Just before the 1994 midterm elections — in which Republicans secured their first House majority in four decades — the prominent US political historian Alan Brinkley lamented, “[I]t would be hard to argue that the American Right has received anything like the amount of attention from historians that its role in twentieth-century politics and culture suggests it should.” Brinkley urged historians to take the Right more seriously — to tackle what he termed the “problem” of American conservatism, which was “in the end, a problem of historical imagination.”

To say that historians answered Brinkley’s call would be a profound understatement. The next two decades saw the publication of dozens of scholarly books exploring the origins and evolution of modern American conservatism. These studies focused not only on prominent conservatives like Alabama governor George Wallace, “Dixiecrat” presidential candidate and longtime South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly but also on the grassroots activists who built the conservative movement in places like Orange County, California; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Atlanta, Georgia. This profusion of scholarship prompted historian Kim Phillips-Fein to write in 2011 that “historians might be forgiven for asking whether there is anything left to study in the history of the Right.”

The rise of Donald Trump and Trumpism in 2015–16 breathed new life into the study of conservatism and the GOP. While some political historians over the past decade or so have implored their peers to look “beyond the red–blue divide” for continuities between conservatism and liberalism and Republicans and Democrats, the Trump era stimulated interest in the recent history of the American Right specifically. Accordingly, some of the most recognizable public-facing historians of the Trump (and post-Trump?) years have been scholars of conservatism and the Republican Party, such as Kevin Kruse and Heather Cox Richardson — whose wildly popular newsletter has earned her a New York Times profile, a sit-down interview with President Joe Biden, and over $1 million a year in subscription revenue.