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The Future of Political History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Steven M. Gillon
Affiliation:
Oxford University

Extract

It has become an article of faith that political history has fallen on hard times in recent years. “[T]he status of the political historian within the profession,” William E. Leuchtenburg observed in his 1986 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians (OAH) has “sunk to somewhere between that of a faith healer and a chiropractor.” Hugh Davis Graham, in an insightful analysis of policy history, reached a similar conclusion. “The ranks of traditional political history are depleted,” he wrote in 1993, “their assumptions and methods discredited along with the Great White Men whose careers they chronicled.”

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1997

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References

Notes

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