Around 1880-1920 wide-ranging non-academic historians such as George Bancroft and James Ford Rhodes focused on durable institutions, especially the presidency, Congress, and the two main political parties.
Traditional political history focused on major leaders and long played a dominant role beyond academic historians in the United States.
The popularity of these writers was due to their literary style, storytelling abilities, and their willingness to draw lessons from history for the reader.
What was new was a demand for finished PhD dissertations, a deemphasis on drama and color, and an insistence on using primary sources, as tracked through footnotes.
The title of Nevins' most outstanding work, Grover Cleveland: a Study in Courage, epitomized the moralizing tendency of the genre, while arguing that heroes had to be understood in their deeper historical context.
The historian Carl L. Becker's History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1776 (1909) formulated the progressive interpretation of the American Revolution.
[9] By the 1980s it was replaced chiefly by the notion that a new idea republicanism swept the colonies and caused the Patriots to reject rule by the British monarchy and aristocracy.
Patterson argued that contemporary events, especially the Vietnam War and Watergate, alienated younger scholars away from the study of politicians and their deeds.
Historians now apply a broader definition of politics, including popular ideology, social movements, war, education, crime, sexuality, and the reciprocal influence of mass culture.
However, the growing emphasis on patronage eroded the republican character of each party, leading to political corruption which stimulated anti-party sentiments.
In the 21st century conventional anti-party themes remain compelling in political discourse, with a growing trend towards independent voter registration and nonpartisanship.