R. J. Collingwood compares the historian to a detective. Both, in his opinion, are dissatisfied with what is contained in the documents and engage in a search for hidden or lost information. Both follow their intuition, guided by scientific positivist methods, and base their work on hypotheses and the strict logic of question and answer (1980: 253-269). In recent years the research laboratories of detectives and historians almost simultaneously have been replenished by quantitative methods of analysis, which substantially increased the possibility of achieving the desired goals: to find hidden information and go beyond the bounds of what is directly contained in the documents.

Historians of mid-nineteenth-century American politics all know it to be an era when intraparty factional rivalry was almost as bitter as the struggle between parties. Recent studies, such as Joel Silbey’s A Respectable Minority (1977) and Michael Perman’s The Road to Reaction (1984), concentrate on disagreements between “legitimists” and “purists” in both parties. My own A Compromise of Principle (Benedict, 1975) stressed factionalism among Republicans in the 1860s, while the first chapter of Robert D. Marcus’s study of political structure in the Gilded Age, Grand Old Party (1971), is entitled “Faction.”

From Olympus, Samuel Eliot Morison (1965) reminds us that “we owe admiration as well as pity to the simple folk of America who suffered so grievously under the depression.” And no doubt we do. But those who would understand the long-term political and social impacts of the Great Depression must gain a fuller understanding of the ways in which Americans made sense of their Depression experiences. The critical passage through Roosevelt’s Hundred Days largely satisfies most historians’ appetites for understanding the impact of the Great Depression upon Americans’ personal attitudes. The effects of the whole Depression era upon the ways Americans felt are assumed to be congruent with changes in political institutions and ethos. In particular, the durable partisan realignment and its concomitant “New Deal coalition” occurring in the middle of the Depression calls up images of major modifications in attitudes. Thus Clubb, Flanigan, and Zingale (1980) explain the endurance of the New Deal realignment with reference to the “vital and active concern for a suffering citizenry” that FDR and the New Deal came to connote.

Many Historians of the social aging process have focused primarily on the experiences of aging white men. A prime example is provided in the seminal work of David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (1978). In tracing the reversal in societal attitudes toward the aged, from gerontocratic to gerontophobic, Fischer argues that the authority of the elders in the eighteenth century was very great (1978: 220). Clearly, he was not referring to women for, as Fischer himself acknowledges, “no one would claim that colonial females exerted much political power.” And obviously, he was not including black male and female slaves or poor white men. Nor does his general theme of exultation apply to aging colonial widows who