New Directions in Political History
I was invited by the Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era to take part in a dialogue on “New Directions in Political History,” specifically for the GAPE. In my contributed essays, I urge political historians to engage frameworks of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and affect to better rethink the horizons of U.S. political issues, past and pending. The abstract and link for the special issue for the roundtable is below:
This roundtable takes up old themes and new perspectives in the field of political history. Scholars engage with six questions across three main categories: the scope of the field, current debates, and teaching. The first two questions ask how we should think about political power and the boundaries of what constitute political history. The section on current debates interrogates the relationship between governing and social movements during the GAPE, and how to situate the political violence of the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot in historical perspective. The final section on teaching takes up two very different challenges. One question is a perennial concern about connecting with students in the classroom about political history. The other dilemma is how to respond to the growing cascade of censorship laws passed by state legislatures that prohibit the teaching of so-called “divisive concepts.”
