{"product_id":"2940014868587","title":"Presidential Nominations and Elections: a History of American Conventions, National Campaigns, Inaugurations and Campaign Caricature","description":"The nominating convention is a purely American invention and a natural outgrowth of popular government. It came into being with the enlargement of the suffrage through the gradual removal of restriction upon it and with the steadily increasing demand of the people to have a voice in the selection of candidates for office. Before the Revolution, and for many years afterward; political action was controlled by unofficial and voluntary associations or coteries of persons who were drawn together by kindred opinions and whose prominence in the affairs of the community made them its natural leaders. These gatherings very early in their career took the name of caucus. The origin of this word is obscure and much erudite speculation, some of it amusing, has been brought to bear upon it. One theory was that it was derived from the Algonquin Indian word kaW'kaW'Wus —to consult, to speak—but this had few supporters. Another, which John Pickering, an early American philologist, set forth gravely in his \"Vocabulary of Americanisms'' published in Boston in 1816; made it a corruption of \"calkers'' In the early politics of Boston' and particularly during the first difficulties between the townsmen and the British troops, the seafaring men and those employed about the shipyards were prominent among the townspeople, and there were numerous gatherings, say advocates of this theoiy, which may have very easily come to be called by way of reproach a meeting of calkers after the least influential class who attended them, or from the calking house or calk house in which they were held. What was at first a derisive description, came to be an appellation, and the gatherings of so-called calkers became a caucus. This theory is upset by the fact that the word was in familiar use at least seven years earlier, for John Adams wrote in his diary, in February, 1763:","brand":"Sweet and Maxwell, Limited","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47074079637744,"sku":"2940014868587","price":9.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940014868587_p0.jpg?v=1763616241","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940014868587","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}