Congress and History at the Miller Center, May 2009

I’m afraid I’ve completely missed the existence of the Annual Congress & History Conference until I came across the podcasts of a number of session at its eighth meeting, held at the Miller Center for Public Affairs last May. I’ve started in with the retrospective session on Ira Katznelson and John S. Lapinski, “Congress and American Political Development: Missed Chances, Rich Possibilities,” Perspectives on Politics, 4(2): 243-260, with comments by Charles Stewart III, Elizabeth Sanders, and Brian Balogh, responses by the article’s authors, and some acute questions from the floor. I can recommend the entire session as a quick orientation to work at the bounder of political science, American political development and political history. I especially appreciated the oral history portion of Sanders’s remarks, in which she recounts how the New Deal looked from the vantage point of Theodore Lowi’s graduate seminar.