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In previous experiences with early American politics and, for that matter American history in general, I have found that most of the information I have read or learned about can be classified as squares or circles. Ideas that take a specific shape, detail a specific viewpoint or bias, or attack an issue from one angle. This in my opinion, is very common in historical writing for historians, as we discussed in class today, have numerous reasons for omitting or specifying certain subjects. I choose to address this in my blog tonight after reconsidering Wade’s claim at the end of class. He explained how historians of old focused on what I like to call squares and circles, one-sided representations of early American politics. Whether it be biographies of political elites, party voting, or top down leadership; history was presented in fragments, and seen as simple to understand when looking at such topics. Wade asserted that no, politics actually took multiple shapes. It wasnt just squares and circles, it was a complex combination and circumstance of numerous different aspects of political, social and economic change.
I believe the authors of Beyond the Founders do a great job of highlighting this claim in their introduction and assert that we can’t sum up early American politics with a few summaries of the political elites when the shear nature of “political” was changing itself. We can’t exclude everyone that Jefferson doesnt consider “all men” after the revolution when the identity of the citizen and the idea of politics were being formed and subsequently constantly reevaluated. History and politics did not stop at the party system and when we explain it as if it did, we are misinterpreting the period as a whole and continue to isolate and disconnect African Americans, women, and Indians. As the authors cite in the intro, Gordon Wood states, “This fascination with the great and not-so-great men of the era has tended to further fragment our understanding of the period. We often see the early republic solely in terms of its individual political leaders… But such biographies of leading political figures contribute little to a comprehensive understanding of the early republic.” A squares and circles understanding lends us to miss all sorts of impacts and influences that others had on the early republic.
A fully integrated political history will paint a more complex and mutually connected early republic. One that sees the very nature of politics changing under its feet. Becoming a practice that can be expressed by many differents kinds of people in many different forms. Beyond the Founders explains that to fully grasp early American politics, you must be willing to shed your high school history textbooks and open your eyes to the emergence of popular politics and the presence of new political influences outside the realms of the political elite. To finish, I really like the last few words of the introduction and believe it ties together much of what I wanted to address here; “The founders, in sum, are only the beginning. Beyond the founders lies a complex and important story about how recognizably American political institutions and practices actually emerged from the top down, from the bottom up, and perhaps especially from the middle out in every direction. It is a story about leaders and followers together, about Americans simultaneously unified and divided by partisanship, by gender, by race, by class, by region, by nationalism, and by localism.” History doesnt come in squares and circles, it takes many different shapes and sizes, so why should we look at the early republic any differently?