1. Summers, Mark Walgren, “‘To Make the Wheels Revolve We Must Have Grease’: Barrel Politics in the Gilded Age,” Journal of Policy History 14, no. 1 (2002): 49–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Silbey, Joel H., “The State and Practice of American Political History at the Millennium: The Nineteenth Century as Test Case,” Journal of Policy History 11, no. 1 (1999): 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gienapp, William E., “The Myth of Class in Jacksonian America,” Journal of Policy History 6, no. 2 (1994): 232–259CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a notable exception, see Calhoun, Charles W., “Political Economy in the Gilded Age: The Republican Party's Industrial Policy,” Journal of Policy History 8, no. 3 (1996): 291–309CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Kelley, Robert, “The History of Public Policy: Does It Have a Distinctive Character and Method?” in Federal Social Policy: The Historical Dimension, ed. Critchlow, Donald T. and Hawley, Ellis W. (University Park, Pa., 1988), 1Google Scholar. Kelley for some reason dated the conference to 1979. For a more detailed history of the emergence of policy history as a distinctive field of inquiry, based in part on the personal papers of one of the participants (Ellis Hawley), as well as the correct date of the first meeting (November 1978), see Zelizer, Julian E., “Clio's Lost Tribe: Public Policy History Since 1978,” Journal of Policy History 12, no. 3 (2000): 369–394, esp. 373CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Although this assumption is shared by many political historians, it has been developed in the greatest detail by Joel H. Silbey. See, for example, Silbey's Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics Before the Civil War (New York, 1985). For the fullest elaboration of Silbey's position, see Silbey's, American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Palo Alto, 1991)Google Scholar. For a brief synopsis, see Silbey, , “Foundation Stones of Present Discontents: The American Political Nation, 1776–1945,” in Present Discontents: American Politics in the Very Late Twentieth Century, ed. Shafer, Byron E. (Chatham, N.J., 1997), 1–29Google Scholar.

4. On the political psychology of the founders, as well as the influence of the Enlightenment on the framing of the Constitution, see Howe, Daniel Walker, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (1997), chaps. 2 and 3Google Scholar.

5. Banning, Lance, “Political Economy and the Creation of the Federal Republic,” in Devising Liberty: Preserving and Creating Freedom in the New American Republic, ed. Konig, David Thomas (Stanford, 1995), 11–49Google Scholar; Nelson, John R. Jr., Liberty and Property: Political Economy and Policymaking in the New Nation, 1789–1812 (Baltimore, 1987)Google Scholar; McCoy, Drew R., The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, 1980)Google Scholar.

6. Novak, William J., The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1996)Google Scholar; Karsten, Peter, Head Versus Heart: Judge-Made Law in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1997)Google Scholar.

7. John, Richard R., “Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787–1835,” Studies in American Political Development 11 (Fall 1997): 347–380CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Formisano, Ronald P., “State Development in the Early Republic: Substance and Structure, 1780–1840,” in Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American Political History, 1775–2000, ed. Shafer, Byron E. and Badger, Anthony J. (Lawrence, Kan., 2001), 7–35Google Scholar.

8. Among the notable exceptions is Larson's, John LauritzInternal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill, 2001)Google Scholar. In a dust-jacket blurb, the distinguished political historian Peter S. Onuf termed Larson's book the “single most important contribution to our understanding of the antebellum American political economy in the last generation.”

9. Voss-Hubbard, Mark, “The ‘Third Party Tradition’ Reconsidered: Third Parties and American Public Life, 1830–1900,” Journal of American History 86 (06 1999): 122CrossRefGoogle Scholar. No enthusiast himself for the party period paradigm, Voss-Hubbard praised, as counterweight, an alternative “nonpartisan framework” that would reorganize nineteenth-century political history around “movements of reform and policy innovation” (141, 149). For a book-length elaboration of this theme, see Voss-Hubbard, , Beyond Party: Cultures of Antipartisanship in Northern Politics Before the Civil War (Baltimore, 2002)Google Scholar.

10. McCormick, Richard L., The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York, 1986), 206Google Scholar. McCormick's characterization of nineteenth-century policymaking as distributive was indebted, as his footnotes make plain, to the scholarship of James Willard Hurst, the celebrated legal historian who faulted late nineteenth-century policymaking for “drift and default.”

Interestingly, both McCormick and Hurst viewed the nineteenth-century political economy through the lens of the early twentieth-century Progressive Era–rather than, say, from the standpoint of the founders of the republic. For a cogent critique of Hurst's preoccupation with “drift and default,” see Scheiber, Harry N., “At the Borderland of Law and Economic History: The Contributions of Willard Hurst,” American Historical Review 75 (02 1970): 753–755CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Drift and default, Scheiber observed, might well characterize resource allocation (Hurst's specialty), yet did not characterize other policy arenas such as transportation or economic regulation. An analogous critique could be made of McCormick.

Hurst's characterization of the nineteenth-century political economy owed a good deal (as is well known) to his detailed investigation of the Wisconsin lumber industry. One wonders how his characterization of nineteenth-century law might have differed had he studied policy arenas in which economic regulation was more deliberate, elaborate, and sustained–such as communications, banking, or intellectual-property rights.

11. McCormick, Party Period, 208. “Unlike regulatory questions, sectional issues, or cultural matters,” McCormick hypothesized, “distributive decisions seldom threatened consensus or risked unmanageable divisions in the party coalitions” (212). For a case-study that applied McCormick's idea to the pivotal state of New York, see Gunn, L. Ray, The Decline of Authority: Public Economic Policy and Political Development in New York, 1800–1860 (Ithaca, 1988), esp. chap 4 (“The Political Economy of Distribution”)Google Scholar.

12. McCormick, Party Period, 205. McCormick credited the insight that distributive policies were “pervasive” to political scientist Theodore J. Lowi, who set forth a “seminal” typology of policy outputs in an essay that he published in 1964 (204). The essay was “American Business, Public Policy, Case-Studies, and Political Theory,” World Politics 16 (07 1964): 677–715CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lowi's typology distinguished between policy outputs that were distributive, regulatory, and redistributive. “Distribution,” Lowi famously declared, was “almost the exclusive type of national domestic policy from 1789 until virtually 1890” (689). Given the enormous influence of Lowi's characterization, it is worthwhile to inquire on what empirical evidence it was based. This is by no means easy to determine, since, in an essay that included thirty-two footnotes, Lowi did not cite a single work of historical scholarship on the nineteenth-century United Sates. It is, thus, perhaps, a bit surprising that a historian as judicious as McCormick would rely on Lowi's characterization as a master-key to nineteenth-century public policy.

Among the historians to express misgivings about the relevance of Lowi's typology to the nineteenth-century United States were Morton Keller, whose Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth-Century America (1977) remains a landmark in the field. “American law and public policy”–Keller wrote in 1979, in an explicit critique of Lowi's typology–“always have been committed to the dual (and often contradictory) goals of economic growth and social order.… What is needed is an overview–a style of scholarship…that accepts this inherent ambiguity of social ends and proceeds to explore its manifestation in law and public policy.” Keller, Morton, “Business History and Legal History,” Business History Review 53 (Autumn 1979): 298CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Yet even Keller regarded Lowi's notion of “distributive” policy as of enduring value. Keller, “Social Policy in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Critchlow and Hawley, Federal Social Policy, 104. For a similarly mixed assessment of the utility of Lowi's typology as a characterization of nineteenth-century public policy, see Scheiber, “Borderland,” 753.

13. McCormick, Party Period, 18. By politics, McCormick meant primarily the history of political party competition. “Collectively,” McCormick wrote, at another point, “these governmental matters–beliefs, policies, and rules–have been the mainsprings of American party history” (144).

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., 87.

16. “Fundamentally,” McCormick added, both politics and policymaking derived “not from one another” but instead from “social conditions and economic opportunities” that were part of the “larger environment”–and, thus, largely independent of and unrelated to governmental institutions. Ibid., 18–19, 16. Political scientists interested in American political development might find McCormick's claim surprising, since they have long regarded the state as a potentially autonomous agent of change; yet it was entirely in keeping with the society-centered worldview in which most historical inquiry in the 1980s was framed.

Nowhere was the society-centered functionalism of McCormick's analysis more manifest than in his treatment of the Progressive Era. In this age, McCormick wrote, changes in politics and government were “products” of those “all-powerful, ubiquitous forces in modern American history: industrialization, urbanization, and immigration” (275). The limitations of such a society-centered analytical framework–which reified “social change” as a kind of unmoved first mover–have been detailed by historically oriented social scientists. For an influential critique, see Skocpol, Theda, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Evans, Peter, Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda (Cambridge, 1985), 3–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Tilly, Charles, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York, 1985)Google Scholar.

17. McCormick, Party Period, 19.

18. Ibid. “The decades from the 1830s to the early 1900s,” McCormick wrote, “form a distinctive era in American political history, with patterns of party politics, electoral behavior, and economic policy that set it apart from the eras that came before and after.… [T]his was the period when parties dominated political participation and channeled the flow of government policies. Even as the nation grew in size and numbers, fought the Civil War, and industrialized, parties continued to perform these functions and retained their dominance” (200–201).

19. Ibid., vii.

20. For a similar caveat, see Pisani, Donald J., “Promotion and Regulation: Constitutionalism and the American Economy,” Journal of American History 74 (12 1987): 768CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this essay, Pisani surveyed the secondary literature on economic policymaking and observed–correctly–that many historians associated distribution (or promotion) with the nineteenth century and regulation with the twentieth. “The paramount question raised here,” Pisani observed in his conclusion, is “whether such sweeping categories as promotion and regulation–as well as the identification of one as an essentially nineteenth-century phenomenon and the other as a creature more of this century–do not obscure more than they illuminate.” Pisani's misgivings find many echoes in the essays that follow.

21. Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. McCormick cited Skowronek's book, along with Nelson's, William E.Roots of American Bureaucracy (1982)Google Scholar, as one of the most interesting recent works on nineteenth-century American governance. McCormick, Party Period, 13.

23. Skowronek, Building a New American State, 27, 25.

24. Ibid., 5. The “exceptional character” of the early American state, Skowronek declared, is “neatly summarized in the paradox that it failed to evoke any sense of a state.” For a critique of this characterization of nineteenth-century public life, see John, “Governmental Institutions,” 347–80. See also John, , “Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Jacobs, Meg, Novak, William J., and Zelizer, Julian E. (Princeton, 2003), 50–84Google Scholar.

25. Skowronek, Building a New American State, 292. “This new cycle of reconstruction politics,” Skowronek speculated, “might end with reenergized parties, a vigilant judiciary, and disciplined bureaucracies all working in harmony under the Constitution.”

26. Ibid., 291. The erroneous characterization of the United States in the period before 1880 as pre-bureaucratic has long been a favorite conceit of institutional historians such as Louis Galambos who specialize in the post-1880 period. Although the origins of this conceit are complex, it owed something to the distinction that social historian Samuel P. Hays drew between bureaucracies and “technical systems.” The “technical system of the modern world,” Hays declared, was “vastly different from the bureaucracies and organizations or earlier times.” Significantly, Hays did not contend that the United States lacked bureaucracies in the pre-1880 period; indeed, he more or less took their existence for granted. Hays, Samuel P., “The New Organizational Society,” in Building the Organizational Society: Essays on Associational Activities in Modern America, ed. Israel, Jerry (New York, 1972), 3Google Scholar. For Galambos's characterization of the pre-1880 period as “non-bureaucratic,” see Galambos, , “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in American History,” Business History Review 44 (Autumn 1970): 288CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Before 1880, Galambos observed, there was “virtually” no bureaucracy for government officials to direct, making the nineteenth-century state–just as Skowronek has contended–”essentially a government of courts and parties.” Galambos, , “By Way of Introduction,” in The New American State: Bureaucracies and Policies since World War II, ed. Galambos, (Baltimore, 1987), 7Google Scholar. For a book-length critique of the idea that bureaucratic institutions did not exist in the nineteenth-century United States, see John, Richard R., Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar. See also John, , “Leonard D. White and the Invention of American Administrative History,” Reviews in American History 24 (06 1996): 344–360CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27. “Of all the aspects of American history,” wrote Daniel T. Rodgers in a perceptive review essay, “political history clings most strongly to the old exceptionalist story line.” Rodgers, Daniel T., “Exceptionalism,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret Their Past, ed. Molho, Anthony and Wood, Gordon S. (Princeton, 1998), 34Google Scholar.

28. For a cogent analysis of the rejection of the state as an interpretative frame in the post-World War II period by American scholars, led by political scientists, see Ciepley, David, “Why the State Was Dropped in the First Place: A Prequel to Skocpol's ‘Bringing the State Back In,’” Critical Review 14, nos. 2–3 (2000): 157–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. Keller, “New American State,” 248.

30. Keller, Morton, “(Jerry-) Building a New American State,” Reviews in American History 11 (06 1983): 248CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Keller faulted Skowronek for neglecting the “really important business of government” in the late nineteenth century–which he took to be opening the western lands, tariff and currency policy, and social policymaking on the state and local level (249). In addition, he questioned the magnitude of the transformation that Skowronek described. In Keller's reading, the “springs” of government were hardly less “weak” in 1920 than they had been in 1877 (252).

31. Keller, “New American State,” 250, 249. Interestingly, Keller remained reluctant to characterize as a “state” a structure of politics and government that was “so varied, decentralized, and responsive,” as opposed to being “initiatory.” Keller, “Social Policy in Nineteenth-Century America,” 109.

32. The importance of the book for policy history, as well as for the related field of American political development, was recently highlighted by a special issue of Social Science History. See, in particular, Zelizer, Julian E., “Stephen Skowronek's Building a New American State and the Origins of American Political Development,” Social Science History 27 (Fall 2003): 425–441Google Scholar.

33. This is particularly true of historically oriented social scientists–for example, Berk, Gerald, Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865–1917 (Baltimore, 1994)Google Scholar, and Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)Google Scholar.

34. For a related discussion that focused on state and local government, see McDonald, Terrence J., “The Burdens of Urban History: The Theory of the State in Recent American Social History,” Studies in American Political Development 3 (1989): 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar. “When one considers,” McDonald wrote, the “various ways that the subnational state helped to constitute society by acting or refusing to act, the various issues around which political mobilization occurred or failed to occur, and the various ideologies that these actions generated, the most damning thing that can be said about viewing politics from the perspective of ethnicity, patronage, and machines is simply that it is an extraordinarily narrow way of viewing the relationship between state and society in America” (29).

35. Silbey, “Foundation Stones of Present Discontents,” 8. Only in the twentieth century, Silbey observed, did policymaking shift from “smoke-filled rooms and the hustings” to boardrooms, administrative agencies staffed by civil servants, and the courts (21). The essays in this special issue call into question Silbey's characterization of nineteenth-century policymaking. None, for example, devotes much attention to backstage political maneuvering or partisan electioneering. For a more general critique of the idealization of nineteenth-century popular politics that Silbeyeque political historians have done so much to foster, see Bensel, Richard Franklin, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Altschuler, Glenn C. and Blumin, Stuart M., Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar; and Schudson, Michael, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1998)Google Scholar.

36. The propensity of historians to disparage as narrowly self-serving the pronouncements of nineteenth-century legislators, administrators, and jurists helps explain why so many dimensions of nineteenth-century policy history remain obscure. Relatively few historians today are conversant with the details of nineteenth-century policy debates, much less the specific cultural and institutional context out of which they emerged. It is thus easy to misinterpret the import of a particular sentence or phrase. Compounding the problem has been the often-uncritical adoption by historians of the interpretative conventions of certain contemporaries–such as, for example, labor leaders. It is “absolutely wrongheaded” and an “act of intellectual bad faith”–as the urban historian Philip J. Ethington has astutely observed, in a critique of labor historian Sean Wilentz–to “consider genuine only the words of labor leaders, while writing off as disingenuous those of the mainstream party leaders. It is also poor critical theory.” H-SHGAPE electronic list, posted 28 November 1995.

Among the interpretative conventions that historians would do well to reconsider is the characterization of the post-Civil War decades as a “Gilded Age.” Although the phrase was coined in 1873 by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, it was never embraced by contemporaries, and it has recently been challenged by political historians Rebecca Edwards and Alan Lessoff. On this point, I have found useful Lessoff's “Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, and the Gilded Age: Provenance of a Usable Past,” unpublished essay in the author's possession, and Edwards's, RebeccaNew Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905 (Oxford, forthcoming)Google Scholar. Lessoff's essay demonstrated that late-nineteenth-century social commentators almost never used the phrase “Gilded Age” to describe the period in which they were living–unlike, for example, the “Progressive Era,” which was embraced by contemporaries. As it happens, the phrase “Gilded Age” would not be popularized until the 1920s, when social critics Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford adopted it as part of a broader critique of American industrialism. Edwards rejects the “Gilded Age”/“Progressive Era” duality–she contends, on the contrary, that a great deal of continuity marked the period between 1865 and 1905–yet she found it impossible to avoid the phrase “Gilded Age” in her title, in large part because her editors presumed that this was how the period is commonly identified by the general readers for whom her book is intended. Rebecca Edwards to Richard R. John, email communication, 18 May 2005.

37. The propensity of political historians to connect-the-dots between nineteenth-century party leaders and their twentieth–and now, twentieth-first–century successors is one of the oldest genres of American political writing. Although hard to justify intellectually, such an exercise has a peculiar fascination for political historians, most of whom incline toward the Democratic side of the political spectrum–and, thus, find it congenial to link nineteenth-century Democrats with policy positions of which they approve. For a recent example, see Kovler, Peter B., ed., Democrats and the American Idea: A Bicentennial Appraisal (Washington, D.C., 1992)Google Scholar.

38. Carpenter, Daniel P., The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar.

39. The centrality of the military to the making of the United States is a much-neglected topic. For some suggestive leads, see Royster, Charles, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character (Chapel Hill, 1979), 38, 147, 319–20, 360Google Scholar, and Ellis, Joseph J., Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York, 2001), 154–155Google Scholar.

40. “Significant government intervention” in regulatory policy, “especially at the federal level,” declared the respected economic historians Claudia Goldin and Gary D. Libecap in 1994, in summarizing what has long been a scholarly consensus among economic historians, “took place only after 1880.” Goldin, Claudia and Libecap, Gary D., “Introduction,” to The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy, ed. Goldin, and Libecap, (Chicago, 1994), 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The persistence of such a claim in the face of the large body of evidence to the contrary raises the suspicion that the denigration of the role of the federal government in nineteenth-century economic development is, at its core, less of an empirical observation than an ideological cri de coeur. That this claim is, for example, often voiced by economists who are professionally predisposed to favor market incentives over regulatory mechanisms may not be altogether coincidental. To be sure, not all economic historians share this consensus. For one dissent, see Sylla, Richard, “Experimental Federalism: The Economics of American Government, 1789–1914,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2, The Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Engerman, Stanley L. and Gallman, Robert E. (Cambridge, 2000), 483–541CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For another, see John, Richard R., “Private Enterprise, Public Good? Communications Deregulation as a National Political Issue, 1839–1851,” in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, ed. Pasley, Jeffrey L., Robertson, Andrew W., and Waldstreicher, David (Chapel Hill, 2004), 328–354Google Scholar.

41. For a sampling of historical scholarship on these topics, see Edling, Max M., A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bensel, Richard Frankin, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (Cambridge, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sylla, “Experimental Federalism”; Bensel, , Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar; Anderson, Fred and Cayton, Andrew, Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (New York, 2005)Google Scholar; Katznelson, Ira, “Flexible Capacity: The Military and Early American Statebuilding,” in Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, ed. Katznelson, and Shefter, Martin (Princeton, 2002), 82–110Google Scholar; Smith, Merritt Roe, ed., Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 1985)Google Scholar; Starr, Paul, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of American Communications (New York, 2004)Google Scholar; John, Richard R., “Recasting the Information Infrastructure for the Industrial Age,” in A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present, ed. Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. and Cortada, James W. (New York, 2000), 55–105Google Scholar; Einhorn, Robin L., American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, forthcoming, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fehrenbacher, Don E., edited and completed by McAfee, Ward M., The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery (New York, 2001)Google Scholar; Richards, Leonard L., The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge, 2000)Google Scholar; Freehling, William W., The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York, 1994)Google Scholar. For additional citations, see John, Richard R., “Farewell to the ‘Party Period’: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Policy History 16, no. 2 (2004): 117–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John, “Governmental Institutions,” 347–80; and Lacey, Michael J., “Federalism and National Planning: The Nineteenth-Century Legacy,” in The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy, ed. Fishman, Robert (Washington, D.C., 2000), 89–145Google Scholar.

42. This characterization of Conkling provides a fresh perspective on his notorious contention as a litigant in the Supreme Court case of San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific (1882) that Congress intended the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the rights not only of ex-slaves but also of corporations. In articulating what was regarded at the time as a quite-novel view, Conkling may well have been intended less to invest corporations with a new kind of right than to extend to them a right long associated with proprietary firms. For a related discussion, see Lamoreaux, Naomi R., “Partnerships, Corporations, and the Limits on Contractual Freedom in U.S. History: An Essay in Economics, Law, and Culture,” in Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture, ed. Lipartito, Kenneth and Sicilia, David B. (New York, 2004), 29–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43. For a classic statement of the preference of nineteenth-century courts for ventures and their relative neglect of vested rights, see Hurst's, James WillardLaw and the Conditions of Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America (Evanston, Ill., 1956)Google Scholar.

44. The notion that mid-nineteenth-century Americans had a political conception of society is a major theme of Ethington's, Philip J.The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar. The emphatically political cast of nineteenth-century social thought about wealth distribution–a topic often studied today as a purely economic phenomenon–is explored with discernment in Huston, James L., Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765–1900 (Baton Rouge, 1998)Google Scholar.

45. Notable exceptions include Dunlavy, Colleen A., Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia (Princeton, 1994)Google Scholar, and Hartog, Hendrik, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730–1870 (Ithaca, 1983)Google Scholar.

46. Among the leading scholars to foster just such a dialogue have been political historian Julian E. Zelizer and political scientist Ira Katznelson. See, for example, Zelizer, , “History and Political Science: Together Again?” Journal of Policy History 16, no. 2 (2004): 126–136CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Katznelson, “Rewriting the Epic of America,” in Katznelson and Shefter, Shaped by War and Trade, 3–23.