Political Parties in the United States: Reinterpreting Their Natural History

Abstract

THE FIELD OF American political history is enjoying a remarkable burst of creative and diverse scholarship. Undaunted by the contemporary tide of political apathy or by the heyday which our colleagues in social history are enjoying, political historians within the last five years have been turning out excellent biographies, state and local histories of uncommon quality and originality, superb analyses of popular voting behavior, and innovative explorations of those elusive phenomena termed political culture and political ideology.' A dozen years ago, a high proportion of the most interesting work in political history was concentrated in the area of voting studies. Today, highly imaginative political histories are confined to no single area, they subscribe to no common interpretation, and they defy easy categorization. In the matter of methodology, quantification has enabled a number of historians to make seminal contributions, but quantification has not swept everything before it. Equally impressive to name but one non-quantitative approach have been the efforts to examine such sources as newspapers, pamphlets, and party platforms for the light they throw on popular belief systems and on the meanings ordinary people found in political discourse. In the matterof periodization, the party-systems concept continues to inspire imaginative work on the great eras of electoral realignment, especially the 1850s, the 1890s, and the 1930s. But other historians