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Departmental Colloquium Series
Stephanie Mudge, "The Formation of the American Political Field, 1872-1928: A Field-Theoretic Political Economy Approach."
Monday, March 13, 2026 - 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
402 Social Sciences Building
The years 1872-1928 were formative in American, and indeed global, history. They saw the consolidation of a gold standard order recognized by Karl Polanyi for its subordination of democratic demands to the dangerous fiction of self-regulating markets--alongside eerily familiar tendencies: repressive politics; jingoism, expansionism, and nativism; escalating inequality; big money campaigns; political and state-sponsored violence; and concentrated corporate power. The ensuing years dissolved into what Polanyi characterized as a near-collapse of Western civilization, following patterns recognized by WEB Du Bois as symptomatic of racial empire.
Predating national polls and surveys, political historiography of the US between 1872 and 1928 is voluminous but fractured. Computational analysis of mass newspapers, a primary outlet of political expression, offers new possibilities—if done in a theoretically-informed and historically-grounded way.
In this talk, I present initial findings of the Strategy & Democracy Project, developed in collaboration with Shahar Zaken (UC-Davis). We map the formation of the American political field between 1872 and 1928. Following Bourdieu, we conceptualize the political field as a space of oppositions that forms through the “officialization” of everyday language, a process that is dynamically interconnected with economic field formation. We apply our framework via a computational field analysis of political language in American newspapers, using a sample of over 20 million pages of election-year news from the Chronicling America collection. In a first analysis we present a tentative measure of semantic breadth, which suggests the American political field expanded and then began contracting around 1916—a period of financial consolidation and intensifying monetary instability. We then shift into an inductive mode, using named entity recognition to identify person-years, topic modeling to map person-year topical fingerprints, and multiple correspondence analysis to track person-year-topical configurations over time and across regions. We find that the American political field underwent two transformations; regional or “sectional” political topologies and temporalities varied substantially; and progressive era politics was a pathway to a nationalized field marked by the absence of two critical issues: race and money. Findings are consistent with a gravitational concept of the political effects of capital accumulation and offer new insights into the relationship between American political formation and racial capitalism.