This past week I’ve been savoring Daniel Walker Howe’s The Political Culture of the American Whigs and I also recently re-read Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. What’s rather remarkable about that fact is that I am not just reading them as classics in the genre of history—as one might read Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s Age of Jackson or Merle Curti’s Growth of American Thought—but as the still undisputed best sources on their respective subjects. Free Soil was first published in 1970, PCotAW in 1979, giving both a remarkable Read more