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Introduction
| Over the past several years many historians and students of politics alike have lamented the supposed death of political history, or at least the kind of political history that considered the character, conduct, and consequence of campaigns as singularly important markers of American identity. They have attributed that "death" to historians' preoccupation with political culture and political scientists' preoccupation with survey research about the American voter. But any canvas of books and articles appealing to a broad public suggests that reports of political history's demise are premature. Major works on the rise and activities of political parties and their role in shaping American democracy have never really disappeared, as witnessed by the best-selling work of David McCullough, Joseph Ellis, and William W. Freehling, among others. Most recently, Sean Wilentz has raised the flag for old-fashioned political narrative in his magisterial The Rise of American Democracy (2005). |
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Political biography, enduringly popular, is basking in a golden age. Biographies of presidents have resurrected some reputations (John Adams, Dwight Eisenhower), complicated those of others (Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon), and confirmed (in remarkably fresh detail) the greatness of those inhabiting political Valhalla: the two Roosevelts, Andrew Jackson, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. This outpouring of books has, if anything, whetted our appetite for more. The best of them have brought the importance of personality back into full view in coming to terms with American political behavior. |
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Nor is this the only sign that political history is alive and well, albeit running along tracks informed by the "history from the bottom up" revolution of the 1960s and 1970s that still reverberates today. Recent investigations into the ways Americans expressed themselves politically—whether in print, in the streets, or in the voting booth—have illuminated civic engagement and political mobilization. We will never return to the days when history was equated with "past politics." But there is a new appreciation for a political history that overlaps social history and embraces the most fundamental questions about identity and Americanism. |
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The history of politics at the state level seems less auspicious. This is surprising, for state and local political history was once a staple in the profession. Then, too, studying state history, especially, promised to be essential to any understanding of the peculiarities and varieties of the American experiment in self-government. States were and are, after all, what Lord Bryce famously termed, the "laboratories of democracy." To be sure, studies of people participating in campaigns and engaging public policy issues in states and localities continue to tumble out through masters' theses and doctoral dissertations. Many of these works become articles or monographs, especially for the colonial era through the mid-nineteenth century, at least through the Civil War era. But much of that literature has skewed toward southern and western states and places. Except for the Progressive Era and the New Deal, too little of it considers twentieth-century developments. Pennsylvania, the keystone state in many ways for over half a century in the formative period of the nation's history, and a "battleground state" in recent elections, has suffered from the lack of attention for the modern period. For a state with so many interesting stories that need to be told, this lack of attention is mystifying. |
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