| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic. Ed. by Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xii, 435 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2889-0. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8078-5558-8.)
Scholarship on the early republic is thriving as never before. While popular authors roll out best-selling biographies, others explore more creative interpretive terrain. Beyond the Founders showcases thirteen of these intrepid, mostly younger scholars. Their essays range widely in subject and approach. We have Jeffrey L. Pasley on Thomas Jefferson's giant cheese, Saul Cornell on the Second Amendment, and John Brooke on theorizing the public sphere. Some authors, including Andrew W. Robertson on electioneering, David Waldstreicher on dress, and Nancy Isenberg on dandyism, partake of the new cultural approach, presenting politics as ritual or performance charged with symbolic meaning. Others, such as Reeve Huston on the New York anti-renters and Richard John on government and the telegraph, incorporate new actors or subjects into the political realm.	1
The unifying thread to all these is not methodological or conceptual but ideological: a determination to stretch the early republic's political history beyond the familiar and, in the authors' view, implicitly conservative birth-of-a-nation narrative centered on the doings of great men. An introduction by the editors and a closing chapter by the veteran historian William Shade seek to bring coherence to the collection.	. . .

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