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The Culture of Politics: The Politics of Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

Joanne B. Freeman
Joanne B. Freeman
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

In a way, there is an unspoken subtext to this “state-of-the-field” panel on political history. For at least some of us, there is a whisper of uneasiness associated with this topic, a small internal voice concerned about the health and survival of political history. In the relatively recent past, the flowering of social history challenged and eventually toppled the dominance of political history—a fine development, given that in the long reach of history politics is only part of the story. Unfortunately, this shift of balance left some scholars with a bad taste in their mouths. Some social historians have retained a lingering antipathy toward political history as a looming presence—an elite-driven, chronologically organized, “imperalist” narrative that threatens to subsume scholarship once again. Some political historians, in turn, feel besieged by social history and its seeming focus on minority and underprivileged populations to the exclusion of much else. Both of these emotionalized outlooks rest on distorted and exaggerated assumptions. But for many political historians, the end result is a current of nervous tension about the place of their field in the larger scheme of historical scholarship.

Type
Roundtable: State-of-the-Field: American Political History
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , April 2004 , pp. 137 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2004

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References

Notes

1. This article is based on a roundtable discussion entitled “Political History—The State of the Field,” held at the April 2003 annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians.

2. Baker, Jean H., Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, 1983)Google Scholar; Hunt, Lynn, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984)Google Scholar; McGerr, Michael E., The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (New York, 1986)Google Scholar.

3. Baker, Affairs of Party, 11; McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics, 9–10.

4. Baker, Affairs of Party, 11; Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, 14. See also McGerr, The Decline of Party Politics, 10.

5. Baker is boldest on this front, declaring that “given the data base available, I am convinced that the limits of such interpretation have been reached.” Baker, Affairs of Party, 11.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., 11, 12.

8. See also Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, 10–11: “The values, expectations, and implicit rules that expressed and shaped collective intentions and actions are what I call the political culture of the revolution.” Baker notes that she relied on Sidney Verba's definition of political culture, from Pye, Lucien and Verba, Sidney, Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “‘the system of empirical beliefs, expressive symbols, and values which define the situation in which political action takes place' and which encompass, given its orientation to the subjective aspect of politics, not only the life histories of the individuals who make up the system but the public events and private experiences that become ‘the collective expression of a political system.’” Baker, Affairs of Party, 12.

9. Baker, Affairs of Party, 12.

10. Freeman, Joanne B., Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, 2001), 289–290Google Scholar.

11. Allgor, Catherine, Parlour Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville, 2000)Google Scholar; Freeman, Affairs of Honor; Irvin, Benjamin H., “Representative Men: Personal and National Identity in the Continental Congress” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2002)Google Scholar.

12. Travers, Len, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst, 1997)Google Scholar; Newman, Simon P., Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Waldstreicher, David, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, 1997)Google Scholar; Pasley, Jeffrey L., “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early Republic (Charlottesville, 2001)Google Scholar.