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American studies

American studies or American civilization is an interdisciplinary field of scholarship that examines practices and cultures maintained by individuals and groups, and how those influence beliefs and value shape political actualities within America. It traditionally incorporates the study of history, literature, and critical theory, but also welcomes research methods from a variety of other disciplines. It is, the exploration of multiple cultures that submerge into a bigger culture; their transnational exchanges, interactions, and impacts.

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:

I have undertaken to give some account of the genesis and development in American letters of certain germinal ideas that have come to be reckoned traditionally American—how they came into being here, how they were opposed, and what influence they have exerted in determining the form and scope of our characteristic ideals and institutions. In pursuing such a task, I have chosen to follow the broad path of our political, economic, and social development, rather than the narrower belletristic.[3]

The "broad path" that Parrington describes formed a scholastic course of study for Henry Nash Smith, who received a Ph.D. from Harvard's interdisciplinary program in "History and American Civilization" in 1940, setting an academic precedent for present-day American Studies programs.[4][citation needed] Although he gained national recognition from his publication The American West as Symbol and Mythin 1950, Smith was also responsible for the first important book in the field of American Studies.

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 and Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden in 1964.[citation needed] Myth and symbol scholars claimed to find certain recurring themes throughout American texts that served to illuminate a unique American culture.

Several generations of American Studies scholars have critiqued this ethnocentric view, and have focused critically on issues of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and both transnational and international concerns. Environmental perspectives, in ascendance in related fields, such as literature and history, have not penetrated the mainstream of American studies scholarship.[5] A major theme of the field in recent years has been internationalization[citation needed]—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.