Book Review

Canada and the United States

At a time when most historians (and their publishers) boast of connections between their work and one or another "new" history, Donald J. Ratcliffe gives his study of party politics in early Ohio a refreshingly different spin. "This book will be dismissed," he writes in the opening sentence, "as old-fashioned political history" (p. ix). Certainly, Ratcliffe's focus on political contests and electoral competitions contrasts with recent trends in the historiography of the early republic. He makes no effort to decode the symbology of political culture or to understand how diverse power relationships shaped public and private behavior. What has come to be called the new political history, Ratcliffe maintains, tells us little about how politics actually worked, about how candidates won elections. By contrast, that issue did inform the social science-minded historians, who constructed the last generation's "new political history." Yet Ratcliffe's work stands apart from that current of scholarship as well. Although the concerns may be similar, the methods are not. Ratcliffe's book contains only one table, and no computers were needed to analyze the limited quantitative evidence that the author marshals.

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