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American political history has been built around narratives of
crisis, in which what “counts” are the moments when seemingly
stable political orders collapse and new ones rise from the ashes.
No doubt the history of American politics is filled with such
moments—the Great Depression and the New Deal; the rise of modern
conservatism in the 1960s and ’70s; and, most recently, the 2016
election of Donald Trump. But while crisis-centered frameworks can
make sense of certain dimensions of political culture, partisan
change, and governance, they also often steal attention from the
production of categories like race, gender, and citizenship status
that transcend the usual breakpoints in American history. Brent
Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams have brought together
first-rate scholars from a wide range of subfields who are making
structures of state power—not moments of crisis or partisan
realignment—integral to their analyses. All of the contributors
see political history as defined less by elite subjects than by
tensions between state and economy, state and society, and state
and subject—tensions that reveal continuities as much as
disjunctures. This broader definition incorporates analyses of the
crosscurrents of power, race, and identity; the recent turns toward
the history of capitalism and transnational history; and an
evolving understanding of American political development that cuts
across eras of seeming liberal, conservative, or neoliberal
ascendance. The result is a rich revelation of what political
history is today.
Don't Blame Us traces the reorientation of modern liberalism and
the Democratic Party away from their roots in labor union halls of
northern cities to white-collar professionals in postindustrial
high-tech suburbs, and casts new light on the importance of
suburban liberalism in modern American political culture. Focusing
on the suburbs along the high-tech corridor of Route 128 around
Boston, Lily Geismer challenges conventional scholarly assessments
of Massachusetts exceptionalism, the decline of liberalism, and
suburban politics in the wake of the rise of the New Right and the
Reagan Revolution in the 1970s and 1980s. Although only a small
portion of the population, knowledge professionals in Massachusetts
and elsewhere have come to wield tremendous political leverage and
power. By probing the possibilities and limitations of these
suburban liberals, this rich and nuanced account shows that--far
from being an exception to national trends--the suburbs of
Massachusetts offer a model for understanding national political
realignment and suburban politics in the second half of the
twentieth century.
"Don't Blame Us" traces the reorientation of modern liberalism
and the Democratic Party away from their roots in labor union halls
of northern cities to white-collar professionals in postindustrial
high-tech suburbs, and casts new light on the importance of
suburban liberalism in modern American political culture. Focusing
on the suburbs along the high-tech corridor of Route 128 around
Boston, Lily Geismer challenges conventional scholarly assessments
of Massachusetts exceptionalism, the decline of liberalism, and
suburban politics in the wake of the rise of the New Right and the
Reagan Revolution in the 1970s and 1980s. Although only a small
portion of the population, knowledge professionals in Massachusetts
and elsewhere have come to wield tremendous political leverage and
power. By probing the possibilities and limitations of these
suburban liberals, this rich and nuanced account shows that--far
from being an exception to national trends--the suburbs of
Massachusetts offer a model for understanding national political
realignment and suburban politics in the second half of the
twentieth century.
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