The “Trial” of Lee Benson: Communism, White Chauvinism, and The Foundations of the “New Political History” in the United States

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreNancy Christie teaches history at the University of Western Ontario. Her work centers on the cultural, political, legal, and social history of eighteenth-century Quebec, with a particular emphasis on the impact of British colonialism after the Conquest of 1763. Winner of numerous scholarly awards, in particular for Engendering the State: Family, Work and Welfare in Canada, she is the author of a major forthcoming volume, A Northern Bastille: The Formal and Informal Politics of Colonialism in Post-conquest Quebec, 1760–1837.Jason Dawsey is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where he teaches courses in modern European history. Currently, he is completing a monograph on Günther Anders’s critique of technology.Michael Gauvreau teaches history at McMaster University. His research focuses on the cultural, intellectual, and social histories of Canada and Quebec from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. He is the author of the prize-winning The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970, and his new research centers on Quebec in the age of revolutions.Aaron G. Jakes is assistant professor of history in the Department of Historical Studies at the New School. He teaches classes on the history of the modern Middle East, environmental history, and the historical geography of capitalism. He is the author of “Boom, Bugs, Bust: Egypt’s Ecology of Interest, 1882–1914,” Antipode (2016), and he is currently working on a book manuscript entitled State of the Field: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism in Egypt, 1882–1914.Ahmad Shokr is a junior research fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University and an assistant professor of history at Swarthmore College. He teaches classes on the history of the modern Middle East, the political economy of empire and decolonization, and the history of capitalism. He is a contributor to several volumes, including Dispatches from the Arab Spring: Understanding the New Middle East (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest, and Social Change in Egypt (Verso, 2012).Kristoffer Smemo is a PhD candidate in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has taught courses on twentieth-century American social and political history. His dissertation examines how social struggle shaped the rise and fall of the liberal wing of the Republican Party during the mid-twentieth century. His work has appeared in the Journal of American History and Labor: Studies in the Working-Class History of the Americas.Samir Sonti is a PhD candidate in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has taught the history of capitalism and labor studies. His dissertation focuses on the politics of inflation in the twentieth-century United States.Gabriel Winant is a PhD candidate in history at Yale University. He has taught twentieth-century American history, the history of capitalism, and African American history. He is completing a dissertation on the transformation of the labor market and the emergence of the health care economy in Pittsburgh in the second half of the twentieth century. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Historical Studies Volume 4, Number 1Spring 2017 Sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/691061 © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

David Arnold is Professor of History at Columbia Basin College where he teaches courses in US, Native American, and African American history. His first book, The Fishermen's Frontier: People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska (University of Washington Press, 2008) is a social and environmental history of Indian and non-Indian fishermen from precontact to present.Matthew M. Babcock is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Texas at Dallas and author of Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule. He received his PhD at Southern Methodist University, and he focuses on the history of North American borderlands, American Indians, and the colonial Southwest.Rosie C. Bermudez is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. Her research and teaching interests include Chicana grassroots activism, social movements, and women of color feminisms. Bermudez is currently writing a book about Chicana activist Alicia Escalante and the East Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization.Dea H. Boster is Associate Professor of History in the Humanities Department at Columbus State Community College in Columbus, Ohio. She has published several works on the history of American medicine and disability, including African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South (Routledge, 2012).Heather D. Curtis is the Warren S. Woodbridge Professor of Religion at Tufts University, where she also holds appointments in the Department of History and the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Curtis received her doctorate in American Religion from Harvard University. Her research explores how religion has shaped responses to racial injustice, humanitarian disasters, and bodily illness from the late nineteenth century to the present.Justene Hill Edwards is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (2021).David G. García earned his PhD in US History at UCLA and is Associate Professor in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. He is the author of the award-winning book Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality (University of California Press, 2018).Lyrianne E. González is a History PhD student minoring in Latino Studies at Cornell University. She is a mid-twentieth-century historian with focuses in US labor history, US foreign labor relations, US–Mexico relations, and im/migration. Her research investigates the racial and generational legacies of US agricultural guestworker programs.José G. Moreno is a full-time senior lecturer in ethnic studies and sociology and the Associate Director of the Ethnic Studies Program at Northern Arizona University. He has published various peer review articles, critical essays, and book reviews in academic publications.Mark Newman is a reader in history at the University of Edinburgh. He thanks the University of Edinburgh Development Trust Research Fund, the British Academy, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, and the Leverhulme Trust for the financial support that made this article possible.Lucy E. Salyer is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Under the Starry Flag (Harvard University Press, 2018), Laws Harsh as Tigers (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), and numerous articles on the history of immigration and citizenship policy.Ryan E. Santos is a lecturer in the Social and Cultural Analysis of Education program at California State University, Long Beach and in the Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies Department at California State University, Los Angeles. His research and teaching emphasize educational history with an emphasis on race, community resistance, and the law.Cameron Tardif is a PhD student who studies twentieth-century US history at Cornell University. His research focuses on how the relationship of slavery and freedom between the United States and Canada impacts the experiences of transnational black athletes. His work has been published in the Journal of Sport History.Lila Teeters is Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Political Science at Worcester State University. She received her PhD in American History from the University of New Hampshire in 2021. Her dissertation is entitled “Native Citizens: The Fight for and against Native American Citizenship, 1887–1924.”Tara J. Yosso is Professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Riverside. Her research seeks to recover counter-narratives of race, schooling, inequality, and the law. Her extensively cited publications examine the ways people of color utilize community cultural wealth to survive and resist racism and other forms of subordination.Hao Zou is an independent scholar based in San Francisco. His research interests include Asian American history, immigration history, race and ethnicity, and the history of the American West.

The Liberal Republican Movement: By Earle Dudley Ross, Ph.D., sometime Fellow in American History, Cornell University, Professor of History, Illinois Wesleyan University. [Cornell Studies in History and Political Science.] (New York: Henry Holt. 1919. Pp. xi, 267. $1.80) The Liberal Republican Movement: By Ross Earle Dudley, Ph.D., sometime Fellow in American History, Cornell University, Professor of History, Illinois Wesleyan University. [Cornell Studies in History and Political Science.] (New York: Henry Holt. 1919. Pp. xi, 267. $1.80.) Edward Stanwood Edward Stanwood Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 25, Issue 3, April 1920, Pages 522–524, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/25.3.522 Published: 01 April 1920

The Wretched Refuse of Jewish American Literary History

A richly detailed and valuable portrait of an American community in the making... Few historians have been more diligent than Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats in reconstructing an American community by linking together a mass of data on its citizens, mapping its neighborhoods, and analyzing political life. -- American Historical ReviewBourke and DeBats weave data from a real treasure-trove... to produce one of the finest social histories of politics ever written... The authors explore the effects of a variety of social and economic variables upon voters' degrees of partisanship and depth of political participation. Any summary fails to do justice to the complexity of their findings... is beautifully written, set up to be read in such a way that a conflict between two of the settlers which resulted in a murder trial can be viewed as an allegory for the county's political development. In short, it uniquely integrates electoral and social history. will have widespread appeal, both to professional historians and laypeople.--Register of the Kentucky Historical SocietyBourke and DeBats have identified a magnificent subject--together with wonderful sources--and they have developed an original interpretation that is splendidly suited to make the most of their material. Even more important, Washington County is sure to have a major influence upon the writing of nineteenth-century American social and political history, geography, and political science.--Richard L. McCormick, University of North Carolina, Chapel HillIn the 1850s, Washington County, Oregon, gathered together a broad cross-section of antebellum America. More than that, however, it left for historians a rareopportunity to explore political, social, and cultural trends in American history due to its unique practice of viva voce voting--announcing individual ballots publicly rather than recording them in secret. Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats tap into this remarkable resource to reveal how individual political identities developed and political choices were made. It is one of the significant contributions of this book that the research tool of viva voce voting permits the individual data from poll books to be linked to political behavior of various dimensions as well as to other measurable aspects of individual behavior, whether religion or economic status. The authors painstakingly develop these materials into a finely grained snapshot of Washington County... Throughout, Washington County scintillates with suggestive insights that make it an important contribution to American history.--Reviews in American HistoryThis is a major work of scholarship which, in closely looking at a single county on the distant Pacific coast, nevertheless poses some absolutely fundamental questions. offers the closest and most satisfying analysis of individual partisanship in the mid-nineteenth century available. The larger implications of their conclusions are sure to be debated for some time to come.--William E. Gienapp, Harvard University

This chapter offers an overview over the relationship between political science and political history after the Second World War. The pioneers of the contemporary politics in the 1960s and 1970s had sufficient historical perspectives, as they developed a general theory from the observation of the historical phenomenon. However, the divergence between political science and history has progressively grown. On the one hand, political science had gradually lost its historical perspective in the name of "scientification." On the other hand, when "the end of history" was widely publicised coinciding with the conclusion of the Cold War, political history as a subfield of political science seemed to lose its significance and relevancy. In the 21st century, authoritarianism is far from disappearing and liberal democracy is disturbed. In other words, the time of crisis has returned. This chapter explores the possibility of a new integral approach combining political science and political history, particularly in light of the current political context being characterised by the resurgence of authoritarianism. In order to grasp the current historical phase of politics, an integral approach is needed, which builds bridges between the study of contemporary politics and political history.

The Power Movement remains a controversial, misunder stood, and relatively neglected era in the historiography of post war American history. In striking contrast, over the past quar ter century historians have devoted considerable attention to the civil rights movement, especially its heroic years from 1954 to 1965. These years were indelibly marked by bus boycotts, sit-ins, political assassina tions, and legal and legislative victories that riveted the national con science and have been successfully upheld by contemporary historians as the most important social and political development of the postwar era. Historians, even as they have critically analyzed the movemenf s setbacks, ambiguities, and successes, generally view civil rights as a moral and political good, with many arguing that, despite all of its no table achievements, the struggle for racial justice remains incomplete. On this score, civil rights historiog raphy has developed into one of the richest and most prolific subfields of American history (i). Conversely, Power has been viewed as a destructive, short-lived, and politically ineffec tual movement that triggered white backlash, urban rioting, and se verely crippled the mainstream civil rights struggle. Power's clas sical period of 1966-1975 is most often characterized as a kind of fe ver dream dominated by outsized personalities who spewed words of fire that make this a justly forgotten era. Moreover, histories of the New Left tend to blame Power rad icalism for inspiring white radicals towards a simplistic and tragically romantic view of revolutionary violence (2). A new subfield of American historical scholarship and Africana what I have called Black Power Studies, is changing the way in which historians, teachers, students, and the general public view Power, civil rights, and the 1960s specifically, and more gen erally, postwar American history. In doing so, Black Power Studies places the history of the era within the broader context of American and African American history at the local, national, and international level. Power is too often portrayed as a temporary eruption that existed outside the confines of American history. That is, the movemenf s anti war activism, antipoverty efforts, foreign policy interventions, intellec tual and political debates, local character and national influence have been virtually ignored in the historiography of postwar America. This is as unfortunate as it is ill considered. Power grew out of the tumult of postwar America, not just the decade of the 1960s, when the possibilities of American democracy seemed unlimited. Power activists tested America's willingness to extend citizenship to blacks with a robust call for self-determination that scandalized and transformed longstanding American institutions. Some activists did this through, at times, a bellicose advocacy of racial separatism contoured by threats of civil unrest. Others sought equal access to predominantly white institutions, especially public schools, colleges, and universities while many decided to build independent, black-led institutions designed to serve as new beacons for African American intellectual achievement, political power, and cultural pride. Yet such efforts did not exist in a vacuum. Organized black activists en countered political repression at the local, national, and international level. A complex web of criminal justice and police agencies infiltrated, harassed, and helped to eventually cripple Power's most visibly militant groups. But the movement adapted to such constraints through bold ef forts to transform American de mocracy by advocating radical goals that were tempered by a surprising and effective blend of militancy and pragmatism. Organized protests for efforts to incorporate the Arts into independent and existing institutions, and the thrust to take control of major American cities through electoral strength exemplified these impulses. Power activism's influence stretched from prisons to trade unions to local and national political elections. In ternationally, Power militants forged alliances with iconic Third World leaders including Fidel Castro, Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, and Julius Nyerere. Leading American political figures of the postwar era, most notably Lyndon Baines John son, Hubert Humphrey, Ramsey Clark, Nicholas Katzenbach, Richard Nixon, and J. Edgar Hoover regarded the movement as dangerous, un predictable, and a threat to national security. Yet the movemenf s im pact on American history, its successes, failures, and shortcomings, as well as it contemporary legacy, remain undervalued and understudied. While scholars have made important strides in documenting the way domestic civil rights struggles played out on a Cold War interna tional stage where democracy's image was contested against the back drop of southern civil rights demonstrations, virtually no attention has been paid to the way in which Power era urban riots impacted American foreign policy. Likewise, activists such as Stokely Carmi chael's overseas trips proved embarrassing enough for American of Black Power Studies places the history of the era within the broader context of Ameri

September/October 2004 Historically Speaking 19 An Interview with John Ferling JOHN FERLING, professor emeritus ofhistory at the State University ofWest Georgia (he retired in May 2004), has written extensively on the political and military history ofearly America. Among his works are A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2003); A Wilderness ofMiseries: War and Warriors in Early America (GreenwoodPress, 1980); andStruggle for a Continent: The Wars ofEarly America (Harlan Davidson, 1993). An accomplished biographer, Ferling has written lives ofGeorge Washington, John Adams, and the Pennsylvania LoyalistJoseph Galloway, as well as Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2000). His most recent work is thejustpublishedAdams Vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, part of Oxford University Press's Pivotal Moments in American History series. Joseph Lucas hadtheprivilege ofinterviewing this prolificstudent ofearly American history in April of2004. Ferling reveals that hispredilectionfor writing about war, politics, and great leaders stemmedpartlyfrom expediency. Yet Ferling also passionately believes that these classicsubjects continue to matter, and their histories have much to teach us today. Joseph Lucas: During your long and productive career you have bucked several ofthe trends that have defined your generation of historians. You have focused on elite leaders rather than marginalized masses. Your primary concerns are political and military history rather than social and cultural history. And you see the past not as a foreign country but as intimately connected to the present. Indeed, you argue that the past, particularly with regard to political and military leadership, holds important lessons for us today. How do you account for your iconoclastic views? And how do you see your work in relation to that ofyour peers and colleagues? John Ferling: Well, for many years I had a poster over my desk, and it contained a quote from Thoreau about marching to a different John Ferling drummer. So maybe I am iconoclastic. But I don't think so. I think I've wound up doing what I've done out of necessity because of where I teach. It just seems the pragmatic thing to do. I don't teach at a major research university, and I don't have a research library at my disposal. So I've chosen to work with the resources available to me on a daily basis. We have things like the modern editions of the Washington papers, Franklin papers, Hamilton papers, Adams papers, and so forth. That was the direction that I went simply because the material was there and available to me. As a result, I think, most of my work has been on political and military history. When I was finishing graduate school, I had a one-year appointment at a school just outside ofPhiladelphia in Chester County. I was very much interested in abolitionism, and there was a wonderful library ofabolitionist materials in Chester County, maybe five minutes from where I was living. Ifthat had materialized into permanent, tenuretrack employment, I would have probably worked on the history ofantislavery. I do think there are lessons from the past: political lessons and military lessons as well. I'm struck by the fact, for example, thatJefferson wrote a letter toJohn Adams in 1813 stating that all through history, in every society at every time, one party existed that favored the many while another party existed that favored the few, and political battles tended to revolve around that struggle between the many and the few. And that's how I see American politics. I see that struggle going on in the Revolution. I see that struggle going on between the Federalists and the Democratic Republican Party in the 1790s and the early days ofthe republic. I see it through most of the 19th and 20th centuries in America's political history as well. Lucas: Are there other important lessons from the era of the American Revolution and the early republic? Ferling: I think there are. The American Revolution , for example, can tell us a great deal about the limits ofmilitary power. Look at the relative strength of Great Britain and the colonies in 1775—it seemed as if there was no way that the colonists...

Grounded in extensive historical research, this eye-opening survey reveals the long-undervalued role secret societies have played in American history. Americans are fascinated by secret societies and have devoured exaggerated claims for their influence. At the same time, scholarly assessments of covert groups that have shaped American social, cultural, and political history have often undervalued their role or even questioned their existence. This survey challenges both the exaggerators and the deniers. Freemasons? They may not be the hidden rulers of the world, but a significant number of America’s founders were Masons. The Know Nothings? Two American presidents joined the movement. The Bohemian Grove? Republican politicians and corporate leaders really did engage in strange behavior under the redwood trees through the 20th century. Revealing fascinating facts about some of the most talked-about covert societies, including the Mafia, the Skull and Bones and the Ku Klux Klan, Secret Societies and Clubs in American History exposes the truth about the subcultures that made their mark on some of the most important events in the nation’s history and contributed to the shaping of the country itself.

back upon A decade of upheaval in American history. The country's youngest president, having succeeded a conservative Republican and having sounded a clarion call to the progressive forces in the country, is now gone forever from the presidency. An activist Democratic president skillfully shepherds legislation through Congress, but wolfish war follows close on the heels of domestic reform. Radical protests against the system, and a few bombings, ignite national hysteria. The president retires in bitterness, soon to die. His Republican successor at first holds forth the hope of restoring the national composure, but he is replaced by his vice-president after a truncated term marred by economic dislocation and executive scandal unprecedented in American history. Would it pass understanding if the new president set aside his clarion so that he might speak softly to his countrymen? As there are times during the nation's history that require its citizens to summon up their last reserves of daring and courage, are there not other times that call for the exercise of moderation and sobriety? Does not prudence comprehend all of the virtues? Imagine a statesman ascending to the presidency after a decade of war, national hysteria, recession, and scandal. Imagine that the next five years are characterized by peace, national calm, unprecedented inflation-free prosperity, and rigid executive integrity. Would not the citizens bestow their gratitude upon the statesman who presided over such a time? And if it is true, as a famous political scientist once said, that we approach the subject of prudence by studying those to whom we attribute it, would not such a statesman be worthy of the attention of our political scientists and political historians? When I wrote at the outset of this article about a decade of upheaval in American history, I had in mind the period from the first administration of Woodrow Wilson to the death of President Harding. During the five years following the decade 1914 to 1923, President Calvin Coolidge won the admiration and the gratitude of the American people. His three predecessors had begun their terms full of hope for the future, and had ended them, respectively, in defeat, repudiation, and death. Coolidge in-

Reviewed by: The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton by William E. Leuchtenburg Daryl A. Carter The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. By William E. Leuchtenburg. ( New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi, 886. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-19-517616-2.) There are many people and institutions that can impact society. Private actors, such as protesters, researchers, and businesspeople, can push and pull society. Institutions, such as Congress, the courts, and universities, can bring both progress and regression. Since the beginning of the twentieth century no entity has arguably been as influential as the American presidency. The modern presidency has often been at the center of important moments in American history. Its importance has been seen in both domestic affairs and international relations. In this new addition to the literature on twentieth-century American [End Page 723] political history, the preeminent historian William E. Leuchtenburg underscores the importance of the American presidency in the life of the United States. In the 1960s, historians began focusing on other aspects of history. Social and cultural history—from the bottom up—replaced much of the focus academic historians had given to great white men and politics. Over the next several decades studies in gender, race, social movements, civil rights, and world history reflected a growing shift in focus and in employment opportunities. As political scientists became obsessed with quantitative research and increasingly jettisoned political theory, political history went out of vogue. But over the course of the last twenty years political history has begun a comeback. And the growing political instability over the last ten years, both in the United States and globally, has brought attention back to the importance of politics, especially the role of the American president. Leuchtenburg has performed a valuable service to the historical profession with this volume. The author began this work after attending a meeting at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. After a colleague approached him about writing a history of the American presidency, Leuchtenburg agreed and devised a two-volume study. Currently he is working on the second volume, which will cover the Constitutional Convention through the end of the nineteenth century. The main undercurrent of this work is the author's contention that American presidents shaped the twentieth century. Leuchtenburg examines every president from Theodore Roosevelt to Bill Clinton in detail. The book is designed to appeal to a broad audience. In doing so, the author presents a highly readable and informative history of the twentieth century. Leuchtenburg proceeds in a chronological fashion, beginning with the assassination of President William McKinley in September 1901. The death ushered in a new president whose political prowess defined the presidency for a generation: Theodore Roosevelt. The author notes that Republican Party power broker Mark Hanna thought it was a "mistake" nominating Roosevelt to be vice president because of his reputation for political troublemaking (p. 23). When Roosevelt became president, the nation was entering not only a new century but also a new era in which American power would be increasingly on display. Consequently, the office of the president would have to modernize, too. By noting the developing importance of the chief executive, Leuchtenburg underscores the fact that as industrialization and modernity transformed the United States, the nation's highest leader would have to be transformed as well. Every subsequent president built a myth around himself and sought to push a national agenda. The only exceptions were the Republican presidents of the 1920s—Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. The author explains how Woodrow Wilson expanded on the developments in the changing nation. He held a Ph.D. and had been a professor, president of Princeton University, and governor of New Jersey. Wilson brought a certain idealism attractive to Progressives. Yet President Wilson's achievements, such as the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the Nineteenth Amendment, and others, failed to inspire confidence as World War I and the restraints [End Page 724] brought on by the war and domestic tensions drove a great many Americans into the Republican camp by 1920. Leuchtenburg notes correctly the vast importance of Franklin D. Roosevelt to Americans' shifting dependence...

One of the environments in which political science faculty most directly face issues of community, communities, and politics is when they find themselves teaching in programs abroad. The rigors of international teaching force faculty to confront issues of community identity, assumptions about political orientation, and presumptions about how communities interact that often remain unstated or unexplored at home institutions in the United States. In this paper, we will explore these matters based on our experiences teaching in the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies during the late 1990s. The Hopkins-Nanjing Center brings together Chinese and international (mainly American) graduate students in a unique living-learning environment. Chinese students take graduate-level course work in political science, American history, economics, and ESL in English from visiting American faculty members, while international students take analogous classes in Chinese from faculty at Nanjing University. Faculty and students are housed in the Center's residential wing, where Chinese and international students are paired together as roommates. We discuss the unusual pedagogy involved in teaching Chinese students in the program (who are extremely bright and motivated, but usually lack substantive and methodological backgrounds in political science); the opportunities for extracurricular education afforded by the Center's living-learning facility; and describe our experiences interacting with our Chinese faculty counterparts.

A Digital History of Anglophone Demography and Global Population Control, 1915–1984

The relationship between Australian political and social history has received little historiographical attention. Political history has been lauded or, more often, dismissed as traditional historical practice, while from the 1960s social history took its place as a catch‐all phrase for various “new” histories concerned with everyday life. This article examines the place of political and social history in the nascent Australian academic historical profession of the 1950s to the early 1970s, and then explores the impact of the new social history on academic political history. It will suggest that while there was only limited exchange before the late 1980s, in the last twenty years social history has contributed modestly to a reconstituted understanding of political history as part of lived experience.“[…] I can read poetry and plays, and things of that sort, and do not dislike travels. But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?”“Yes, I am fond of history.”“I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all — it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention […]”.1

Race, Politics, and Nation in Albion W. Tourgée's American Historical Novels Series: The Example of <i>Hot Plowshares</i>