Conservatism: A State of the Field

December 2011 The Journal of American History 723 The historical literature of American conservatism is at a crossroads. Over the past two decades it has been one of the most dynamic subfields in American history, the subject of dozens of journal articles, books, and dissertations. In contrast to the many polemical works on conservatism that populate bookstores, this body of scholarship is wide-ranging, ecumenical, and grounded in serious archival research. The catalogs of major university and commercial presses from the past few years reveal titles on subjects ranging from libertarianism to the southern agrarians to the development of Christian conservatism. Recent meetings of the Organization of American Historians (oah) and the American Historical Association have seen panels on the intellectual history of conservatism, teaching the Right, the Right in the 1960s, military history and conservatism, and the conservative movement in the 1970s. The 2010 meeting of the oah even featured a metapanel on the expansion of the subfield: “How Should Historians Study Conservatism Now That Studying the Right Is Trendy?” In 1994 Alan Brinkley wrote an oft-cited essay for a forum published in the American Historical Review arguing that historians had ignored conservatism to the point that it was an “orphan” of American political history. Today, instead of decrying the absence of scholarship on conservatism, historians might be forgiven for asking whether there is anything left to study in the history of the Right.1 The answer is yes. The new work on conservatism has illuminated the history of a powerful and diverse political movement that organized throughout the postwar era alongside other social movements that received much more attention. Written during a time when conservatism often seemed to be the dominant force in American politics, this new scholarship has reversed the earlier vision of the Right as a marginal part of American life. The literature has described a range of different constituencies for the Conservatism: A State of the Field