Book Review

Canada and the United States

Rogan Kersh provides an insightful history of the concept of "union" in American political and popular discourse. As even the most cursory glance at nineteenth-century politics would demonstrate, union has been among the most important and contested concepts in American politics. The concept of union does not fit neatly into the standard liberal and republican paradigms that have framed much of the scholarship on American political thought over the past few decades, however. As a consequence, union has received substantially less attention than such equally vital concepts as "liberty," "equality," "community," or "virtue."	1
As Kersh amply demonstrates, the scholarly oversight of union has been unfortunate. Understanding the concept of union is essential to understanding American politics from before the American Revolution until well after Reconstruction. Moreover, Kersh's careful history shows that the concept of union illuminates a surprisingly large number of issues in American political development.	2
In order to trace the history of the idea of union in America, Kersh employs various methods. His innovative starting point is a quantitative coding of a large sample of American newspapers between 1750 and 1900, supplemented with diaries, congressional debates, and presidential speeches. The book is not organized around this quantitative data, but the database helps to provide a graphic overview of the usage of the term and a helpful starting point for the analysis. The bulk of the book shifts expertly from broad-ranging discussions of this primary data, to close textual analyses of such leading figures in American political thought as Daniel Webster, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln, to lessons drawn from a vast secondary literature.	. . .