The political history of the United States has involved many different areas of study. From the age of Jackson to the 1900s, this country has seen the government issue policies to help or hurt certain individuals and movements, both at home and abroad. At the same time, there have been debates among historians over the political thought of politicians, and how their decisions reflected that thought. These include men such as Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, James Polk, and Abraham Lincoln. In this historiography, I intend to highlight various historical topics concerning race, gender, labor, and foreign affairs. I will also show how politics ignited scholarly debate, its impact on labor movements, its effects on race and gender, and how it affected foreign affairs.
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It was due to the fact that many of these historians came from wealthy northern families or those in the middle class. Their families had control over politics before the Jacksonian period. When Jackson became president in 1829, their families’ power was taken away from them and replaced with a new administration, which based itself on the spoils system. For Progressive historians, Jackson was considered a hero and a man of the people. Like Jackson, many of these historians’ families grew up in small rural communities, either in the west or the southern part of the United States. They related to his experiences growing up, and saw him as a man who represented the values they healed so dear. Some historians saw Jackson’s spoil system as something that was needed. This was shown in the work of Russell Fish’s The Civil Service and the Patronage, in which he said “the spoils system paid for the party organization… which established a government of the people in the United States in 1829…it served a purpose that