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Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War ed. by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith (review)

In Practicing Democracy, Douglas Bradburn observes: “American historians have overwhelmingly been Whig historians” (26). The phrase “Whig history” originated in Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History, published in 1931. Whig historians used the past, Butterfield argued, to explain and sanction the triumph of liberal democracy in nineteenth-century Britain. By orienting their studies toward that achievement, historians failed to understand the past on its own terms. In the United States, Whig history manifests itself in the democratization model of development. This model presents the nation as democratizing steadily over time, with democracy encompassing free elections, an expanding electorate, and a two-party system. Andrew Robertson contends that historians of nineteenth-century American politics have especially adopted a Whig perspective (99). Many historians search for the roots of democracy in the early republic, and trace its rise from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson or Abraham Lincoln. The ten essays in this compelling new volume edited by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith challenge that Whig trajectory. While Whig histories chart a linear path to democracy, the essays in Practicing Democracy present case studies of uneven development, improvisation, and instability. John L. Brooke conceptualizes historical time as “lumpy and punctuated” rather than “smooth and continuous”