An edited post, transferred from H-AMSTUDY:

A year ago I posted a query about how we who are teaching American Studies at the college level deal with the problem of generalizing about American culture. I see this as a problem because the typical American Studies writing assignment is, one way or another, to analyze a cultural text "in all of its cultural contexts," and in my experience our students know little or no context. Their high school American history courses rarely got past 1960, and they remember little of it anyway. How do we "teach" enough American history in our classes to give the students some sort of context?

I observed that the problem grows when we take seriously the notion that American Studies needs to be comparative. How do we generalize meaningfully without stereotyping?

Imagine how you would create an hour-long lecture (or assignment, perhaps) that would provide students with some basic generalizations about American culture.

JAY MECHLING (American Studies, U of California, Davis)

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