| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, editors. Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. 435. Cloth $59.95, paper $24.95.
This is the second collection of essays published in the past two years signaling a resurgence of political history. Interest in the field has never lagged, judging by works produced and readers both inside and outside the discipline. But the book under review is further evidence that imaginative and relevant scholarship is giving political history a buzz again within academia.	1
Several of the essays extend the work of political historians associated with an earlier New Political History by building on the concept of political culture. The thirteen contributors, all younger, mid-career academics, exhibit a refreshing spirit of openness toward their predecessors' work. Disclosure: some contributors reference this reviewer among those whose work has been useful to them, or, seen as needing revision—satisfying in either case.	2
So, what's new? Not methodology, as William G. Shade argues in a superb concluding commentary (that is a must read for any historian wishing to understand political history's immediate past on the basis of information). Rather, Shade observes, these scholars are "generally humanist" and while sharing "with other current cultural historians a quest for 'meaning,' they are strikingly traditional in their methods" (p. 399). Newness appears in two ways: first, in treatment of topics that historians were not thinking much about a generation ago; second, in looking at fairly familiar topics from a different angle of vision.	. . .

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