ABSTRACT
In recent years, an increasing number of political scientists have set their Wayback Machines2 for travel to earlier eras in order to study various aspects of congressional history. This trend is remarkable in that, not long ago, most students of Congress focused almost exclusively on contemporaneous events and behaviors, to the point where (testing the boundaries of hyperbole) a casual observer of the literature might think that the institution did not exist prior to World War II. This propensity to ignore the past can be explained in part by data constraints, as systematic member, constituency, and electoral data for the pre-1940s period had, until only recently, been in short supply. Yet, this did not prevent such luminaries as Joseph Cooper (1970), Nelson Polsby (1968; 1969, with coauthors), David Brady (1973, 1991), Samuel Kernell (1977a), and Charles Stewart III (1989) from carrying out their masterful studies.3 Moreover, the necessity of collecting data has never prevented scholars from exploring new or understudied questions relating to the contemporary Congress. Another explanation, therefore, must be in order. I posit that congressional scholars typically have not considered the net benefit of studying congressional history to be sufficiently high. Why has this been the case?
