The Invention of the Ethnocultural Interpretation

Abstract

as exists at particular moments or to change over time. Especially susceptible may be historiography written as prelude to the statement of one's own argument when entering contested terrain.' The practice of historiography as a reductionist process is interwoven with the thesis of this essay: the so-called of political parties and voting, especially with regard to the nineteenth-century United States, has been invented largely by the principal critics of the new political history. An ethnocultural interpretation was neither created nor advocated by the two historians most associated with initiating the new political history, Samuel P. Hays and especially Lee Benson. These new political historians, in arguing that politics could be understood best by systematic analysis of the social context of politics, did not limit themselves to the study of ethnicity or religion, as was charged by some critics, but rather considered as broad a range of social variables as possible. Nor did they posit a society in which class structure had no meaning for political power. Benson and Hays advocated applying social science methods, concepts, and theories to political and social history in an effort to produce more complex and credible explanations of historical processes and events. Quantitative methods were incidental to these goals, but producing scholarship of general interest to historians and other social scientists was central.2 Although the new political history has encompassed the interdisciplinary analysis of parties, legislatures, elites, power, policy, communities, subcultures, and political culture from the Thanks for helpful criticism to Jean Baker, Richard Oestreicher, Michael Zuckerman, Darrett Rutman, to anonymous readers for the AHR, to University of Florida graduate students who received the arguments in this essay with proper skepticism, and especially to William G. Shade. I Michael Kammen has warned that it can be risky to categorize historians into schools, such as the