Recapturing the Oval Office

Recapturing the Oval Office aims to show skeptical social and cultural historians that they can write about the presidency without altering their intellectual priorities or tarnishing their professional prestige. Instead of scorning high-level national politics as anachronistically focused on elite white men, these skeptics, the book implies, should heed its arguments and the work that it samples as guides to integrating Washington, D.C., politics into other areas of historical inquiry. I am not persuaded that most historians are as hostile to the study of the presidency as these essays suggest. And other elements of the book's framing—that the 1960s generation of historians devoted to “history from below” dethroned a presidential synthesis—may be slightly overdrawn, neglecting the interest that the earlier generation showed in the world beyond politics and minimizing the continued interest in the presidency since the 1960s. Still, the editors, Brian Balogh of the University of Virginia and Bruce J. Schulman of Boston University, are entirely correct that presidential historians are often on the defensive, sometimes hard-pressed to find jobs, and occasionally derided for pursuing popular acclaim rather than historiographical impact. Schulman quotes eminent Joseph Ellis

Archaeology · Economic history · Elite · Framing (construction · Historiography · Political science · Politics · Presidency · Presidential system · Prestige · Skepticism · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy

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