Governing America: An Introduction

in the spring of 1995, i attended a session at the organization of American Historians conference at the Washington Hilton, which focused on the state of political history. When i walked toward the conference room i expected to find a small crowd, and one with little hope for the future. At the time, the political history field seemed bleak. senior practitioners, who, for at least two decades, felt that their work had been relegated to the academic dustbin, were demoralized and pessimistic. Graduate students such as myself entered the profession with a sense of trepidation, concerned about how our interests would be received in the academy. When i entered the meeting room, i was surprised. The panelists spoke to an overflow crowd. The room was filled to capacity. Attendees were standing along the walls, and even outside the door in the hallway peering in. During the discussion, a generational debate opened up. While some of the older panelists and attendees expressed the predictable laments about the demise of the field since the 1960s, younger voices insisted that in fact we were on the cusp of a new era. They pointed to new scholarship that was starting to reenvision how historians wrote about politics by bringing back issues such as public policy and government institutions while integrating these subjects into broader narratives that dealt with social and cultural forces. it was clear to everyone in the room that something was happening. The electric atmosphere suggested that change might be taking place after decades when U.s. political history had suffered professionally. As it turned out, the younger generation was right. The problems for political history had begun toward the end of the 1960s, when a new generation of scholars entering the profession developed a stinging critique of political history as it had been practiced by legendary figures such as Arthur schlesinger Jr. and richard Hofstadter. shaped by the conflicts of the 1960s over civil rights and vietnam, the scholarly arm of the new Left had argued that political history, as it had been practiced