In a way, there is an unspoken subtext to this “state-of-the-field” panel on political history. For at least some of us, there is a whisper of uneasiness associated with this topic, a small internal voice concerned about the health and survival of political history. In the relatively recent past, the flowering of social history challenged and eventually toppled the dominance of political history—a fine development, given that in the long reach of history politics is only part of the story. Unfortunately, this shift of balance left some scholars with a bad taste in their mouths. Some social historians have retained a lingering antipathy toward political history as a looming presence—an elite-driven, chronologically organized, “imperalist” narrative that threatens to subsume scholarship once again. Some political historians, in turn, feel besieged by social history and its seeming focus on minority and underprivileged populations to the exclusion of much else. Both of these emotionalized outlooks rest on distorted and exaggerated assumptions. But for many political historians, the end result is a current of nervous tension about the place of their field in the larger scheme of historical scholarship.
