HISTORY - TEACHING AMERICAN FEDERALISM WITH A COMPUTER

Computer technology has yet to redefine how historians conceive the pa st. This article shows that a computer database is a better metaphor f or antebellum legal activity than the leading cases scholars usually p resent to their students. A database can present a picture of an islan d community's determinedly local peculiarities better than data struct ured by a researcher's assumption that, within a national or even worl d context, one neighborhood is much the same as another. In the future , computers will allow scholars to disaggregate the past for their stu dents, making comprehensible the decentralized reality of traditional society.