Schulman, Bruce J.2024-10-032024-10-032024-03-01Schulman BJ. The (New) American Political Tradition. Modern American History. 2024;7(1):76-86. doi:10.1017/mah.2024.62397-1851https://hdl.handle.net/2144/49375The year 2023 marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It—a bestselling book that captured the imagination of many of Hofstadter's fellow Americans in the early postwar period and, at the same time, defined the terms of argument for much of academic history for the next generation.1 It was also the book my high school teacher, Mr. Backfish, assigned in eleventh-grade Advanced Placement (AP) American History that helped transform me into a historian. So different was it from the dry, conventional textbook in both its riveting, sometimes acerbic prose and its unsentimental view of venerated figures in the American past. I still have my original copy (Figure 1).pp. 76-86en-USCopyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. This article has been published under a Read & Publish Transformative Open Access (OA) Agreement with CUP.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0Political culturePolitics and governmentPost-1945Civil rightsIdeas and intellectual lifeArticle10.1017/mah.2024.6