Gidlow, Liette, ed. Obama, Clinton, Palin: Making History in Election 2008 (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2012), $25.00, 192 pp. ISBN: 978-0-252-07830-9 (paper).

With the 2012 US presidential election upon us, we look back at 2008 and wonder what difference it made in the political landscape. The 2008 election season represented many firsts in American politics: the first potentially winnable woman candidate, the first woman on a Republican presidential ticket, and, of course, ultimately the election of the first African American president. The ten chapters (plus an introduction by the editor and a beautifully summarized conclusion by Elizabeth Israels Perry) in the edited volume provide an historian’s eye to the political events of 2008. In so doing, the authors—all historians—demonstrate both how far the United States has come since 1789 and how much it has yet to overcome if we are ever to achieve racial and gender equity in public office.