The American Political Tradition is one of the most influential and widely read historical volumes of our time. First published in 1948, its elegance, passion, and iconoclastic erudition laid the groundwork for a totally new understanding of the American past. By writing a "kind of intellectual history of the assumptions behind American politics," Richard Hofstadter changed the way Americans understand the relationship between power and ideas in their national experience. Like only a handful of American historians before him—Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard are examples—Hofstadter was able to articulate, in a single work, a historical vision that inspired and shaped an entire generation.

1. The Founding Fathers: An Age of Realism
   
   2. Thomas Jefferson: The Aristocrat as Democrat
   
   3. Andrew Jackson and the Rise of Liberal Capitalism
   
   4. John C. Calhoun: The Marx of the Master Class
   
   5. Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth
   
   6. Wendell Philiips: The Patrician as Agitator
   
   7. The Spoilsmen: An Age of Cynicism
   
   8. William Jennings Bryan: The Democrat as Revivalist
   
   9. Theodore Roosevelt: The Conservative as Progressive
   
   10. Woodrow Wilson: The Conservative as Liberal
   
   11. Herbert Hoover and the Crisis of American Individualism
   
   12. Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Patrician as Opportunist