| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The BCharles W. Calhounoundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era. By Mark E. Neely Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xvi, 159 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8078-2986-2.)
This elegant little book originated as the Steven and Janice Brose Lectures delivered in 2002 at Pennsylvania State University, where Mark E. Neely Jr. is McCabe-Greer Professor of History. It is a welcome addition to the debate over the meaning of political culture in mid-nineteenth-century America.	1
Neely's initial aim was to challenge Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin's assertion in Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (2000) that, despite the assumptions of generations of historians, politics played only a minor role in the lives of most nineteenth-century Americans. As Neely's project evolved, he concluded that rather than merely refute Rude Republic, he would attempt to strike a balance between Altschuler and Blumin's claims and those of other historians who have insisted that politics "enter[ed] into everything" (p. 3). With creative research and careful analysis, he charts the boundary between the public sphere and the private sphere, and in doing so he shows how pervasively elements of the political culture bridged the two.	. . .

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