‘Who gets to define “America”?’ (Kristen Silva Gruesz, ‘America’, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, New York UP, 2007, p. 17). What answer would you give to Gruesz’s question?
For neo-conservative educationist Lynne Cheney, American history textbooks should be filled with ‘tales of heroes’ (qtd. in George Lipsitz, Time Passages, U of Minnesota P, 1990, p. 24). Which three ‘heroes’ would you select for a textbook on American history, and why?
Where, would you say, is the counterculture in the contemporary United States. How effective is it in challenging the American mainstream?
Compare and contrast the understanding of home in two contemporary American cultural texts of your choice (you might select materials of differing sorts: a novel and a film, say, or a film and a song).
Offering hybridity as a form of resistance in a world in which the structures of power are characterized by their ability to hybridize’ is problematic (James Annesley, Fictions of Globalization, Continuum, 2006, p. 133). In the light of Annesley’s statement, assess the politics of hybridity and hybridisation in your chosen American cultural materials.
‘Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?’ (Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Signet, 1957, p. 99). What would be your response to this question as you observe contemporary American culture and society?
Study Activities
In this chapter, we consider how Christopher Columbus’s explorations of ‘the New World’ late in the sixteenth century were subsequently drawn into American celebrations of the United States as a uniquely blessed nation. Consider the part played by American visual culture in this appropriation of Columbus for purposes of national celebration. Your examples might include paintings such as Peter Rothermel’s Columbus Before the Queen (1841), Emanuel Leutze’s Columbus Before the Queen (1843) and John Vanderlyn’s Landing of Columbus(1847), together with Luigi Grigori’s Columbus Murals at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana (1882-84). What sense of the ‘New World’ is created in these works – and how?
Consider the visions of America generated by the Inaugural Addresses, or other major speeches, of three US presidents of your choice. Do you find enduring commonalities or, rather, significant differences? What rhetorical devices are adopted by each speaker, and with what effects? You might select examples with regard for variations in period and party: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, perhaps, or Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Donald Trump. Older speeches can be accessed via the helpful Presidential Rhetoric website (also listed below as one of this chapter’s online resources); more recent addresses, by Trump, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, can be found easily by searching the National Archives.
The Port Huron Statement, issued in 1962 by Students for a Democratic Society, was among the most powerful manifestos for an alternative America to emerge during the 1960s. While the text is historically significant, however, it also repays attention as a political resource for our own moment. Read the Statement carefully and consider the extent to which its diagnoses of America’s structural weaknesses, and its proposed solutions, still have value. You might evaluate its reflections on what it terms ‘Politics without Publics’ (p. 9), ‘the Remote Control Economy’ (p. 11) and ‘the Military-Industrial Complex’ (p. 13). In light of the assault of Trump Redux on the sovereignty of higher education institutions, the Statement’s vision of the potentiality of American universities, their promise to be ‘a significant source of social criticism and an initiator of new modes and molders of attitudes’ (p. 8), is also likely to be of interest.
Sports films are never just about the sport; instead, they are powerful, adaptable vehicles for thinking about such topics as culture, identity and power. In the American instance, the baseball film has long been such an agent of national inquiry. Build upon our chapter’s analysis of Field of Dreams by considering what vision of America is promoted by such baseball movies as Barry Levinson’s The Natural (1992), John Sayles’s Eight Men Out (1988), Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own (1992), Bennett Miller’s Moneyball (2011) and Robert Lorenz’s Trouble with the Curve (2012). Or you might vary the sport and assess how films about American football, say, or basketball or boxing also perform as national allegories.
Research what textbooks are used in the United States to support high school courses in American history. What do they include, what do they exclude? Which details are emphasised, which subordinated? Given the devolution from federal level of much education provision in the US, you may find suggestive differences between states in this regard (compare Florida, for example, with California).
Online Resources
American Journeys – maintained by the Wisconsin Historical Society: a fascinating compendium of narratives of American ‘settlement and exploration’ from Viking sagas of AD 1000 to tales of the Rockies eight centuries later
Early Americas Digital Archive – invaluable resource hosted by the University of Maryland that archives texts on America written between 1492 and 1820
Archive of Early American Images – thousands of images belonging to one of the John Carter Brown Collections at Brown University, Rhode Island: wide-ranging both historically (1492-1825) and geographically (Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego)
Measure of America – very useful resource, maintained by the Social Science Research Council, offering maps of the United States that show regional variations in racial profile, educational attainment, energy consumption, etc.
Texas Time Travel – maintained by the Texas Historical Commission and tracing the state’s complex mixing of ethnicities from African American to German, and Hispanic to Asian (visit alongside our discussion of John Sayles’s film Lone Star)
Presidential Rhetoric – in need of updating to include Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, but a valuable repository, curated by Martin Medhurst and Paul Stob, of speeches by US Presidents (beginning with George Washington’s First Inaugural Address in 1789)
The Allen Ginsberg Project – vast collection of materials by and about this major figure in American counterculture from the mid-1950s to his death in 1997
Barry Lopez Foundation for Art and Environment – resource documenting and celebrating Lopez’s work as an environmental writer and campaigner (especially valuable for the many interviews with Lopez that it hosts)
Huck – in existence since 2006, US-focused yet also global in its remit to showcase ‘independent culture […] artists, activists and creative renegades who are breaking down the old world to build something new’