What did politics and public affairs mean to those generations
of Americans who first experienced democratic self-rule? Taking
their cue from vibrant political campaigns and very high voter
turnouts, historians have depicted the nineteenth century as an era
of intense and widespread political enthusiasm. But rarely have
these historians examined popular political engagement directly, or
within the broader contexts of day-to-day life. In this bold and
in-depth look at Americans and their politics, Glenn Altschuler and
Stuart Blumin argue for a more complex understanding of the "space"
occupied by politics in nineteenth-century American society and
culture. Mining such sources as diaries, letters, autobiographies,
novels, cartoons, contested-election voter testimony to state
legislative committees, and the partisan newspapers of
representative American communities ranging from Massachusetts and
Georgia to Texas and California, the authors explore a wide range
of political actions and attitudes. They consider the enthusiastic
commitment celebrated by historians together with various forms of
skepticism, conflicted engagement, detachment, and hostility that
rarely have been recognized as part of the American political
landscape. Rude Republic sets the political parties and their noisy
and attractive campaign spectacles, as well as the massive turnout
of voters on election day, within the communal social structure and
calendar, the local human landscape of farms, roads, and county
towns, and the organizational capacities of emerging
nineteenth-century institutions. Political action and engagement
are set, too, within the tide of events: the construction of the
mass-based party system, the gathering crisis over slavery and
disunion, and the gradual expansion of government (and of cities)
in the post-Civil War era. By placing the question of popular
engagement within these broader social, cultural, and historical
contexts, the authors bring new understanding to the complex
trajectory of American democracy.
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