Volume 25, Number 3 · March 9, 1978
The Great Political Fiction
By Edmund S. Morgan
Commons Debates 1628 Volume I: Introduction and Reference Materials Volume II: March 17-April 19, 1628 Volume III: April 21-May 27, 1628
edited by Robert C. Johnson, edited by Mary Frear Keeler, edited by Maija Jansson Cole, edited by William B. Bidwell
Yale University Press, Vol. III, 641 pp., $35.00
Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789 Volume I: August 1774-August 1775 Volume II: August-December 1775
edited by Paul H. Smith
Library of Congress, Vol. II, 585 pp., $9.00
The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution Volume I: Constitutional Documents and Records, 1776-1787 Volume II: Ratification of the Constitution by States, Pennsylvania
edited by Merrill Jensen
State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Vol. 2, 779 pp., $27.00
The Documentary History of the First Federal Elections, 1788-1790, Volume I
edited by Merrill Jensen, edited by Robert A. Becker
University of Wisconsin Press, 896 pp., $30.00
The current fashion in American historical research is to discover things about the past that the people who lived in it are not likely to have known about themselves, things like the mean or median age at which they married, how much longer they could expect to live at any given age, how their wealth was distributed, in what ethnic or geographic or economic patterns they cast their votes, and so on. In the midst of all this counting and computing a number of historians and archivists have been quietly carrying forward a work that contributes very little to it but that tells us more completely and more reliably than ever before what some people in the past did know, and what they thought, about themselves and the world they lived in.
Review, 6450 words
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