American studies or American civilization is an interdisciplinary field of scholarship that examines American literature, history, society, and culture. It traditionally incorporates American historiography, literary criticism, and critical theory.
Scholarship in American studies focuses on the United States and its impact on human history. It has also broadened to include Atlantic history and Americans' interactions with countries across the globe. Subjects studied within the field are varied, but often examine the literary themes, histories of American communities, ideologies, or cultural productions. Examples might include topics in American social movements, literature, media, tourism, folklore, and intellectual history.
Fields studying specific American ethnic or racial groups are considered to be both independent of and included within the broader American studies discipline. This includes African American studies, Asian American studies, Latino studies, Native American studies, and others.
Founding notions Vernon Louis Parrington is often cited as the founder of American studies for his three-volume Main Currents in American Thought, which combines the methodologies of literary criticism and historical research; it won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize. In the introduction to Main Currents in American Thought, Parrington described his field:
The "broad path" that Parrington describes formed a scholastic course of study for Henry Nash Smith, who received a PhD from Harvard's interdisciplinary program in history and American civilization in 1940, setting an academic precedent for present-day American studies programs.
The first signature methodology of American studies was the "myth and symbol" approach, developed in such foundational texts as Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land in 1950, John William Ward's Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age in 1955 and Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden in 1964. Myth and symbol scholars claimed to find certain recurring themes throughout American texts that served to illuminate a unique American culture. Later scholars such as Annette Kolodny and Alan Trachtenberg re-imagined the myth and symbol approach in light of multicultural studies.
Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, these earlier approaches were criticized for continuing to promote the idea of American exceptionalism—the notion that the US has had a special mission and virtue that makes it unique among nations. Several generations of American studies scholars moved away from purely ethnocentric views, emphasizing transnational issues surrounding race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, among other topics. But recent studies critique the exceptionalist nature of the transnational turn. "The transnational turn has positioned American Studies in a nationalist rut", observes Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, in After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism:
Institutionally, in the last decade the American Studies Association has reflected the interdisciplinary nature of the field, creating strong connections to ethnic studies, gender studies, cultural studies and post- or de-colonial studies. Environmental perspectives, in ascendance in related fields, such as literature and history, have not penetrated the mainstream of American studies scholarship. A major theme of the field in recent years has been internationalization—the recognition that much vital scholarship about the US and its relations to the wider global community has been and is being produced outside the United States.
Debate on use of the term American Until the mid-2000s, the use of American for this multidisciplinary field was widely defended. In 1998, Janice Radway argued, "Does the perpetuation of the particular name, American, in the title of the field... support the notion that such a whole exists even in the face of powerful work that tends to question its presumed coherence? Does the field need to be reconfigured conceptually?" She concluded, "the name American studies will have to be retained." In 2001, Wai Chee Dimmock argued that the field "is largely founded on this fateful adjective. [American] governs the domain of inquiry we construct, the range of questions we entertain, the kind of evidence we take as significant. The very professionalism of the field rests on the integrity and the legitimacy of this founding concept." In 2002, Heinz Ickstadt argued that American studies "should accept its name as its limitation and its boundary." In 2006, Dimmock affirmed that the field "does stand to be classified apart, as a nameable and adducible unit."
More recently, scholars have questioned American as a categorizing term. "In consideration of the limitations of conventional terms," Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera argued in 2018, instead of American, terms like "spaces claimed by the political body" and "residents of spaces claimed by the political body" would offer a "more sensitive and attuned description... of the regions, critical artifacts, communities, and individuals in question, one that is less charged with the ambiguities and colonial ties that weigh down the traditional disciplinary nomenclatures." In "the interests of justice and along the lines most suitable to our emergent age," argued Markha Valenta in 2017, scholars should consider "abandoning America as the field identifier."
Imperial American studies
"One of the central themes of American historiography", argued William Appleman Williams, "is that there is no American Empire". Another central theme is that America is a world power continuously and steadily expanding since 1890 and extending varying degrees of American sovereignty throughout the world. Whatever euphemisms are used to describe the American Empire, it exists.
According to American Studies Association president Janice Radway, one of the main problems has been that American Studies consistently tilted towards "Imperial American Studies." The field consistently becomes politicized, and its representatives find themselves responsible for US foreign policy and for globalization suspected to benefit US citizens disproportionately.Radway, Janice (20 November 1998). "What Is in a Name? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association," American Quarterly, vol 51 (1/1999), p 23, https://www.jstor.org/stable/30041632 The imperial tilt increased following the "unipolar moment" in 1991. The field reacted with a "Transnational Turn" initiated by Amy Kaplan in 1993. Paul Giles joined the campaign with a proposal to elevate the field from the aged patriotic empire-building to the increasingly transnational networks of the 1990s.Giles, Paul (1994). "Reconstructing American Studies: Transnational Paradoxes, Comparative Perspectives," Journal of American Studies, vol 28: p 337. The volume of scholarship edited by Kaplan inspired a 1998 conference on the theme "American Studies and the Question of Empire." Opening the conference, Radway magnified the anti-imperial push and suggested erasing the adjective "American" from "American Studies" because of the association between "American" and "Imperial."Radway, Janice (20 November 1998). "What Is in a Name? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association," American Quarterly, vol 51 (1/1999), p 8, 18, https://www.jstor.org/stable/30041632
Frank Kelleter, the chair of the American Studies at the University of Göttingen, writing in the Review of International American Studies, criticized the Transnational Turn in 2007 as "an antipode to US state power". Speaking transnationally became identified with speaking in a counter-hegemonic way. He claimed the Transnational Turn prevents understanding US imperialism and the manifestations of non-US imperialisms in their respective fields. He considered outlining why and how US imperialism is more successful and power than most pre-American forms of dominance as an integral part of American Studies. According to Kelleter, the Transnational Turn is based on wishful thinking caused by US hegemony:
In 2026 the Progressive Policy Institute published a report titled The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s with the central claim being that American Studies is too negative. The authors are Richard Kahlenberg, the Director of Housing Policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, and Lief Lin, a Policy Analyst at the Progressive Policy Institute. They looked at American Quarterly articles to see if the academic field is spreading misinformation by not having enough neutral or positive articles .
They use Donald Trump as an equivalent example for misinformation, "President Donald Trump has notoriously sought to erase the negative components of American history...On other pages, statements on the historic struggle of Black Americans for their rights were cut or softened.”
Their assessment has been criticized by other members of the American Studies field. In an article in Public Books titled Who Benefits from Distorting American Studies?, Iván Chaar López, Associate Professor in American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, and Erin McElroy, Associate Professor in Geography at the University of Washington, respond to the claims made in the report. They state the report is "based only on selective and superficial readings" of the field's top journal without "do[ing] the hard work of examining the soundness of the claims made [by American studies scholars] about US history and society." Instead, the authors continue, the report relies on rigid interpretations of the past. Another claim examined is how criticism against American Studies is occurring while there is government pressure to silence the truth.
Chaar López and McElroy also took issue with the intent behind Progressive Policy Institute's publishing of the article. They claim this push for accuracy is really about pushing the theory of American Exceptionalism.
Scholars have examined how cultural imperialism occurs within the US borders. Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera described the phenomenon as an attempt to transition the "cultural symbols of the invading communities from 'foreign' to 'natural,' 'domestic,'" through three discrete and sequential phases: {| class="wikitable" |People in new space |Objective |- |(1) Merchants
Also termed "explorers" e.g., Lewis and Clark |Encounter resources
E.g., minerals, trade routes, spices, furs, communities
to tax or conscript, fertile agricultural zones, strategic
geography, etc. |- |(2) Military
An invasion force |Control resources
Implement martial law so that the metropolitan may
exploit resources; establish "Fort" cities, e.g., Fort
Lauderdale, Fort Worth etc. that facilitate metropolitan
settlement. |- |(3) Politicians
Socialize the space into a new province of the metropolitan |Social engineering
Acculturize the space into a region of the metropolitan
through saturation of symbol, legend, and myth.
Establish laws and norms that promote the metropolitan
(invading system) as dominant culture and prohibit or
criminalize other systems; offer citizenship to conquered
peoples in exchange for submission to metropolitan
cultural norms and abandonment of original or other (in
the case of immigrants) social tendencies. |} (Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey. 2018. After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism. Routledge. p. 24)