Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T02:28:49.528Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Future of Political History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Steven M. Gillon
Steven M. Gillon
Affiliation:
Oxford University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It has become an article of faith that political history has fallen on hard times in recent years. “[T]he status of the political historian within the profession,” William E. Leuchtenburg observed in his 1986 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians (OAH) has “sunk to somewhere between that of a faith healer and a chiropractor.” Hugh Davis Graham, in an insightful analysis of policy history, reached a similar conclusion. “The ranks of traditional political history are depleted,” he wrote in 1993, “their assumptions and methods discredited along with the Great White Men whose careers they chronicled.”

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , April 1997 , pp. 240 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. Leuchtenburg, William E., “The Pertinence of Political History: Reflections on the Significance of the State in America,” The Journal of American History 73, (December 1986), 585–600CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Graham, Hugh Davis, “The Stunted Career of Policy History: A Critique and Agenda,” The Public Historian 15, (Spring 1993), 30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Graham, “The Stunted Career of Policy History: A Critique and Agenda,” 31.

3. Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988), 583CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Van Tassel, David D., “From Learned Society to Professional Organization: The American Historical Association, 1884–1900,” American Historical Review 89 (October 1984), 943.Google Scholar

4. Apple, R.W. Jr., “Poll Shows Disenchantment with Politicians and Politics, New York Times, August 12, 1995, 1, 8.Google Scholar

5. Blum, John Morton, Liberty, Justice, Order: Writings on Past Politics (New York, 1993), 4.Google Scholar

6. John Morton Blum, Liberty, Justice, Order: Writings on Past Politics, 6.

7. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, 440–442; Stearns, Peter, “Coming of Age,” Journal of Social History 10 (1976), 250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Levine, Lawrence W., “The Unpredictable Past: Reflections on Recent American Historiography,” American Historical Review 94 (June 1989), 673CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blassingame, John, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Genovese, Eugene D., Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974)Google Scholar; Levine, Lawrence, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977).Google Scholar

9. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, 469–521.

10. Lee Benson, “Research Problems in American Political Historiography,” in Benson, , Toward the Scientific Study of History (Philadelphia, 1972), 8Google Scholar; Benson, Lee, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy (Princeton, 1961).Google Scholar

11. In 1977 a poll of historians ranked The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy third, behind Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform and The American Political Tradition and ahead of Arthur Schlesinger's The Age of Jackson and C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South, among the most influential books in American political history to appear since World War II. See: Allan G. Bogue, “The New Political History in the 1970s,” in Kammen, Michael, The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, NY, 1980), 231–232.Google Scholar

12. Allan G. Bogue, “The New Political History in the 1970s,” 231–251; Hays, Samuel P., “The Social Analysis of American Political History, 1880–1920,” Political Science Quarterly 80 (1965), 373–394CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Formisano, Ronald, The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827–1861 (Princeton, N. J., 1971)Google Scholar; Holt, Michael Fitzgibbon, Forging a Majority: The Formation of the Republican Party in Pittsburgh, 1848–1860 (New Haven, Conn., 1969)Google Scholar. Kleppnet, Paul, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850–1900 (New York, 1970)Google Scholar. Silbey, Joel, The Partisan Imperative (New York, 1985)Google Scholar. The first lonely call for abandoning the presidential synthesis in favor of a “social science synthesis” came from Cochran, Thomas C., “The ‘Presidential Synthesis’ in American History,” American Historical Review 53, (1948), 748–759.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. Gordon, Linda. “U.S. Women's History,” in Foner, Eric, The New American History (Philadelphia, 1990), 189Google Scholar; “Report on the Status and Hiring of Women and Minority Historians in Academia,” Perspectives 34 (March 1996): 35–37.Google Scholar

14. Brinkley made the observation in a discussion on “The Future of Political History” at the 1995 OAH Convention.

15. Foner, Eric, “History in Crisis,” Commonweal (December 18, 1981), 725Google Scholar; Alice Kessler-Harris, “Social History,” in Eric Foner, The New American History, 178; Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth and Genovese, Eugene D., Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York, 1983), 179–212Google Scholar; Gutman, Herbert G., “The Missing Synthesis: Whatever Happened to History?” Nation (November 21, 1981), 521, 553–554.Google Scholar

16. Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; Sellers, Charles, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Silbey, Joel H., The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford, Calif., 1991)Google Scholar; Chafe, William, Unfinished Journey (New York, 1986).Google Scholar

17. Baker, Paula, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984), 620–647CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kerber, Linda, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America, (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980)Google Scholar; Norton, Mary Beth, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1790–1800 (Boston, 1980)Google Scholar; Ryan, Mary P., Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981)Google Scholar. For more traditional studies of women and political power see: Chafe, William, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Political, and Economic Roles, 1920–1970 (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; Elaine Tyler May, “Expanding the Past: Recent Scholarship on Women in Politics and Work,” in Kutler, Stanley I. and Katz, Stanley N., The Promise of American History: Progress and Prospects (Baltimore, 1982), 216–233.Google Scholar

18. Wilentz, Sean, “On Class and Politics in Jacksonian America,” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 45–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilentz, , Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984).Google Scholar

19. Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York, 1990), 6, 362–368.Google Scholar

20. Chafe, William H., Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Equality (New York, 1980)Google Scholar; Carson, Clayborne, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass., 1981)Google Scholar; Dittmer, John, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana, Ill., 1994)Google Scholar. The Carson quote is his article, “Martin Luther King Jr.: Charismatic Leadership in a Mass Struggle,” The Journal of American History 74 (September 1987), 451.Google Scholar

21. Hirsch, Arnold R., “Massive Resistance in the Urban North: Trumbell Park, Chicago, 1953–1966,” The Journal of American History 82 (September 1995): 522–550CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sugrue, Thomas J., “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940–1964,” The Journal of American History 82 (September 1995): 551–578CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gerstle, Gary, “Race and the Myth of the Liberal Consensus,” The Journal of American History 82 (September 1995), 580CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McGreevy, John T., Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North, (Chicago, 1996), 5.Google Scholar

22. William E. Leuchtenburg, “The Pertinence of Political History: Reflections on the Significance of the State in America,” 590

23. Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York, 1982), viiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brinkley, Alan, “Writing the History of Contemporary America: Dilemmas and Challenges,” Daedalus 113 (Summer 1984), 121–141.Google Scholar

24. Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977)Google Scholar; Galambos, Louis, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review 44 (1970): 279–290CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hawley, Ellis W., The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence (Princeton, N.J., 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Evans, Peter B., Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. Eric Foner, “History in Crisis,” 725; Le Goff, Jacques, “Is Politics Still the Back-bone of History?” Daedalus 100 (Spring 1971), 1–19Google Scholar; Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics” 620–648; Miller, Eugene F., “What Does ‘Political’ Mean?” Review of Politics 42 (January 1980), 56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kousser, J. Morgan, “Restoring Politics to Political History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (Spring 1982), 569CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leuchtenburg, “The Pertinence of Political History,” 589.

26. Blum, Liberty, Justice, Order: Writings on Past Politics, 7.

27. Brinkley, Alan, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; Blum, John Morton, V Was for Victory (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; Patterson, James T., America's Struggle Against Poverty, 1900–1994 (Cambridge, Mass., 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kennedy, David, Here, Over: The First World War and American Society (New York, 1980).Google Scholar

28. Hamby, Alonzo L., Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; McCullough, David, Truman (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; Chafe, William H., Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Dallek, Robert, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908–1960 (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Kalman, Laura, Abe Fortos: A Biography (New Haven, Conn., 1990)Google Scholar; Gillon, Steven M., The Democrats' Dilemma: Walter F. Mandale and the Liberal Legacy (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; Burner, Eric R., And Gently He Shall Lead Them: Robert Parris Moses and Civil Rights in Mississippi (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Mills, Kay, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Cook, Blanche Wiesen, Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. I, 1884–1933 (New York, 1992).Google Scholar

29. Degler, Carl N., “In Pursuit of an American History,” The American Historical Review (February 1987), 1–12Google Scholar; Higham, John, “The Future of American History,” Journal of American History 92 (March 1994), 1289–1307CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bender, Thomas, “Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History,” Journal of American History 73 (June 1986), 120–136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30. Painter, Nell Irvin, “Bias and Synthesis in History,” Journal of American History 74 (June 1987), 109–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John Higham, “The Future of American History,” 1305; Fox, Richard Wightman, “Public Culture and the Problem of Synthesis,” Journal of American History 74 (June 1987), 114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. Thomas Bender, “Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History,” 128.

32. Bailyn, Bernard, “The Challenge of Modern Historiography,” American Historical Review 87 (February 1982), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thelen, David, “The Practice of American History,” The Journal of American History 81 (December 1994), 953.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. Bernard Bailyn, “The Challenge of Modern Historiography,” 7.

34. David Thelen, “The Practice of American History,” 953.