Here’s a link to my review in the Wall Street Journal of The Virgin Vote, by historian and Smithsonian curator Jon Grinspan, a book that gave me a more vivid sense than anything else I’ve read of what American politics was like on the ground in the nineteenth century. Highly recommended.

We hear and I write a lot these days about young people and how they vote, but they were actually a more important and active part of the political process in the turbulent years from 1840 to 1900, as Grinspan demonstrates.