An internationally recognized center for the study of America’s political past, the American Political History Institute is Boston University’s intellectual hub for research, teaching, and scholarly exchange in the field United States political history. Organizing monthly seminars with visiting scholars, the center also sponsors the annual graduate student conference, oversees the graduate exchange fellowship with the University of Cambridge, assists student research, and co-sponsors the annual BOCA LONGA History Workshop with colleagues from Berkeley, Emory, Stanford, UC-Davis, and University College London.
Scholarly Context
Modern U.S. history has suffered from a kind of schizophrenia: while it has long nourished a large body of traditional political history (studies of presidents, elections, court decisions, and policy innovations), over the past half-century it has also spawned a burgeoning library of social and cultural history (analyses of formerly disfranchised historical actors, of the experience of everyday life for ordinary Americans, and of the mentalité of Americans at crucial junctures in their past). Beginning in the late 1960s the profession had downplayed the study of politics in favor of social and cultural history, so that the study of social movements, local communities, and cultural phenomena overshadowed analysis of political elites, institutions, and public policy. The two approaches engaged in little productive dialogue.
Over the past 25 years, however, a generation of historians has reinvigorated political history in new ways that avoid the pitfalls of previous scholarship. Blending politics with social and cultural analysis, the new political history has emerged as one of the most exciting areas of academic scholarship. This new approach pays close attention to the ways politics and public policy structure everyday life, defining the boundaries of the cultural arena (framing, for example, the relations between landlords and tenants, parents and children, producers and consumers, people and the environment, teachers and students). At the same time, this scholarship examines the ways social, cultural, and demographic forces affected and delimited political action. This new political history thus combines policy analysis with an understanding of the people policies acted upon.
Historians of politics and public policy have also rediscovered the connections between the private sphere (the intimate worlds of family, friendship, and voluntary association) and the public arenas of party organizations, electoral politics, and policymaking bureaucracies. This new trend in political history moves beyond biographical study to explore the ways policy communities, political networks, and collections of like-minded political actors with informal national and international connections reshaped American politics at critical junctures in twentieth-century U.S. history. This scholarship has also investigated how such personal networks limited the scope and functioned as a brake on certain kinds of political endeavor. At the same time, scholars in other fields such as political science and political sociology have shown that the historical analysis of politics is a truly interdisciplinary endeavor.
Through undergraduate teaching, graduate training, research projects, public programs and collaborations with other institutions, the American Political History Institute seeks to make Boston University a center for advancing this important scholarly work.
