United States

The ‘New’ Political History

Bibliographic Data

ID10074499
AuthorsAllan G Bogue (corresponding author)
Year1968
Volume3
Issue1
Pages5-27
Publication date1968-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Contemporary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-0094 • E-ISSN: 1461-7250
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/002200946800300101
OpenAlexW44023495
LanguageEN
Citations received14

Thousands of scholars study, teach, or write American history. Score upon score of commercial and scholarly presses speed the researches of these scholars to an audience provided by their professional colleagues and the general public. To search for trends or to look for common denominators in this massive outpouring is a task for the brave, the gifted, or the foolish. On occasion, however, accident or incident reveals a purposive current in the relentless tide even to those who lack the ideal qualifications of the historiographer. So was it recently, when a political scientist searched in his midwestern University for a scalogram computer programme and learned that the only deck on campus belonged to a historian. His discovery reflected the growing interest in quantification and social-science theory and method that has been developing among American political historians for some years now. American historians experimented with quantification in earlier years. Frederick Jackson Turner and some of his Wisconsin students, most notably Orin G. Libby, were industriously mapping election returns and analysing legislative roll calls at the turn of the century. Libby's plea for the systematic study of congressional roll calls appeared in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association in I896.1 Turner never lost his enthusiasm for such methods and the imprint of his influence shows in the major publications of a number of scholars. Work in this tradition appeared as late as 1941, but the early interest in quantification and political ecology among historians subsided, perhaps because of the inadequate statistical methods of the pioneers. At present a small number of historians are trying to apply social

Enthusiasm · Historiography · Legislature · Media studies · Plea · Political history · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Law · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub