Despite its youth American studies has several histories. Accounts of its aims have varied greatly. In some parts of the world, especially in universities in the United States since the mid-1950s, the field seems perpetually in an identity crisis. Scholars are both eager to be counted part of the field and loath to define it. Many of the field's leaders have treated the mere mention of "method" as if it were a threat to intellectual liberty. Humanists, who increasingly dominate the field in the United States, particularly worry about the prospect of creeping "methodolatry" (Joel M. Jones's word for it) whereby robotic regimens supplant creativity and common sense. Instead, method could be understood, as the founder of sociology �mile Durkheim recommended, to indicate a more general, articulate but evolving disposition. Any collective endeavor might be expected to nurture a particular quality of curiosity. But method in U.S. American studies has more often been considered a tool of scientistic totalitarians. In this respect U.S. Americanists defend their liberty in a stereotypically "American" way. The freedom to act as an individual, independent of a group, is more precious than the freedom to act as a member of one.
U.S. publications on American studies method hence have an elusively scrappy or passive-aggressive tone. Authors conjure, disavow, demonize, or resurrect intellectual spirits so discreetly that it is hard to know precisely what is at stake. Readers new to this literature are apt to wonder what all of the fuss is about. At issue is the definition of the field, the identity, purpose, tolerance, and capacities of its teachers and students.
In most of the rest of the world, especially where English is a foreign language, the actual practice of American studies has varied even more widely but rallied more readily around a single, broad aim: understanding a place called "America." Commencing with the onset of "the American century" and accelerating rapidly during the cold war with encouragement from the United States Information Agency and the Fulbright program, American studies in most places has meant considering "American stuff," America-related topics and materials of any variety in any way. Outside the United States, then, American studies has consistently supported regular exchanges with a larger range of fields: business, policy, and social sciences as well as humanities. Any one set of topics or one discipline or a few of each may dominate the practice of American studies in a school or a whole nation or region of the globe for a time. In Spain, for example, American studies has emphasized the long history, literature, and culture of its former colonies (especially Mexico), while in China the field has stressed recent diplomatic, strategic, and trade relations with the United States. In many secondary schools outside the United States the name American studies means, in effect, instruction in English as a second language, possibly enriched by the inclusion of popular-culture texts. In U.S. high schools it may be just a new name for the traditional survey of domestic history and government, but sometimes an American literature teacher and an American history teacher will team-teach an American studies course.
Since in the late twentieth century the United States gained powers that could scarcely be ignored anywhere on the planet, it would seem an unproblematic focus, a perfectly sensible academic target. But at least since the mid-1980s, U.S. scholars and others moved by colonial experience or postcolonial theory have worried greatly about a residue of ambiguity in this conception of the field, in particular, in the word American.
For some scholars, the word America refers to a geographic site, a locale that could be fixed on a map. Unfortunately, it rarely is. It might be as large as both halves of the Western Hemisphere, only the northern half, or the portion that lies roughly between the forty-ninth parallel and the R�o Bravo. For other scholars (or the same ones on different occasions), America is a political designation, a shorthand for the jurisdiction of the United States of America (and the governments that it has subsumed). For yet other scholars or purposes, America is a symbol, a social construction that people associate with a geopolitical terrain. It is their sense of the place. It is a concocted, contestable, and mobile entity, more like a set of beliefs or ways of life than a tangible or legal object. It might be bounded by nothing more substantial than sentiment (or as Alexis de Tocqueville would have it, a "habit of the heart"), with familiarity on one side and estrangement on the other. Its contents can be shaped not only by topography, law, and power but also by word-of-mouth, ritual, the circulation of goods, arts, amusements, flights of fancy, and acts of will. This is the sense of the word to which more plainly controversial terms such as Americanism or Americanization appeal. Given this variation in usage, whether defined spatially, politically, or symbolically, the "America" that American studies scholars aim to understand is itself an elusive target.
For most of the history of the field most Americanists, like most nonacademics, have assumed that these senses of the word America actually do or ought to converge. They suppose that the U.S. terrain, its government, and the ways of life of its people compose a single, even if conflicted, whole�a culture�that is distinguishable from the cultural contributions of annexed territories, populations, and polities. For better or worse, America is supposed to be unique. When assembled on North American soil, subject to an American government, citizens supposedly participate in the making of a New World. Scholars have long disagreed about the extent to which the United States actually has achieved such a special prospect, but there has seldom been much doubt that (also for better or worse) it has one.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, U.S. scholars from a broad range of humanities and social sciences lent this notion�"American exceptionalism"�academic credibility. Among the most renowned were Ethel Albert, Gabriel Almond, Daniel Bell, Ray Allen Billington, Daniel Boorstin, Henry Steele Commager, Cora Du Bois, Erik Erikson, Richard Hofstadter, Francis Hsu, Orin Klapp, Florence Kluckhohn, Clyde Kluckhohn, John Kouwenhoven, Harold Laski, Max Lerner, Seymour Lipset, F. O. Mattheisson, Margaret Mead, Perry Miller, David Potter, David Riesman, Arthur Schlesinger, Henry Nash Smith, and William Whyte. But there are also much older precedents. Such pioneering scholars as Constance Rourke and Vernon Parrington published theories of American distinctiveness in the 1920s and 1930s, as Henry Adams and Frederick Jackson Turner did in the early 1890s, Tocqueville in the 1830s, or for that matter, John Winthrop in 1630. Proponents of American exceptionalism can be found throughout international literature for centuries.
In documenting that distinctiveness they cite a bewildering array of influences: God's grace, Puritan theocracy or the separation of church and state, early colonists' military might or their resistance to diseases that they spread, the timing and composition of particular waves of immigration, the "availability" of arable land, continental abundance or regional shortages of resources, free enterprise or slavery, the spirit of science or unfettered individualism, political liberty or the suppression of dissent, technological prowess or omnivorous consumerism, mobility, individualism or conformity, pragmatism or idealism, relative peace and prosperity or racism and violence. Whatever the explanation, at issue has been less whether there is anything distinctly American (a culture uniquely associated with a population, a setting, and a nation-state) than deciding the best way to describe and evaluate it.
Beginning in the late 1960s, in response to intensifying demands for self-determination at the U.S. borders and among domestically oppressed groups, attention shifted to the relationships among these various senses of the term American. Since the label has both an ambiguous referent and political connotations, scholars have become more sensitive to the consequences of designating anything in or out of it. Since, too, the label can be either honorific or pejorative, people in and around the United States have good reason to be wary. Depending on the generalization in question, they might insist on being included or excluded from it. By focusing on allegedly mainstream or dominant traits, Americanists risk signaling that these people�in total, the majority of Americans by any definition�do not count.
Scholars, especially in the United States, now tend to argue that faithfulness to the historical record and basic fairness require a more measured, less ambiguous and presumptuous use of the word American. At the very least scholars expect more demographic precision. By the early 1990s U.S. Americanists demanded careful attention to ways that gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, region, and class, as well as chronology, condition their generalizations. With each passing year, as the global circulation of goods and communications intensifies, it becomes harder to think of America as a freestanding whole or to imagine that it ever was one.
The studies part of the name of the field has also encompassed significant variation. In general the term has signaled an approach that is vaguely interdisciplinary. Exactly which disciplines are broached or how they are bridged remains uncertain. Regardless, American studies, especially in the United States, is proudly not disciplinary, at least not in the same way as fields with which it most often trades: language and literature, history, political science, art, sociology, communications, film, museology, folklore, music, and anthropology. American studies may engage people or interpretive strategies from these "regular" disciplines but it remains in some ways smaller (in its focus on but one place) and larger (in its methodological eclecticism) than any one of them. It shares this hybrid quality with other fields that have studies in their names.
Between the 1930s and 1950s the first of them ("area studies") in the United States were chiefly defined around parts of the world that seemed culturally or strategically distinct in relation to western, industrialized states. Beginning in the late 1960s their number rapidly multiplied and their principle of definition changed. Focusing mainly on U.S. "minorities" with organized, articulate advocates, these programs were a low-budget, curricular response to social movements (for example, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the gay rights movement) and demands for "social relevance" and recognition of diversity on U.S. campuses. Americanists generally supported the development of these kindred African, Native, Latino and Latina, and Asian American, women's, ethnic, gender, sexuality, queer, and environmental studies programs. Although relations among these programs were often troubled, they similarly styled themselves as young and rebellious when compared to "regular" liberal arts. Although they differ greatly in official favor, subject matter, and approach, they share, at least, pride in their difference from academic business as usual. In many cases, that is all that the word studies (and by implication, interdisciplinary) is taken to mean.
The most common way that American studies relates to affiliated disciplines is as a bricolage. Candidates for an American studies degree are ordinarily required to take America-oriented courses in several academic departments. The selection and sequence is seldom stipulated. United States Americanists are expected to be comfortable with more than one of the media (sources of "texts") that traditionally distinguish areas of expertise (for example, novels or artifacts as well as archival records, or paintings and music as well as polls). Although print is favored, any supplement will do. Scholars who augment the definition of sources favored in their home discipline might thereby consider themselves "interdisciplinary" without ever leaving home. Or their purpose may be more ambitiously transdisciplinary, a deliberate, discipline-crossing quest for methods and materials that complement each other.
More commonly, however, Americanists boast of borrowing insights hither and yon. While "regular" disciplines might demand high regard for the epistemology and pedigree of each of their approaches, Americanists are apt to grab and mix anything that works. Theirs is a can-do spirit�"a kind of principled opportunism," Henry Nash Smith dubbed it in 1957. Ever since, U.S. Americanists have been willing to face the charge that they are dilettantes, if the compensation includes insights that academic sectarianism and meta-theory would impede.
The oldest line of methodological discussion in American studies revolves around the promise of just such integration: Can or even should American studies develop a method of its own? For most of its history, the answer has been a resounding No. After all, most people who "do American studies" are already responsible to the rigors of a home discipline. Back in regular departments there is no shortage of methods for Americanists to borrow (and better employment opportunities). The vitality of the field, most argue, depends on improvisation, the mixing of ingredients that are as diverse as possible. Leave it to the disciplines to develop them. Strategies can be cobbled to fit the particular interpreter, curiosity, and source material at hand. It is through the absence of a regimen that American studies has earned its distinction.
One problem with this view is that in hindsight it has been relatively easy to detect regimens in the field. Both outside the United States and inside it (at least through the mid-1950s), such regimens were generally those of individual, contemporary liberal arts. There has been nothing particularly transdisciplinary or even "not disciplinary" about it. Even the pioneers of improvisation just basted a couple of methods together and left the edges unhemmed.
For example, when preparing his classic Main Currents in American Thought, Vernon Parrington chose an unconventional mix of sources�a sample of U.S. literature and history. At the time (the 1920s) most English departments belittled American (versus British) literature, as history departments did the arts. Rather than finding a ready-made position at an East Coast university, Parrington had to earn his living, among other things, coaching football at the University of Oklahoma. As Gene Wise, the most credited chronicler of the field, has argued, Parrington's work on Main Currents�its range, passion, and critical edge�inspired subsequent generations of Americanists. To this day, introductory American studies courses in the United States draw from the well that he dug.
But the way he dug, his mode of research, was hardly original. He more or less sorted readings conventional in one discipline into a chronology conventional in another. He interpreted literature (stressing belles lettres) as if it expressed the sociopolitical vision of its authors. He then classified those visions as tacking through time, periods of looking forward and then back, in the manner of the then-fashionable "progressive" historians of American politics. Furthermore, at least since the early eighteenth century, Western philosophers have consulted both history and the arts to assess national achievement. The strategy was less controversial than the standard of judgment. At issue then, and in some measure still, is whether critics should advocate "achievement" by standards that owe more to the Enlightenment (universalizing, rational; the French civilisation) or Romanticism (localizing, spiritual; the German Kultur). It is perhaps telling that an alternative name for the field�American civilization�fell into disrepute in the 1960s precisely because of its Enlightenment implications.
The first, and by some accounts the only, truly distinctive method ever to be fully developed and hegemonic in U.S. American studies was a variant on these precedents. First centered in the 1950s at the University of Minnesota, Harvard University, and Amherst College, the approach became known (ten to fifteen years later) as "myth-and-symbol." Its sources for analysis were primarily drawn from literature and history. The evolution in patterns of particularly complex, evocative ("powerful") images and stories ("symbols" and "myths") in those sources was taken to reflect the course of dominant ideas in their time. The ideas that drew attention, then, were mainly matters of national political dispute that were evident at once in public letters and public affairs. These ideas, in turn, became the object of Americanists' criticism, generally from a cold-war liberal point of view. They aimed to distinguish the best from the worst propensities of "the American mind."
The earliest and most celebrated example of myth-and-symbol was Virgin Land, published by Henry Nash Smith in 1950. Like many who were inspired by his work, Smith focused on the way that Europeans and their descendants established dominion over the continent (albeit, with scant reference to New Spain, slavery, the Civil War, people of color, or women of any sort). Although they normally insist on their individuality, scholars associated with this school of thought (during its heyday, roughly the 1950s to the mid-1970s) include not only Smith but also Daniel Aaron, Allen Guttman, Leo Marx, Alan Trachtenberg, R. W. B. Lewis, Roy Harvey Pearce, and John William Ward. The first heady era of the "American studies movement" took place in the shadow of their work.
Since the late 1970s, however, it has been the subject of devastating criticism. To have one's teaching or research likened to myth-and-symbol is now to stand accused of serious errors. Among the first that leap to mind are those associated with American exceptionalism. Myth-and-symbol classics in general slight diversity and dissent in the United States as well as international relations. They slight women and people of color in particular, a bias with special sting given the subsequent strength of social-justice movements on college campuses. As Nina Baym has explained, myth-and-symbolists' orthodox taste in source material and their propensity to highlight struggles for individuation may better bespeak the authors' worries about their own "manhood" than anything else. Other critics lambaste the epistemology of the approach (the facile, conceptual leaps from text to writing, publishing, reading, thought, and action), its anachronisms (the projection of modern assessments of literary power onto prior periods), its conception of culture (idealist, homogeneous, autotelic), or its taste for irony and tortured platitude.
Nevertheless, despite their reputation as cold-war-accommodating, myth-and-symbol works emphasize national flaws. They find America's myths unsustainable and its realities grim. But since the nation's people, with the exception of gifted artists and, presumably, their myth-and-symbol promoters, are supposedly so governed by delusion, there is not much to be done beyond wringing hands. The lesson is often excruciatingly fatalistic and condescending. Hence�when compared (also anachronistically) to "post-1960s" academia�myth-and-symbol is remembered as "elitist" and "conservative." Americanists in the United States have subsequently demanded ever more "radical" remedies to these methodological flaws. What they mean by "more radical" is the subject of continuing dispute in the United States and mystery in other parts of the world.
Among the first orthodoxies to lose credibility were those privileging whole categories of source material. After the 1970s, as pop art helped discredit "mass-culture," Frankfurt-school fogies, mass-marketed entertainment became fodder for the field. Ever since, U.S. Americanists have tended to consider items of "popular culture" (best-selling novels, top-forty music, Hollywood film, television, advertisements, amusement parks, snapshots, kitchen gadgets, and the like) better indicators of cultural currents than the canonical literature whose "power" so impressed myth-and-symbolists. Waves of interpretive strategies reigning in departments of English subsequently made the rounds through popular culture by way of American studies: structuralist, Marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, reader-response, poststructuralist, postmodern, and later "cultural studies."
Likewise, the sorts of documentary sources that early Americanists had shared with the two, then chic branches of U.S. history�political and intellectual�fell out of favor. Social records, particularly those pertaining to the history of women and other oppressed groups (subalterns), took their place. By the late 1980s, women's history was the most common specialty in the field in the United States. While myth-and-symbolists scored debating points against national leaders, their descendants unmasked brute injustice in domestic and intimate, no less than civic, affairs. They focused on social formations that privilege and resist the white, wealthy, heterosexual, and male.
In so improvising on its past, American studies has flourished. In the 1990s, for example, the membership of the U.S. professional association (the American Studies Association [ASA]) soared. Credit for this growth mainly belongs to the recruitment of humanists and cultural historians new to American studies. Some Americanists charge that many of the conceptual flaws of myth-and-symbol (for example, its bookish bias and epistemological incoherence) remain or that U.S. Americanists are losing touch with the social or natural sciences and international norms. Some lament that, after so many years, the proportion of Americanists trained in and primarily committed to the field (versus English or history) remains so small. But to resurrect questions of interdisciplinary method�visions of a more clearly defined, distinct, and transdisciplinary field�still raises in the United States the old specter of methodological tyranny. Such are the gains and losses of the field's liberty.
Periodization and American Studies
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture
PAL: Perspectives in American Literature: Appendices
Cultural Politics: Interdisciplinary Cultural Theory
Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), s.v. "American Studies: Approaches and Concepts" (by Richard P. Horwitz), http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=525 (accessed August 23, 2018).
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