Howard W. Allen

COLLECTIVE BIOGRAPHY AND THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT: THE "STATUS REVOLUTION" REVISITED

Virtually from the beginning “collective biography,” or “prosopography,” has been seen as one of the most powerful and useful techniques of the “new” quantitative history. As Lawrence Stone succinctly described that technique, it is “ … the investigation of the common background characteristics of a group of actors by means of a collective study of their lives.” It is not case, of course, as Stone also makes clear, that the new quantitative historians invented collective biography. In fact, the approach was used by historians and other social scientists well before the advent of quantitative history. Even so, the technique has frequently been employed by quantitative historians and may even be seen by some as virtually a hallmark of that approach to historical studies.

From the Populist Era to the New Deal: A Study of Partisan Realignment in Washington State, 1889-1950

Study of the popular response to the political parties and candidates of nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States history has made significant progress since the 1950s. Samuel Lubell in The Future of American Politics was certainly one of the first to show historians that much understanding about the voting behavior of past generations could be gleaned from an imaginative examination of county and precinct election data. Lee Benson, in his now classic essay on “Research Methods in American Political Historiography,” persuasively demonstrated to many that systematic analysis of quantitative data could improve the accuracy and quality of generalizations about past voting practices. Benson’s subsequent study of early nineteenth-century New York politics, The Concept ofJacksonian Democracy, which quickly became a model of excellence in research design and methods, concluded, among other things, that “socioeconomic cleavages” were less important in explaining how New Yorkers voted after about 1820 than were “ethnic and religious” factors. At least in part inspired by Benson’s findings in New York, other historians pursued the study of the relationship between voting behavior and ethnocultural and religious factors by examining, for example, political behavior in Michigan during the Jacksonian era, the Midwest and Northeast during the 1890s, and Chicago in the early twentieth century. While the emphasis upon the importance of ethnocultural and religious factors in voting has engendered some criticism and dissent, it seems fair to conclude that this approach to the study of the voting process has produced significant work that has substantially influenced interpretations of American political history.

Congress in Crisis: Changes in Personnel and the Legislative Agenda in the U.S. Congress in the 1890s

THE LAST DECADE of the nineteenth century was a time of great national crisis, surpassed in severity only by the depression of the 1930s. Unemployment in manufacturing and transportation rose to nearly 17% in 1894. More banks failed in the 189os than in any other economic crisis in American history except the one that began in 1929, and over 159 railroads, capitalized at more than

The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era (review)

2.5 billion, were forced into receivership. Farm prices plunged, and farm spokesmen bitterly complained about the disastrous effects of the long-term deflation of currency, discrimination by railroad monopolies, and high interest rates (Douglas 1930: 440; Fels 1959: 159-219; Hoffman 1956; Steeples 1965). The economic collapse brought discontent and distress. The Peoples, or Populist, party, with strong support in the agricultural South and West, demanded the nationalization of railroads, the telegraph, and the telephone; a subtreasury plan that envisioned federal support for farm prices; and the inflation of currency through the free coinage of silver. Labor militancy and violence

The Cities and the Election of 1928: Partisan Realignment?

hassle for those wishing to conduct research involving any of the governors: the multiplicity of archival holdings in the Hoosier state. Primary documents concerning Harrison, for example, are held at three different places in Indianapolis: the Indiana Historical Society, the State Library, and the State Archives. This work would have benefited by having fewer authors (forty contributed to this volume) and by paying greater attention to context. In addition, including each governor’s party affiliation on the first page of each biography would have helped orient readers at the outset. Because readers will use this as a reference book, such a basic structure would have helped considerably. Despite some shortcomings in analysis that may be a function of the format, the Governors of Indiana ably accomplishes its main task of chronicling those who occupied the highest political office in the Hoosier State.