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Everyone’s Doing Congressional Historiography

Where Are the Historians?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Barry Friedman
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Extract

The growth of administrative government in the United States since the turn of this century has meant the gradual rise of statutory enactments as a (if not the) primary source of law. Despite the burgeoning importance of the work of legislatures, legal scholars were relatively slow to devote deserved attention to statutes and the bodies that enacted them.The familiar rhythm of the common law continued to draw the bulk of theoretical analysis.

Any lingering concern about the relative neglect of statutes and legislative bodies may now be put aside. The last two decades have seen a remarkable collaboration among scholars in the disciplines of law, economics, and political science concerning how we can better understand what motivates legislatures and how we should interpret their work product.1 This attention to statutes and the legislative process has caused scholars to engage in a great amount of congressional historiography, as they test their theories against legislative and political practice. Historians are noticeably absent from this interdisciplinary collaboration, a state of affairs this roundtable is designed to address. Everyone, it seems, is doing congressional historiography—everyone, that is, except the historians.

Type
Roundtable: The U.S. Congress in the Twentieth Century
Information
Social Science History , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , summer 2000 , pp. 333 - 348
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2000 

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