ABSTRACT
Political and social historians often speak separate languages. There is a logic in this curiosity, of course. By definition, political scholars chronicle the lives and campaigns of the political elite, and although some writers have finally begun to examine the behavior of politicized women, for the most part in early national America this meant white men. Social historians, in contrast, examine society at large, and in practice, this typically means those who have been left outside of the political order: women, slaves, Natives, and laboring people. Each discipline, in short, examines a different segment of the past, a different gender, a different class or race. They should appreciate and benefit from the scholarship of the other. Unhappily, too often they do not.
