The Politics Issue Cometh

Things have not been as active as they might have been around here because we are busy are completing what I think has turned out to be one of the biggest projects in the history of Common–Place, the special Politics Issue. Some server problems have delayed the full release until early next week, so I thought I would offer a preview here on the blog, because the blog is going to be heavily involved. That’s right: in addition to a very full slate of regular Common-Place articles, there will be ongoing, between-issue content, provided in many cases by writers other than myself. And there will be comment pages here for each article. Change you will believe in!

As to the aforementioned preview: you should see some links at the top of the sidebar on the right. These include a beta release (as we say here in the world of retro-high tech) of my introduction and the full edition of a special bonus article by University of New Mexico legal historian Christian G. Fritz, “America’s Unknown Constitutional World.” You should also see the comment page and an early snippet of Ray Raphael’s “Instructions: The People’s Voice in Revolutionary America.” Together these two pieces form a mini-package on a topic I find myself increasingly absorbed by, popular constitutionalism.

Look for the rest of the Politics Issue very soon.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Jeffrey L. Pasley is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri and the author of “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (2001), along with numerous articles and book chapters, most recently the entry on Philip Freneau in Greil Marcus’s forthcoming New Literary History of America. He is currently completing a book on the presidential election of 1796 for the University Press of Kansas and also writes the blog Publick Occurrences 2.0 for some Website called Common-place.