Party Games: The Art of Stealing Elections in the Late-Nineteenth-Century United States

Tempering the enthusiasm that historians of political culture have invested in "popular politics" and confirming darker recent portraits of the unmaking of the so-called party period, Summers shows how pervasively the major parties manipulated the voters and the rules to hold onto power--and how useful a sense of being wronged was in inspiring and perpetuating the partisan spirit of late-19th-century America.