ABSTRACT
From history’s inception as a professional discipline in the United States, leading practitioners have criticized historians of politics for privileging high-level partisan competition over more complicated and inclusive accounts that connect society to American democracy’s formal arenas of elections and government. In 1911, Frederick Jackson Turner warned that “the political historian handling his subject in isolation is certain to miss fundamental facts and relations in his treatment of a given age or nation.” By the 1940s, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., seemed frustrated that such advice had been ignored. “Politics is a phenomenon of society and can be properly understood only in terms of society,” he wrote. “This statement is obviously a commonplace, yet it is one whose full implications have been explored only intermittently and capriciously by the writers of political history.” In the 1960s, Lee Benson, a pioneer of what became known as the “new political history,” advocated adopting social science techniques because “historical method, as developed to date, cannot satisfy the demands made upon it by researchers interested in mass behavior …” 1 As evidenced by the persistence of these critiques, the tendency to treat politics as a world apart from American society proved difficult to remedy.
