In 1994 Allen Brinkley published an influential article in the Journal of American History that noted with surprise how little his fellow historians had written about the history of American conservatism. Brinkley worried that this glaring omission had left the profession unable to speak meaningfully to the political dynamics that had produced the Age of Goldwater and Reagan. In the years that followed, a new generation of historians took up Brinkley's charge, and they transformed the study of American conservatism into what is now one of the most active subfields in the discipline. That literature has been limited, however, by its almost exclusive focus on the twentieth century, with the post-WWII era understandably drawing the bulk of scholarly attention.
Joshua Lynn's insightful history of antebellum conservatism joins Adam Smith's The Stormy Present (2017) in the ranks of the rare book-length study that extends the chronology of American conservatism back into...