Humbug? bah! altschuler and blumin and the riddle of the antebellum electorate

Journal of American History

Volumn 84, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 886-893

  Watson, Harry L ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33751066226     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2953084     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. Thomas C. Cochran, "The Presidential Synthesis in American History," American Historical Review, 53 (July 19-48), 748-59.
2. Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blurain, "Limits of Political Engagement in Antebellum America: A New Look at the Golden Age of Participatory Democracy," Journal of American History, 84 (Dec. 1997), 857, 883-84.
3. Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blurain, "Journal of American History, Ibid., 858.
4. Samuel P. Hays, "The Social Analysis of American Political History, 1880-1920," Political Science Quarterly, 80 (Sept. 1965), 373-94. Together with his other pieces in a similar vein, it is reprinted in Samuel P. Hays, American Political History as Social Analysis (Knoxville, 1980), 66-86. rbr a penetrating analysis of Hays's legacy among historians and an evaluation of representative works,
5. see Richard L. McCormick, "The Social Analysis of American Political History-After Twenty Years," in The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era, ed. Richard L. McCormick (New York, 1986), 89-140.
6. Walter Dean Burnham, "The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe," American Political Science Review, 59 (March 1965), 7-28. William E. Gienapp has reinforced Burnham's turnout figures with a de-
7. tailed examination of popular political participation in the antebellum era. See William E. Gienapp, " 'Politics Seem to Enter into Everything': Political Culture in the North, 1840-1860," in Essays on American Antebellum Politics, 1840-1860, ed. Stephen E. Maizlish and John J. Kushma (College Station, 1982), 15-69.
8. The influence of Hays and Burnham was most immediate on the "new political history," whose practitioners soon became identified with the so-called ethnocultural model of voting behavior introduced by
9. Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, 1961).
10. Influential critiques include Richard L. McCormick, "Ethno-cultural Interpretations of Nineteenth-Century American Voting Behavior," Political Science Quarterly, 89 (June 1974), 351-77;
11. and Scan Wilentz, "On Class and Politics in Jacksonian America," Reviews in American History, 10 (no. 4, 1982), 45-63. Far a rebuttal,
12. see Ronald P. Formisano, "The Invention of the Ethnocultural Interpretation," American Historical Review, 99 (April 1994), 453-77.
13. Important works evidently influenced by Hays and Burnham but not falling in the "ethnocultural" school include Scan Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-18JO (New York, 1984);
14. J. Mills Thornton III, Politics an J Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge, 1978);
15. Lacy K. ford Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (New York, 1988);
16. Jean Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, 1983);
17. J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven, 1974);
18. and Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 (New York, 1986).
19. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967);
20. Gordon S. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969);
21. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975).
22. Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Stznfosa, 1957), v;
23. Wilentz, Chants Democratic; Baker, Affairs of Party; Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society;
24. Robert C. McMath Jr., American Populism: A Social History, 1877-1898 (New York, 1993).
25. Philip E. Converse, "Change in thé American Electorate," in The Human Meaning of Social Change, ed. Angus Campbell and Philip E. Converse (New York, 1972), 263-301;
26. Philip E. Converse, "Comment on Burnham's 'Theory and Voting Research,'" American Political Science Review, 68 (Sept. 1974), 1024-27.
27. Political historians have been aware of the strong linkage between party organization and high voter turnout since the publication of Richard P. McCormick, "New Perspectives onjacksonian Politics," American Historical Review, 65 (Jan. I960), 288-301.
28. The authors raise a distinction between a "real" America and an (unreal?) Other in a title cited in footnote 8: Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, '"Where Is the Real America?'": Politics and Popular Consciousness in the Antebellum Era," American Quarterly, 49 (June 1997), 225-67.
29. Charles Grandison Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, ed. William G. McLoughlin (Cambridge, Mass., I960).
30. Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society, 155-60.
31. Edmund Jones to Samuel F. Patterson, May 12, 1840, in Marc W. Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 1836-186) (Baton Rouge, 1983), 17.
32. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, 1959).
33. Altschuler and Blumin, "Limits of Political Engagement in Antebellum America," 879-80;
34. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991), 298-305.
35. Altschuler and Blumin, "Limits of Political Engagement in Antebellum America," 880-81.
36. "Introduction," United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 1 (1837), 2.
37. New York Times, July 3, 1997, sec. A, p. 15.