Previews

Responding to the contested presidential election of 2000, the Journal's editors invited historians from different subfields of United States history to participate in our round table, "Elections, Conflict, and Democracy." Their five strikingly different essays suggest some of the ways Americans have defined, pursued, and undermined democracy.

Joyce Appleby contrasts the contested elections of 1800 and 2000. Why was the former settled in the House of Representatives and the latter in the Supreme Court? The explanation, she suggests, lies not only in Americans' recent tendency to resolve political issues by litigation but also in the work of those who drafted the Constitution.

Most Europeans associate American life with everything that is new, modern, and forward-looking. On the contrary, the recent electoral crisis exposed a system packed with such "antiquated" political features as low-tech voting methods, powerful party machinery, and the Electoral College. There is nothing ironic about it. The United States, Arnaldo Testi writes, is an old nation and one of the oldest democracies in the world. Testi looks at American political practices as bridges that connect the present with the nation's past, sometimes in uneasy ways.

For those disgusted by the 2000 election, there is one consolation: Gilded Age politics could be even worse. Tempering the enthusiasm that historians of political culture have invested in "popular politics" and confirming darker recent portraits of the unmaking of the so-called party period, Mark Wahlgren Summers shows how pervasively the major parties manipulated the voters and the rules to hold onto power—and how useful a sense of being wronged was in inspiring and perpetuating the partisan spirit of late-nineteenth-century America.

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