Just Finished Reading: American Political History – A Very Short Introduction by Donald T Critchlow (FP: 2015)

As my regular reader(s) will know I’ve lately become rather fascinated with the train wreck that is US politics these days which is MUCH more interesting than our own slow motion political clusterfuck – enhanced (as always) with having the Atlantic ocean between us. In order to keep up with the latest craziness I’ve been watching a lot of US political news and debate mostly on MSNBC with a bit more from CNN. As we are two nations separated by a common language I ‘get’ most of what’s being talked about but are undoubtedly missing out on sub-text, nuance and what would be considered common knowledge in North America. So, as I didn’t go through the hell (or fun) of High School – complete no doubt with a killer soundtrack – I’m forced to read up on the subject to fill in the blanks. As always with this sort of thing I usually turn to one of my favourite series of book produced by Oxford University Press – the Very Short Introductions. This one – on Political History – will be the first of a set of three, what I’m calling a book blitz. I read three books on this subject over a long weekend just recently and thought it was a really cool idea – so I’ll be doing it again later in the year.

This seemed to be a good place to start – history! Covering US politics from 1787 to 2015 it split things up into the politics of the Constitution, the Early Republic (complete with in-fighting and the evolution of political parties), the age of democracy 1816-44, the prelude to Civil War, War and Reconstruction, the Gilded Age (up to 1918), affluence, depression and world war (up to 1945), Cold War politics to 1974 and then 1974 to the present.

As my knowledge of American history – and particularly political history – is sketchy and largely based on secondary reading, novels and movies/TV I had a lot to learn here. In fact most of the detail was essentially new – apart from the major events and major players. I had no idea, for instance that the idea of a federated system of States stood in such great tension to a more centralised nation state – to the extent that from the very start there was opposition to having a President at all or even a national capital (it seemed). I was somewhat less surprised at how quickly political parties emerged against dire warnings from the Founders. I suppose that it was completely natural that men of like mind would inevitably band together to get their own way with things. Interesting also is, again from minute one, the tension between city and country, between factory and farm. It seemed that from its very origins America was torn across ideological and philosophical lines that have persisted to the present. Finally, the thing that I suppose most surprised me was just how chaotic US political history has been. I think that news reports of the present situation as ‘unprecedented’ are somewhat exaggerated. The US has gone through periods of intense partisanship not unlike today it would seem and past Presidents have been imperialistic, bombastic, corrupt and most certainly not above placing friends and family members in high positions and lucrative jobs throughout the government or associated agencies. Nothing, it would seem, is completely new! Obviously this was a very broad overview covering the entirety of US political history in a mere 133 pages. It did give me a much better idea of the flavour of the subject though and the subsequent two books helped too. Obviously I need to dive somewhat deeper though I suspect I’ll need to good long shower afterwards.