Editor's Note

Political history, and its various tools for analysis, always has provided an important lens for understanding the coming of the American Civil War. The party system could not contain the ever escalating partisanship and tensions over the expansion of slavery into the territories. Over the years, though, historians have tended to gravitate away from political studies focused tightly on ballot boxes and party activities in favor of a more expansive view of political behavior that includes struggles by the enslaved. Yet the essays in this issue make the case that both established and newer techniques can still teach us something about the past, including a methodology usually associated with a former generation of scholarship.

Bruce Levine and James L. Huston use very different techniques to arrive at similar conclusions. Both deal with the emergence of the Republican Party and weigh in on the influences of nativism and antislavery beliefs in giving birth to that organization. Levine challenges the notion that anti-immigrant Republican conservatives imposed their will on the party. While Levine uses the more usual qualitative sources employed by historians, Huston revives quantitative techniques to tackle this problem. In his case study of Illinois between 1844 and 1856, he disputes interpretations that favor ethnic and religious identities as explaining voting behavior. The statistical analysis, he argues, underscores hostility to slavery's expansion as a key factor in elections. For those interested in the research methodology, we are publishing his statistical summaries on the University of North Carolina Press website at http://journalofthecivilwarera.com/Huston/Append/.

Adopting a very different form of analysis, Rachel Shelden shifts the perspective from the halls of Congress to living arrangements in the capital as a means of uncovering sites of policy making and political discourse. In a detailed examination of where and how representatives lived in Washington, she finds that housing organized by section was in the minority. Most congressmen lived in quarters and socialized with people from both the North and the South. Shelden asks us to consider the everyday activities of the men who lived in the capital as an additional dimension for understanding politics.

Winding up this issue is an informative essay by Brian Kelly and John W. White on a new website that can augment the teaching of Reconstruction. Despite the surge in scholarship on emancipation and Reconstruction, they have found a shortage of online collections grounded in good pedagogy to help teachers deal with this period. Directed from Queen's University Belfast—and involving historians, archivists, and web designers from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States—the After Slavery project (www.afterslavery.com) intends to answer this need.

This issue brings to a close our first volume year of publication. It has been an exciting project to launch, and we have benefited from the contributions of a number of fine scholars. We have more good work in the pipeline for the coming volume, including an experiment with an online, interactive forum on the future of the field. We look forward to seeing you next year.