CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog
Political History Or Not?
Richard White, The Middle Ground
Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution
John Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment
Kenneth Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen
Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds
David Laitin, Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Change Among the Yoruba
Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town
Jack Rakove, Original Meanings
James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom
Matthew Frye Jacobsen, Barbarian Virtues
Mary Ryan, Civic Wars
I offer this list as an illustration of how hard it is to clearly categorize much of what historians write as social history, political history and so on. There's no question that many titles on this list come more from the "social history" side, but are also informed in various ways by the traditional concerns, interests and methodology of political, legal and diplomatic history.
White's The Middle Ground or Taylor's William Cooper's Town, for example, seem to me to deserve a place in the canon of antebellum American political history even though their predominant methodological orientation is towards social and cultural history.
McPherson, on the other hand, offers a model of even-handed integration of different specializations.
I mention the Laitin (sneaking in an Africanist work into a largely Americanist discussion) to observe also that new directions in political history are sometimes spurred by political scientists: Laitin's book I think was an important touchstone for a new wave of work on law, ethnicity and the state by historians and anthropologists.
The Jacobsen is also an interesting book to discuss, because I think one thing that confuses debates over canons is that participants in those debates sometimes confuse disagreement with the substantive argument of a book or article and identifying the place of such a book or article in a canon. The Jacobsen seems to me to belong broadly within the canon of diplomatic history, but I can well see that some practicioners of diplomatic history might disagree with its arguments and see it as an ideological work. It's important to distinguish between the two. Some political history resembles social history because its author disagrees about what the substance of "politics" really is--this doesn't mean you can just discount it as not being political history with one sweep of the canonical pen. That's a battle that has to be fought out in the substantive rather than organizational arena. You can't just say, "The subject of political history is formal politics as I define it" without explaining what you mean by formal politics, and why you think that formal politics are more determinant of political outcomes and important study as such.
This goes for almost any field of specialized inquiry in history or other disciplines. It's obvious that military history should involve the study of war, armies, and so on, sure. But that clearly can or ought to include studying the homefront in time of war, studying the social history of military officers or soldiers, studying the economic history of arms production, studying the cultural history of war propaganda. There is no necessary reason why "military history" should equal "battlefield maneuvers and accompanying decisions by generals and officers" now and forever, even if once upon a time that's what military history was defined by as a specialization.
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