Constitutional history

"[6] The constitution of the United States, as a historical research area, was considered to be in decline by Menard in 1971, citing also George Athan Billias and Eric Cantor.

[7] Harry N. Scheiber in 1981 noted that some historians in the field saw a "genuine crisis", which he reported was widely attributed to competition from newer approaches in legal history to the behaviour of law courts.

"[12] The political history of Athens after the Peisistratids (from about 510 BCE onwards) is amply documented in literary sources, and has traditionally been cast as an evolution away from the tyrant (absolute ruler).

[15] In Cicero's view an "ancestral constitution", an organic development based on the mos maiorum, had been ruptured some eighty years before, by the Gracchi and their reforms.

[16] From the High Middle Ages in Western Europe, the effective diplomacy of the Papacy, itself regulated by canon law, played a large part in the constitution of Latin Christendom as a polity, for example in the Crusades.

Its background was studied in depth in the 19th century by Georg Waitz, considered the effective founder of the German Verfassungsgeschichte, as part of legal history.

[17] The three-volume Constitutional History of England (1874–78) by William Stubbs was influenced by German scholars, particularly Waitz and Georg Ludwig von Maurer.

[18] The history of Anglo-Saxon England had standing in the Victorian period, to substantiate claims that the Westminster parliament descended from the witangemot and free assemblies.

The context is a contrast with the conservative History of Europe of Archibald Alison, which pointed to the French Revolution and the dangers of political change.

[28] In the twentieth century, Gardiner's approach was attacked by Roland Greene Usher (1880–1957), and both Herbert Butterfield and Lewis Namier rejected the tradition.