Reviews of Books

At a roundtable during the 1998 meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, a group of young scholars—Joanne B. Freeman, Richard R. John, Jeffrey L. Pasley, and David Waldstreicher— proclaimed the arrival of the latest "New Political History." Their mission, according to these young lions (who also represented such colleagues as Albrecht Koschnik, Simon Newman, and Andrew W. Robertson) is to reveal more fully the political processes of the era by including unexamined historical subjects and new analytic constructs. The proponents of this "New Political History" uncover politics in all its manifestations and identify political players everywhere—in the streets, at the post offices, in voluntary associations of all classes and races, at "perpetual fetes," and in ladies' parlors. Even the seemingly over-studied elite male culture of the founders assumes more complexity and urgency when subject to new scrutiny.	1
The naming and proclaiming of this branch of history is just the latest development for the field. The mentors, teachers, and colleagues of these new scholars have been engaged in their own re-visioning, and A Republic for the Ages: The United States Capitol and the Political Culture of the Early Republic (the latest installment in the series Perspectives on the American Revolution) highlights some of the best of their work. Though I expect that only a few of the contributors would self-consciously identify themselves as part of a movement, this volume, which celebrates the Bicentennial of the Capitol in Washington, D. C., offers fresh new perspectives to historians of politics, society, material culture, and gender.	2
Perhaps it is not surprising that focusing on the traditional seat of power could be a venue for intellectual inspiration. Even after thirty years, James Sterling Young's The Washington Community, 1800–1828 (New York, 1966) can still dazzle with its multidisciplinary approach to studying government formation, incorporating anthropology, political science, and sociology. Oddly, Young's work, though highly praised in its time, inspired few imitators. It has taken a while but the new political historians represented in A Republic for the Ages have taken up Young's mission. This is not your father's political history.	3
The first clue lies in the subtitle—"political culture." Thirty years ago, studies of political culture mostly explicated ideologies and dissected official documents, the historical correlate to "high culture." The scholarship in this book expands and widens "political culture" to approximate "popular culture," investigating the roles of ritual, print culture (including maps and blueprints), architecture, decoration, and, perhaps most startlingly original, the part played by Freemasonry in the early republic. Ideologies and political theory are still present, notably republicanism, but the essays here focus on how they played out and were transformed by many more political participants and historical factors than hitherto imagined. If this is a populist approach to political history, what could be more fitting than to take the creation of the Capitol—the central artifact of popular government—as its subject? In the hands of these historians, the Capitol emerges not only as a building but also, along with the capital city itself, as a contested political space, a many-faceted symbol, and a stage for a variety of dramas and comedies.	. . .