Elisabeth S. Clemens, The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890-1925 (Chicago, 1997).
*Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York, 1970).
Lori D. Ginzburg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the 19th-Century United States (New Haven, 1990).
Kenneth S, Greenburg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baton Rouge, 1985).
Robert C. McMath, Jr., American Populism: A Social History, 1877-1898 (New York, 1994).
* Philip Shaw Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (Lawrence, 1994).
Joel Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838-1893 (Stanford, 1991).
Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992).
Additional Articles on reserve.

NOTE:  Books marked with an * are to be purchased.  I suggest used book stores in Champaign or on the Web.  Amazon.com is another option.  The rest are at textbook rental.

Overview :

    This course introduces graduate students to the historical literature on nineteenth-century American politics.  I have sacrificed detailed treatment of a single period in favor of broad coverage and insight into particular issues and themes.  The readings are divided along three topics-- ideology and culture, government, and social movements-- and within them, arranged chronologically.  The topics, of course, are hardly mutually exclusive.  Indeed, part of what we will be doing is exploring the connections among each through the readings.  I hope in particular that we can clarify and complicate our assumptions about the relationship between state and society, and politics and the "public sphere".  In the end, I expect we will better understand many of the methodological and substantive issues involved in writing political history that will be useful in defining topics for your own research and/or preparing for your MA comprehensive examinations.

Course Requirements:

    Each week we will read a common set of texts, usually a book, or part of a book and articles, and discuss them.  This is a seminar; there will be little if any formal lecture.  It is therefore essential that you read the weekly readings thoroughly and thoughtfully and come to class prepared to discuss them.
    In addition to completing the readings and participating in discussions, each of you will present two analytical essays to the class.  For the first paper, you will choose two books (one required, one from the list of suggested readings) and critique them.  What are the authors' arguments, categories, and assumptions?  Are they valid?  Why or why not?  How do the authors use evidence?  What value do you find in their work?  How might we see the topics at hand differently from the authors' points of view?  There is no specified length, but aim for 7-9 pages.  The papers are due on the Thursday before the next week's class meeting.  Copies of the paper should be made in triplicate so that everyone in the class has the opportunity to read the papers before Monday evening.  Put another way, each class is structured around the texts and the papers.
    Your final paper requires more than simply reviewing a book and pointing out flaws.  You will read both primary and secondary sources on a particular subject in nineteenth-century American political history and attempt an extended analytical synthesis of approximately 15 to 20 pages.  For this assignment, you will need to identify an historical problem in the current literature on the subject and come to your own conclusions about it.  The possibilities are extensive, and should become obvious to you as we work through the course readings.  Talk to me as soon as possible about your topic; discuss your ideas with other members of the class.
    I see this as a hybrid project-- half research paper, half historiographical analysis.  As in the first assignment, you will consult important secondary sources on your subject.  Yet, as in a research paper, your task is to develop an analysis that either builds upon, modifies, or rejects outright the arguments of past historians.  Therefore, you will also need to integrate primary source evidence into your paper and draw your conclusions accordingly.

Grading

    Your final grade will consist of your performance in weekly discussion (including your oral presentations) and the quality of your two papers.

First Paper                        25%
Final Paper                       50%
Discussion Participation    25%

NOTE:  The above requirements are subject to modification.  I reserve the right to alter or amend themes I deem appropriate.  Students with documented disabilities should contact me to request additional accommodations, if needed

Schedule    Note: Weekly readings marked with * are on reserve at Booth.

Week I: (1/7)        Organize

Week II: (1/14)    What is Politics?
*Richard L. McCormick, "The Social Analysis of American Political History-- After Twenty Years," in Idem., The Party Period and the Public Policy, 89-140.
*Robin D.G. Kelley, " 'We Are Not What We Seem': Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South," Journal of American History          80 (June 1993), 75-112.
*Julie Roy Jeffrey, "Permeable Boundaries: Abolitionist Women and Separate Spheres," Journal of the Early Republic 21 (Spring 2001), 79-93.
*David Waldstreicher, "Rites of Rebellion, Rites of Assent: Celebrations, Print Culture, and the Origins of American Nationalism," JAH 82 (June 1995), 37-61.

Week III: (1/21)    MLK Holiday; no class

Week IV: (1/28)    Republicanism & the Revolution
Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution

Suggested Readings
Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America
Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: The Antifederalists and the Dissenting Tradition in America
T.H. Breen, "Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising," JAH (June 1997)
Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society
Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia
Jack Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Western World
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

Week V: (2/4)    Politics in the Early Republic
*Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture, pp. 57-267.

Suggested Readings
David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes
Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s
Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America
Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution
Winifred B. Rothenberg, From Market Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts
Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism

Week VI: (2/11)    The Birth of Mass Political Parties
Silbey, Political Nation, pp. 38-175
*Glen C. Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, "Limits of Political Engagement in Antebellum America: A New Look at the GOlden Age of Participatory Democracy," JAH (December 1997), 855-85.
*Elizabeth Varon, "Tippecanoe and the Ladies Too: White Women and Party Politics in Antebellum Virginia," JAH (September 1995), 494-521.
 

Suggested Readings
Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts, 1790s-1840s
Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs
Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy
Harry L. Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict
John Ashworth, Agrarians and Aristocrats
Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender and American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era
Elizabeth Varon, We Mean to be Counted; Michael Lewis Goldberg, An Army of Women: Gender and Politics in Gilded Age Kansas
Amy Bridges, A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics
Sean Willentz, Chants Democratic
Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, Rude Republic

Week VII: (2/18)    Slavery, Race and the Coming of the Civil War
Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men

Week VIII: (2/25)    The Old South and the Coming of the Civil War
Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen
*** For half the class: 1-2 page Proposal on Final Project (Due the Thursday Before Class) ***

Suggested Readings
William J. Cooper, The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828-1856
William G. Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System, 1824-1861
J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in s Slave Society
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor
Christopher Olsen, Political Culture of Secession in Mississippi
Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds; Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the South Carolina Low Country
LeAnn Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890
Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention

Week IX: (3/4) Nineteenth-Century Policy-Making
*Richard L. McCormick, "THe Party Period and Public Policy: An Exploratory Hypothesis," JAH (September 1979), 179-98.
*Wallace D. Farnham, "The Weakened Spring of Government: A Study in Nineteenth-Century American History," American Historical Review (1962-3), 662-80.
*Richard John, "Government Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development, 1787-1835," Studies in American Political Development 11 (Fall 1997), 347-80.

*** For half the class: 1-2 page Proposal on Final Project (Due on the Thursday Before Class) ***

Suggested Readings
Lee Benson, Merchants, Farmers and Railroads: Railroad Regulation and New York Politics, 1850-1887
L. Ray Gunn, The Decline of Authority: Public Economic Policy and Political Development in New York State, 1800-1860
John Majewski, A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylbania and Virginia Before the Civil War
Oscar and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the Economy
Daniel B. Klein and John Majewski, "Economy, Community, and Law: The Turnpike Movement in New York, 1797-1845," Law & Society Review 26 (1992), 469-512.
William Novak, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America
Christopher Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic
harry L. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era
Louis Hartz, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought

Week X: (3/18)    The Presidency in the Age of the Civil War
Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln

Suggested Readings
Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877
Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate National 1861-1865
James McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution
Morton Keller, Affairs of State
Eric Foner, Reconstruction

Week XI: (3/25)     The Age of Courts and Parties
*Robert J. Kaczorowski, "To Begin the Nation Anew: Congress, Citizenship, and Civil Rights After the Civil War," American Historical Review (Feb. 1987), 45-68.
*Michael Les Benedict, "Preserving the Constitution: The Conservative Basis of Radical Reconstruction," JAH (June 1974), 65-90.
*William Forbath, "The Shaping of the American Labor Movement," Harvard Law Review 102 (April 1989), 1111-1236.
*Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State, excerpts.

Suggested Readings:  See those listed for weeks X & XI

Week XII: (4/1):    Women & Nineteenth-Century Reform
Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence

Suggested Readings
Anne M. Boylan, "WOmen in Groups: An Analysis of Women's Benevolent Organizations in New York and Boston, 1797-1840," JAH (December 1984), 497-523.
Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of AN Independent WOmen's Movement in America, 1848-1869
Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood; Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America
Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary WOmen in the ANtislavery Movement
Nancy A. Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, 1822-1872
Paula Baker, "The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political SOciety," American Historical Review (June 1984), 620-47.
Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of WOmen's Political Culture, 1830-1900.
Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public
Elsa Barkley Brown, "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom," Public Culture (Fall 1994), 107-46.

Week XIII: (4/8)    Late 19th-Century Insurgency
McMath, American Populism
*Richard Oestreicher, "Urban Working-Class Political Behavior and Theories of AMerican Electoral Politics, 1870-1940,) JAH (March 1988), 1257-86.

Suggested Readings
Peter Argersinger, The Limits of Agrarian Radicalism: Western Populism and American Politics
Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R.
Richard Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875-1900.
Victoria C. Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins o Business Unionism in the United States
Peter S. Rachleff, Black Labor in the South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865-1890.
Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920.
Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist

Week XIV: (4/15)     The Rise of Interest-Group Politics
Clemens, People's Lobby

Suggested Readings
John F. Reynolds, Testing Democracy: Electoral Behavior and Progressive Reform in New Jersey, 1880-1920
Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: Ch. 9: "The Discovery That Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism," 311-56.
Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928.
Robert Weibe, The Search for Order
James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918
Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916: The Market, THe Law, and Politics.

Week XV: (4/22)    Paper Reports-- Students will present summaries of their final paper in class.

**** Final Paper Due Monday, April 29th.