"Sautter offers a fascinating account of some of the most dramatic moments in American political history. Sautter evokes images of front runners, dark horses, political bosses and a rogue’s gallery of memorable characters.''
   —Steve Neal, Chicago Sun-Times

This historic exploration of Philadelphia's presidential nominating conventions illuminates the personalities, oratory, party platforms, and concerns behind the nine conventions that have been held there since 1848. It puts the 37th Republican National Convention in a broader historical context of traditions, procedures, candidates, and issues central to past conventions. The inside stories on the founding convention of 1856 that introduced Abraham Lincoln to the nation, the 1872 convention and the struggle to quell the Ku Klux Klan, and the 1900 Republican convention that brought Theodore Roosevelt to the stage are all revealed in this historical study of how the national nominating convention remains as one of the greatest expressions of democracy.

Philadelphia Presidential Conventions is a panoramic excursion through the half-hidden history of Presidential nominating conventions held in Philadelphia, America's original convention city, by the nation's leading political parties over the past century-and-a-half.

In the summer of 2000, the Thirty-Seventh Republican National Convention met in the "City of Brotherly Love" in hopes of naming the first President of the Twenty-First Century. Philadelphia Presidential Conventions helps put the 2000 convention into a broader historical context of issues, traditions, debates, and candidates. Sautter's story captures the personalities, the oratory, the intrigue, the drama, the festive setting of these political conventions and the national campaigns and elections that followed them in 1848, 1856, 1872, 1900, 1936, 1940, and in the triple convention year of 1948.