San Antonio College Library

Under the editorial direction of Pulitzer Prize -- winning historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, jr., special assistant to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, 25 of America's top scholars and historians have provided detailed interpretive essays on all the major and minor parties that have shaped the U.S. political system. A landmark in the study and understanding of American political history, the set provides information and insight on the origins, growth,...

"Robert Ross addresses a fascinating and unresolved constitutional question: why did political parties emerge so quickly after the framers designed the Constitution to prevent them? The text of the Constitution is silent on this question. Most scholars of the subject have taken that silence to be a hostile one, arguing that the adoption of the two-party system was a significant break from a long history of antiparty sentiments and institutional design...

"Bibliographical Note": pages 531-544. Bibliographical references included in "Notes to chapters" (p. 545-611).

This book analyzes how political parties formed after the Revolution, the issues that caused those divides, and how legislators state-by-state voted.

"This book rejects conventional accounts of how, and why, American political parties differ form those in other democracies. It focuses on the introduction of that most distinctive of American party devices, the direct primary, and argues that primaries resulted from a process of party institutionalization initiated by party elites. Thus, it overturns the widely accepted view that, between 1902 and 1915, direct primaries were imposed on the parties...

This volume traces the historical processes in thought by which American political leaders slowly edged away from their complete philosophical rejection of a party and hesitantly began to embrace a party system. The author's analysis of the idea of party and the development of legitimate opposition offers fresh insights into the political crisis of 1797-1801, on the thought of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Martin...

"Demonstrating the emergence of a distinct "campaign-centered" electoral order, David Menefee-Libey discusses the dramatic transformation of American national campaigns and electoral politics in recent years and the parties' adaptive responses to this realignment. The Triumph of Campaign-Centered Politics highlights the electoral dimensions of representative democracy - representation, deliberation, and choice - and it illuminates the challenges Americans...