ABSTRACT
From history's inception as a professional discipline in the United States, leading practitioners have criticized historians of politics for privileging high-level partisan competition over more complicated and inclusive accounts that connect society to American democracy's formal arenas of elections and government. By 2016, historians could claim victory in the long campaign to bridge the divide between society and politics. Understanding how historians today study antebellum politics requires a detour into what the 1990s historians of politics were reacting against, namely the American version of the "new political history", which rose to prominence in the 1960s. Exploring the legacy of revolutionary mistrust of "factions" and popular criticism of partisan politics as disreputable, Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin found that many Americans were not engaged partisans at all and their attitudes ranged from indifference to outright hostility. Once politicians turned to sectional issues to mobilize supporters, disunion became inevitable.
