"Integration now!" quips Sean Wilentz, director of American studies, when asked to describe Princeton's plans for the future of the program.

The old civil-rights slogan describes a direction formally articulated in 1994, when the faculty-student Committee on Diversity and Liberal Education recommended that the university address burgeoning interest in ethnic studies by redesigning its framework for the study of American culture and society. The committee recommended "encompassing studies of the comparative experience of the peoples of America, broadly defined."

Three years later, Wilentz and his colleagues in the Program in American Studies have created a new "flagship" course meant to elicit the interest of freshmen and sophomores in the intellectual questions posed by this comparative perspective. They have also revamped the core course and established a host of new advanced courses that cross disciplinary boundaries. Meanwhile, Princeton has attracted faculty with particular expertise in Asian-American and Latino studies.

"Although the United States may not be a melting pot, neither its culture nor that of its ethnic groups is pristine," wrote Wilentz in an opinion colum in The Chronicle of Higher Education in November 1996. "To paraphrase the writer Ralph Ellison, Americans are all 'cultural mulattos.'"

Dean of the College Nancy Weiss Malkiel, a member of the Committee on Diversity and Liberal Education, cites Wilentz's course American Democracy and the Atlantic World (AMS 370) as an important intellectual antecedent for the discussion of American studies at Princeton.

The course Wilentz designed breaks from customary frameworks, which tend to emphasize the United State's unqieu role in history; instead, it emphasized the idea of the country as an Atlantic nation, one whose relationships to Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa are central to its past and present. The syllabus frames a comparative and cross-regional perspective, "one that starts with the Atlantic world: the economic and political empires, free and coerced labor systems, cultural exchanges, and political institutions out of which the United States emerged in the 18th century," in the words of the course description, and carries on through the political and social transformations of the 19th and 20th centuries.

American Classics

This semester, religion professors Albert J. Raboteau and David L. Carrasco are team teaching American studies's new flagship course, AMS 103, American Classics, to 120 undergraduates. They organized the course around certain historical and literary texts. "By 'classics,' we meant texts that were historically specific but opened out onto wider perspectives on some major themes that have characterized the American experience," says Raboteau. Among the themes and texts are the encounter of people of divergent backgrounds (using Miguel Leon's Broken Spears, which describes the Aztecs' encounter with the Spanish); freedom and its opposities (W.E.B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk, The Declaration of Independence); and community and identity (Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn).

Carrasco draws on source materials and artifacts from his Mesoamerican archive; Raboteau, on documents reated to his ongoing work on a 13-volume history of African Americans and their religious cultures.

The old AMS 201-202 sequence was a two-semester chronology that surveyed important events and broad themes in U.S. history and culture. Students tended to take only the semester that focused on the more recent past. So when the faculty sat down to seign a course that framed a broader view of the history and cultures of the Americas, they sought a construct "a one-term course that cut across 500-plus years of recorded American history," says Professor of English William L. Howarth. "And we also wanted to give ample attention to the various native and European peoples who produced that history... Rather than envision American as a cultural melting pot, I suggested using American places as a means of locating and exploring our many cultural traditions."

Thus, the new AMS 201 - called American Places - follows a model that is both chronological and spatial. "We don't focus just on cultures, but also on the physical locations in which episodes are played out," says Howarth. "Thus, in addition to the techniques of social history and cultural studies, our methods combine those of historical geography and environmental history."

Race and Region

Howarth's course Race and Region is another touchstone in the development of the new approach to American studies. Like AMS 201, this course links the study of social issues with the study of place. "Where people are physically located, where they are forced to move - plantations, reservations, ghettos - says a lot about how they are viewed by others in society," says Howarth.

Other courses in American studies that exemplify the new curricular approach include Ronald W. Schatz's American Jewry since the 1890s; P. Adam Sitney's The American Cinema; and Emily Martin's Health and Medicine in American Life, which bridge American studies with the history department, visual-arts program, and anthropology department.

Wilentz hopes to continue to forge links with other academic units at Princeton. "One of the fruits of this approach," he says, "has been the recognition by many of us that we have a lot in common, that we can interact more than we did in the past."

by Justin Harmon '78

Published in the Princeton Alumni Weekly (December 17, 1997).