American political
history has been built around narratives of crisis, in which what
“counts” are the moments when seemingly stable political orders
collapse and new ones rise from the ashes. But while crisis-centered
frameworks can make sense of certain dimensions of political culture,
partisan change, and governance, they also often steal attention from
the production of categories like race, gender, and citizenship
status that transcend the usual break points in American history.
Brent Cebul, Lily
Geismer, and Mason B. Williams have brought together first-rate
scholars from a wide range of subfields who are making structures of
state power—not moments of crisis or partisan realignment—integral
to their analyses. All of the contributors see political history as
defined less by elite subjects than by tensions between state and
economy, state and society, and state and subject—tensions that
reveal continuities as much as disjunctures. This broader definition
incorporates investigations of the crosscurrents of power, race, and
identity; the recent turns toward the history of capitalism and
transnational history; and an evolving understanding of American
political development that cuts across eras of seeming liberal,
conservative, or neoliberal ascendance. The result is a rich
revelation of what political history is today.