Washington County

As one of dozens of counties in the United States named for the nation's first president, Washington County, Oregon, is hardly unique. But as one of the few counties in the 1850s to practice viva voce voting - in which individual ballots are announced publicly rather than recorded in secret - it produced records that offer historians a rare opportunity to explore political, social, and cultural trends in American history in the crucial years that preceded the Civil War.

Washington County, a fairly typical laboratory of democracy, gathered together a broad cross-section of antebellum America - rich and poor, Northerners and Southerners, Protestants and Catholics, old natives and new immigrants.

Correlating hundreds of individual voting records and voluminous social, cultural, and economic data, Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats take full advantage of the evidence and supply us with an unprecedented study of how people in the 1850s developed political identities and made political choices. In this long-awaited book, Bourke and DeBats show in compelling richness of detail how these decisions more often resulted from private considerations than from the highly publicized appeals of parties and their candidates.

Washington County offers us a wonderful example of how the reconfiguring of political and social history can lead to new levels of understanding.