| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress, vol. 2: Further New Perspectives on the History of Congress. Ed. by David W. Brady and Mathew D. McCubbins. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. xxvi, 505 pp. Cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-0-8047-5590-0. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8047-5591-7.)

After listening to a panel of political scientists discuss their latest research, former U.S. representative Silvio Conte remarked to his colleague John Brademas that if he had known this much about congressional elections he never would have been elected: American historians may have similar feelings after reading this volume's introductory essay. Fortunately, none of the other twenty-five essays on the historical development of the U.S. Congress use Hinton Helper as a statistical resource or assert that "since the conclusion of the American Revolution, the nation has, in fact, if not in name, been the union of two quite different countries: the Northern states and the Southern states" (p. 1). On the contrary, the authors of these often insightful essays are political scientists who, like historians, accept the necessity of engaging original documentary sources to understand specific historical conditions, events, and individuals. Unlike many historians, however, these students of Congress are predisposed to analyze their data with various methodologies and their discipline's goal of making truthful generalizations across extended periods of time. The classic differences between Homer's singing and Aristotle's empiricism, or between the simultaneous reasonableness of William of Ockham's radically contingent particulars and Thomas Aquinas's natural law are partially mitigated by these long-overdue efforts to bridge the disciplinary divide between historians and political scientists.

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