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Writing in the New York Times in 2016, Kenneth Osgood and Fredrik Logevall mourned the slow demise of American political history.

Confronted by popular disillusionment with mainstream politics, the emergence of powerful social movements and the massification and diversification of higher education, the field, they argued, had “cratered”. In response, commentators – many of them political historians – rushed to defend the health of political history, pointing to its application of new methodologies and approaches, its interaction with other disciplines and subfields, and its astonishing breadth and diversity.

Using Osgood and Logevall’s jeremiad as a starting point, this one-day symposium seeks to explore the state of 20th-century American political history today, both through reflections on the field and by showcasing examples of the latest historical research.