American studies

American Studies is the academic area of inquiry that seeks an integrated and interdisciplinary understanding of American culture. Rooted in the traditional disciplines of literature and history, the field has evolved from its establishment in the 1930s to include artifacts, methodologies, and practitioners drawn from a wide variety of disciplines within the humanities, including political science, sociology, theology, communications, anthropology, music, art history, film studies, architecture, geography, gender studies, ethnic studies, and other fields of inquiry.

Beginnings: the 1930s and 1940s

The self-reflective nature of some three hundred years of the American citizenry is the basis for the field of American Studies. The origins of a more formal and more organized field of inquiry within academia are to be found in the 1930s. Most of the founders of this movement were born between 1890 and 1910. Their collective coming of age and early intellectual careers were subject to a number of shared cultural and academic influences: the era of World War I (1914–1918) and its aftermath; the urbanization of America; the role of immigration in American society and culture; the Progressive era in politics; and the increasing professionalization of academia. Balanced against these markers of change, however, was the basic belief that John Winthrop referred to in 1620, that America was "a city on a hill," set forth as an example to all the world and under the direct protection of a benevolent God. This concept of a unique place called America had been echoed since the nation's founding, not only by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s and Frederick Jackson Turner in the 1890s, but again in the 1920s and 1930s by modern American Studies scholars like Vernon Parrington and Constance Rourke.

During the 1930s, the Great Depression and resultant New Deal policies provided a fertile field for Americanists to observe and critique not only the national crisis and responses to it, but also the political and cultural history that had led to that particular historical moment. As did President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his advisors, this first generation of American Studies scholars took a pragmatic approach to history and tradition, enlarging their concept of what could constitute legitimate "texts" for study and approaching these with a critical eye. Many New Deal programs that employed intellectuals and artists provided extensive and exciting new collections of texts and artifacts for consideration: the WPA's productions of dramas, murals and other artwork; written, photographic and recorded oral history collections of shared American experience and memory; and the recordings of American folk music and folklore collected by Alan Lomax and others. Furthermore, the liberal thought and politics that dominated 1930s America were quite resonant with the interdisciplinary openness so integral to American Studies.

The liberalism of the 1930s persisted in the discipline, as the students of the 1940s were trained by the movement's founders. The willingness of American Studies scholars to continue to practice this liberalism and critical analysis during World War II (1939–1945) and, later, the Cold War, opened them up to charges of being unpatriotic or even un-American. However, these scholars argued that with the nation's increasing international profile, blind patriotism was no longer an option for Americans. Instead, it was crucial that Americans learn to honestly evaluate their own culture to be able to successfully and peacefully interact with the other nations of the world. The most influential institution in establishing this heyday of American Studies was the University of Minnesota where, in 1943, a number of outstanding scholars in the field came together. Headed by Tremain McDowell, Minnesota's American Studies faculty included Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx; early graduate students included Allen Guttmann, Allen Trachtenberg and John William Ward. The World War II explosion of American Studies scholarship was concurrent with the emergence of the myth-symbol school, which would become virtually synonymous with the discipline from the 1940s through the mid-1960s.

The Myth-Symbol School

Many analysts of American Studies have argued that the so-called myth-symbol school is indeed the closest example approaching a systematized methodology that the field has ever known. Having its foundations in the crisis of American identity that emerged with the nation's involvement in World War II, this myth-symbol school sought to define what was essentially "American" about America. Practitioners sought the basis of Americanness in the country's bygone cultural grandeur; consequently, the most widely accepted vision came to be that of F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941). In this landmark work, Matthiessen set forth the argument that it took the years from 1776 through 1830 for the new nation to escape the hold of European culture and to establish its own voice in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman. Playing on Matthiessen's sacralization of this period of America's reinvention of itself, the myth-symbol school sought to preserve and expand this myth as a means of retaining an American cultural identity in the post-World War II years of American global leadership and multiculturalism.

This concept of a national mythology has had far-reaching implications for the field of American Studies. Inherent in Matthiessen's ideas and in those of the entire myth-symbol school was a sacred stage on which an American cultural identity had been formed. The concept of America as a discrete, almost holy locale was paramount to the myth-symbol methodology; as the twentieth century progressed, however, the school's ability to retain the requisite isolation from corrupting outside influences was seriously eroded by the phenomenon of internationalism. Further, not only was America increasingly involved with countries and cultures outside its borders, but those countries' inhabitants and influences were increasingly coming into America and attempting to assimilate themselves into the American culture. America as melting pot was, effectively, destroying the uniqueness and cultural purity on which the myth-symbol school had been founded.

As many have been quick to point out, the flaw of the myth-symbol school as established in American Renaissance and extended in Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land (1950) was precisely this reliance on the myth of a virgin landscape: Matthiessen, Smith, and others took as their starting point an uninhabited American wilderness that formed this pristine space. The denial of the existence of an "Other"—the Native Americans already here at the time of the first Europeans' arrival, the later immigrants of non-Anglo or non-Protestant background, or women—necessarily formed the critical flaw of the myth-symbol school.

Shifting Attitudes of the 1950s and 1960s

The 1950s and 1960s were decades of critical shifts in American life and culture, and academia was not immune to these changes. This period saw the field of American Studies struggle for and attain academic legitimacy, with a clear growth in the number of students in the field apparent by the early 1960s. Interestingly, this same period saw the resurgence of the earlier theory of "American exceptionalism"—that is, the notion that America, its citizens, and its culture were somehow unique among all the nations, citizens, and cultures on earth. Not coincidentally, by this time many of American Studies' highly influential founding scholars had taught or studied abroad, frequently as part of the Fulbright program; accordingly, they returned to America with broadened perceptions of life in America. Further, many students coming into an increasingly widespread and broadened American Studies curriculum brought new voices; the numbers of persons of Jewish, immigrant, working-class, or minority backgrounds within the field grew, as did the number of women entering the discourse.

This period is also notable for a return to the practical or "applied" notion of the field, reminiscent of its 1930s roots. The civil rights movement of the day drew academicians out of their classrooms and libraries and into a growing dialogue with their communities. The impact of the civil rights movement (and corollary increases in sensitivity to all types of "Others") upon the field of American Studies must not be underestimated. The heightened awareness of the need to avoid discrimination, whether against the new minority practitioners in the field or against various minority groups throughout American history, led to a corresponding increase in interest in the histories and voices of these minority groups.

American Studies in the Late Twentieth Century and Beyond

By the 1970s, American Studies had emerged as a strong voice for women and women's issues, primarily as a result of scholars' recognition that this segment of American culture had been largely ignored in the past. Similar recognition of past slights to other minority groups (African Americans, immigrant Americans, Native Americans, poor Americans, and so on) led to increased research into these areas of American experience. By the mid-1970s, scholars began to move away from venerating certain categories of inquiry; that is, the heyday of the written literary text, the finely preserved government document, and the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male was gone. These canonical subjects have since been supplanted by the recognition of the role of multiculturalism, an increased importance accorded to material artifacts and non-traditional "texts," and a growing emphasis on popular culture. Similarly, re-search and scholarship have continued to move away from traditional political and intellectual history and toward more inclusive areas of inquiry.

American Studies at the turn of the twenty-first century, then, had become concerned with several ongoing issues related to this new inclusiveness. First, defining the concept of "American" Studies had become increasingly complicated. The question was raised with growing frequency: "Who is an American?" Traditionally, the field had concerned itself with matters relating to the area within the boundaries of the United States of America; however, some critics insisted that Central and South American nations are just as legitimately included in the term, particularly in light of extensive Hispanic immigration to the United States. Others, interested in Canada, took a similar position, based on the geographical, political, and ideological similarities between Canada and the United States. Second, what exactly is it that scholars study about this arbitrarily defined "America"? Is "America" a geographic entity, or is it a cultural concept? Is it a political entity, or a personal one? Is there really an "America," or is what we call "America" merely a symbol, and thus not really a valid topic for study unless we propose a far more concrete definition? Thus, while American Studies no longer presumed "the American" necessarily to be the white male living in the United States, this very recognition raised yet another question: How much specialization and fragmentation can the field undergo and still retain any coherent identity?

Perhaps part of the answer to these questions lay in the fact that many late-twentieth-century American Studies scholars had returned to the roots of the discipline to examine past approaches. There was renewed interest in methodology and theory, including cultural anthropology, new historicism, and what Gene Wise has termed the search for "dense facts." However, only rarely would a modern scholar apply only one of these methods or examine only a limited scope of texts or actors. By 2002, the emphasis had truly shifted toward the combination of the most usable aspects of various methodologies and away from dogmatic reliance on narrow definitions of how American identity should be approached; with practitioners engaging in a celebration of diversity and disavowing the former myth of homogeneity. Obviously, the reductionism and certainty of the myth-symbol school no longer applied to modern American Studies, but this very inquiry and uncertainty are what have made the field one of the most interesting and dynamic areas within the humanities.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, many American universities and a growing number of universities outside of the United States offered graduate degrees in American Studies. Many American schools also offered undergraduate degree programs in the field, and numerous overseas American Studies associations had been established. In the United States, the American Studies Association (ASA) was established in 1951 to serve as the scholarly organization of practitioners in the field. American Quarterly began publication in 1949 as a clearing house for scholarly research in American Studies. Those pursuing an education in American Studies can anticipate careers in traditional academic areas (either in a department of American Studies or in one of its contributing disciplines); careers in the public and private sector may also be pursued, in positions ranging from legal researcher to public history curator to media consultant and beyond.

Bibliography

Gunn, Giles. Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Kammen, Michael. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1991.

Lipsitz, George. American Studies in a Moment of Danger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Maddox, Lucy, ed. Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Madsen, Deborah L. American Exceptionalism. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.

Prown, Jules David, and Kenneth Haltman, eds. American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000.

Stearns, Peter N. Meaning Over Memory: Recasting the Teaching of Culture and History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Tate, Cecil F. The Search for a Method in American Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973.

—Barbara Schwarz Wachal