The State and Practice of American Political History at the Millennium: The Nineteenth Century as a Test Case

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 11, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 1-30

  Silbey, Joel H ^a  

^a Department of Obstetrics Gynecology   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 85011443403     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898030600003043     Document Type: Article

References (98)

1. See, for example, the essays in Michael Kämmen, ed. The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y. 1980)
2. particularly Allan Bogue's contribution, “The New Political History in the 1970s,” 231–51. Even then, the editor noted the beginning of a decline in the place of political history in the total firmament. See the introductory remarks at ix.
3. As Paul Goodman noted, “in its recent assessment of the prospects and achievements of American history, [the important journal] Reviews in American History published no essay on the field of political history, an omission that probably escaped the notice of many readers, or if it did not, went unlamented.” Goodman, “Putting Some Class Back into Political History:The Transformation of Political Culture and the Crisis in American Political History,” Reviews in American History 12 (March 1984): 80.
4. For quite useful discussions of this situation, see William Leuchtenberg, “The Pertinence of Political History: Reflections on the Significance of the State in America,” Journal of American History 73 (December 1986): 585-600; and
5. Mark Leff, “Revisioning U.S. Political History,” American Historical Review 100 (June 1995): 829–53.
6. Eric Foner, ed. The New American History (Philadelphia, 1990), is a good introduction to this.
7. See also Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London, 1997).
8. Carl Degler, “In Pursuit of American History,” American Historical Review 92 (February 1987) 1–12.
9. These matters are very well laid out in Evans, In Defence of History, and Theodore S. Hamerow, Reflections on History and Historians (Madison, Wis. 1987).
10. J. Morgan Kousser, “Restoring Politics to Political History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (Spring 1981): 570.
11. Leuchtenberg, “Pertinence of Political History,” 587.
12. Mark Neeley, “The Presidents Politics Made,” Journal of Policy History 8.2 (1996): 227. This is implicit in the essays of Leuchtenberg and Leff cited above, among others, and is confirmed by the discourse among political historians themselves.
13. Robert Dykstra, Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier (Cambridge, Mass. 1993)
14. Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats, Washington County: Poll· tics and Community in Antebellum America (Baltimore, 1995)
15. William Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System, 1824-1861 (Charlottesville, Va. 1997)
16. Robin Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872 (Chicago, 1991)
17. William Novak, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C. 1996).
18. An excellent introduction to these scholars is in David Brian Robertson, “Politics and the Past: History, Behavioralism, and the Return to Institutionalism in American Political Science,” in Eric Mokkonen, Engaging the Past: The Uses of History Across the Social Sciences (Durham, N.C. 1994), 113-53.
19. Steven M. Gillon, “The Future of Political History,” Journal of Policy History 9.2 (1997): 249. This article provides much useful additional texturing of my comments here.
20. J. Morgan Kousser, “Toward ‘Total Political History’: A Rational Choice Program,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 20 (Spring 1990): 522.
21. Lawrence Levine, “The Unpredictable Past: Reflections on Recent American Historiography,” American Historical Review 94 (June 1989): 679
22. Levine, “Clio, Canons, and Culture,” Journal of American History 80 (December 1993): 863-64.
23. Jean Baker, “Politics as Space, Class as Language: Problems of Synthesis,” Reviews in American History 24 (June 1996): 210
24. Foner, Hew American History, 10
25. Jane Sherron de Hart, “Women's History and Political History: Bridging Old Divides,” in John F. Marszalek and Wilson D. Miscamble, American Political History: Essays on the State of the Discipline (Notre Dame, Ind. 1997), 28-29.
26. Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Has ‘Minority’ History Transformed the Historiographic Discourse?” Perspectives (November 1997): 33.
27. A useful introduction to these revisionist considerations is in the essays in Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock, eds. Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism (Urbana, III. 1993).
28. See also an earlier set of papers, Ellen Dubois et al. “Politics and Culture in Women's History: A Symposium,” Feminist Studies 6 (Spring 1980): 26-64.
29. Hewitt and Lebsock, Visible Women, passim.
30. Leff, “Revisioning U.S. Political History,” passim. On the growing subjectivity of the profession more generally
31. see Peter Novick, “That Noble Dream”: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988).
32. Glen Gendzel, “Political Culture: Genealogy of a Concept,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28 (Autumn 1997): 225-50.
33. Journal of Interdisciplinary History
34. J. Morgan Kousser, “The New History of Race Relations,” Reviews in American History 22 (September 1994): 442.
35. As Steven Gillon points out, however, “Some scholars worry that political history will be defined so broadly that it will lose definition.”
36. Gillon, “Future of Political History,” 249.
37. John Higham, “The Future of American History,” Journal of American History 80 (March 1994): 1305
38. Samuel P. Hays, American Political History as Social Analysis: Essays (Knoxville, Tenn. 1980)
39. Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, 1961).
40. Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984), 62–67
41. Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore, 1990).
42. Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, Conn. 1990)
43. Elizabeth Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C. 1998)
44. Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York, 1997).
45. Edwards, Angels in the Machinery.
46. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted, 1.
47. Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979)
48. Ira Berlin, “Who Freed the Slaves? Emancipation and Its Meaning,” in David Blight and Brooks D. Simpson, eds. Union and Emancipation (Kent, Ohio, 1997), 110 and passim.
49. See such suggestive works as William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore, 1965); and
50. Phyllis F. Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Years (Ithaca, N.Y. 1982); and compare to Dykstra, Bright Radical Star.
51. Hugh D. Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Developments of National Policy, 1960- 1972 (New York, 1990).
52. Ellen Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca, N.Y. 1978).
53. On this, see, most recently, Ellen C. Dubois, Harriet Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman's Suffrage (New Haven, Conn. 1997).
54. Richard Oestreicher, “Urban Working-Class Political Behavior and Theories of American Electoral Politics, 1870-1940” Journal of American History 74 (March 1988): 1257-86
55. Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York, 1981).
56. Leuchtenberg, “Pertinence of Political History,” passim
57. Hugh Davis Graham, “The Stunted Career of Policy History: A Critique and an Agenda,” The Public Historian 15 (Spring 1993): 15-37.
58. Novak, People's Welfare, 1.
59. Terrence McDonald, The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy: Socioeconomic Change and Political Culture in San Francisco, 1860-1906 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986)
60. Ballard Campbell, The Growth of American Governance: Governance from the Cleveland Administration to the Present (Bloomington, Ind. 1995)
61. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass. 1992).
62. Joel H. Silbey, “‘Delegates Fresh From the People’: American Congressional and Legislative Behavior,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 13 (Spring 1983): 603-27.
63. Charles Stewart, Budget Reform and Politics: The Design of the Appropriations Process in the House of Representatives, 1865-1921 (Cambridge, Mass. 1989).
64. Good beginnings to establish where we are include William H. Flanigan and Nancy H. Zingale, Political Behavior of the American Electorate (Washington, D.C. 1994); and
65. Jerome Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, Analysing Electoral History: A Guide to the Study of American Voting Behavior (Beverly Hills, Calif. 1981).
66. Kenneth Winkle, The Politics of Community: Migration and Politics in Antebellum Ohio (Cambridge, 1988)
67. Bourke and DeBats, Washington County. Useful introductions to this problem from political scientists include Samuel L. Popkin, The Reasoning Voter: Communications and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns (Chicago, 1991)
68. Morris Fiorina, Retrospective Voting inAmerican National Elections (New Haven, Conn. 1981).
69. Michael F. Holt, “The Election of 1840, Voter Mobilization, and the Emergence of the Second American Party System: A Reappraisal of Jacksonian Voting Behavior,” in William J. Cooper, Michael Holt, and John McCardell, eds. A Master's Due: Essays in Honor of David Herbert Donald (Baton Rouge, La. 1985), 16-58
70. Ronald P. Formisano, “The New Political History and the Election of 1840,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (Spring 1993): 661-82.
71. See also Lex Renda, Running on the Record: Civil War Era Politics in New Hampshire (Charlottesville, Va. 1997).
72. Harry Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York, 1990)
73. Charles Grier Sellers Jr. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York, 1991)
74. Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion. On the Progressive paradigm, the best place to start remains Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York, 1968).
75. Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York, 1986)
76. Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838-1893 (Stanford, Calif. 1991).
77. I have tried to do this for the Civil War era Democrats in A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1861-1868 (New York, 1978).
78. The best introduction to this is William Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York, 1987).
79. This is one of the main themes of my American Political Nation. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party appears to agree with the point as well.
80. Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s- 1840s (New York, 1983)
81. Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, “Limits of Political Engagement in Antebellum America: A New Look at the Golden Age of Participatory Democracy,” Journal of American History 84 (December 1997): 855-85.
82. Byron Shafer et al. The End of Realignment? Interpreting American Electoral Eras (Madison, Wis. 1991).
83. Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York, 1970)
84. David Brady, Critical Elections and Congressional Policy Making (Stanford, Calif. 1988).
85. Joel H. Silbey, “Beyond Realignment and Realignment Theory: American Political Eras, 1789-1989,” in Shafer, End of Realignment? 3–23.
86. This is the argument of a as-yet-unpublished essay by Ronald P. Formisano, “The ‘Party Period’ Revisited.”
87. Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (June 1992): 11-38.
88. Gendzel, “Political Culture.”
89. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York, 1970)
90. Don E. Fehrenbacher, Lincoln in Text and Context: Collected Essays (Stanford, Calif. 1987), especially his article
91. “The New Political History and the Coming of the Civil War,” 72–92.
92. Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, N.C. 1997).
93. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party
94. Joel H. Silbey, The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics Before the Civil War (New York, 1985).
95. See Allan G. Bogue, “Numerical and Formal Analyses in United States History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (Autumn 1981): 137-75.
96. Thomas Bender, ‘“Venturesome and Cautious,’ American History in the 1990s,” Journal of American History 81 (December 1994): 996.
97. Norma Basch, “A Challenge to the Story of Popular Politics,” Journal of American History 84 (December 1997): 903.
98. Gillon, “Future of Political History,” 244.