Shaped by the State

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.