A couple of weeks into the seemingly endless re-count phase of presidential election of 2000—just after the point at which the pundits appeared to have absolutely nothing left to say—the long line of operatives, attorneys, consultants and commentators-for-hire eventually turned to American history for insight.

It was an alarming moment for historian Jeff Pasley, an assistant professor of History who had just written a 517-page book describing the central role of the press in early American politics. "The whole 2000 election brought out my inner pundit,"Pasley says. "Not so much because of the events themselves, as out of disgust with the inch-deep historical insights purveyed by most of the journalists, card-carrying presidential historians, and ex-political consultants we saw on TV every night."

His book, "The Tyranny of Printers:"Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic, was never intended as a corrective to talking heads on the nightly news. But Pasley hopes it might, nevertheless, help the rest of us make sense of important antecedents to our recent electoral high jinks—thus breathing new life into the previously moribund field of political history. "Before the 1960s, political history was everything," Pasley says of his discipline's past. But no longer.

Decades of conservative "great-men-and-events" style teaching, followed by as 1960s-era reaction that ignored these same events and men, have made political history less relevant than it should be.

As a journalist, commentator, Washington insider and former speech-writer for Al Gore, Pasley has long championed political history of the "relevant"sort. Now he hopes to make it cool again.

Like all things cool, this involves the Internet. In "Losing One to the Gipper," Pasley's first Web column for the online history magazine Common-Place, he wryly located the campaign to put Ronald Reagan on the $10 bill in the context of an odd, neo-conservative form of Alexander Hamilton hating.

"Hamilton understood that government exists to protect liberty," Pasley wrote, "a fact that today's conservatives prefer to sidestep—except, of course, when liberty is threatened in some far away and potentially profitable place, such as a Kuwaiti oil field."

The latest installment of Publick Occurrences, as Pasley's column is know, zeros in on the liberal crowd. Entitled "E-Abolitionists," it takes a hard look at the methods and motives behind the contemporary anti-slavery movement. Pasley surmises that the Web-savvy Sudan hater of today has much in common with his American abolitionist progenitors, including a rather willful naiveté. Among his provocative conclusions?

"The new abolitionism represents a rare effort to make the United States —or, rather, individual citizens—take some responsibility for a few of these problems, but it does so in a way that may not adequately acknowledge the complicity of our whole way of life in spawning them," he writes.

Publick Occurrences can be accessed at the Common-Place Web site (www.common-place.org)—a digital publication jointly sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

This article made its first appearance in Illumination - Research, Scholarship and Creative Achievement at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Fall 2001, published by the MU Office of Research.

2001

Additional links:

Jeff Pasley  
The Early American Republic Plugged-In
"The Tyranny of Printers": Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic  
Department of History

American Antiquarian Society
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

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