ABSTRACT
The historiography of nineteenth-century America, like that of the nation’s history more broadly, has changed in dramatic and profound ways in recent decades, carving out entirely new fields, adding immeasurably to the complexity of our work, and redefining even our most fundamental understandings of the past. This historical awakening, inspired in no small part by the Civil Rights Movement and the succeeding struggles for greater civil and human rights in post-World War II America, has reshaped virtually all fields and subfields by shifting attention away from white male political and military leaders and toward ordinary actors at the grassroots, while also tending to refocus academic lenses onto the local as opposed to the national. Along with such shifts has come the assertion that the experiences of common people can be most readily understood not through analyses of high politics, but rather through the cultural tropes and contours that guided the beliefs and practices of the public. This is not to say that scholars have completely ignored powerful decision-makers in influential centers like Washington and New York, only that the “cultural turn,” as the last few decades of historiography have been labeled, has added incalculably to the breadth and depth of our knowledge of the past.
