CURRICULUM IN FOCUS American Studies By Jordan Taylor & Laura Robertson


A yellowed broadside replete with demons warning about the dangers of alcohol, a call to


arms of the men of Texas, an advertisement for an anti-Vietnam strike at UVa, an evacuation notice for an outbreak of yellow fever in the late 18th


Century, the 37 students of St.


Anne’s-Belfield American Studies class has history in their hands. Tey are ensconced in the Special Collections at the University of Virginia and in lieu of textbooks, rote memorization, and a roll of seminal American novels, the class is examining the dynamic and sweeping changes of American history and culture. For years, English and History curriculums have been siblings with too little communication. While studying the Civil War in US History, students might be reading Te Great Gatsby in English class. Students in American Studies examined the complexities of a time period as reflected in and transformed by its literature and art. Te historical past is offered not as a monologue, a snapshot, or a list of dates but rather as a conversation, a mosaic, and an ever-changing landscape.


18 – PERSPECTIVES/SUMMER 2011


Aſter five years of discussion and planning, for the first time in the 100-year history of the school, students were offered the choice of studying the interconnectedness of American history and culture in a double-period team-taught American Studies pilot course. But American Studies is more than just harmonizing the curriculum of history and English. So what exactly is American Studies? In the words of Vernon Lewis Parrington, American Studies is an examination 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.” Tis examination is by nature inclusive and therefore demands a holistic interpretation of all the forces that come together to define what it means to be an American. American Studies enthusiasts cast broad nets in their studies and commonly use an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses everything from economics and politics to music and poetry. Works of literature become mirrors of their


contemporaneous historical periods, and political speeches become works of literature that need to be interpreted for diction, syntax, and imagery.


In contrast to the past, teachers and students were expected to undertake a thematic rather than a chronological approach in their studies. For example, a majority of the winter trimester was spent examining the role of race in American culture by studying the genesis of the Atlantic slave trade, the institutionalization of slavery, the drive for emancipation, the regression of Jim Crow, the stirrings of race consciousness in the Harlem Renaissance, and the liberation of the Civil Rights movement of the '50s and '60s. Texts ranged from Te Autobiography of Frederick Douglass to Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif ” and the poetry and prose of Harlem Renaissance giants like Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen to first-person accounts of Klan raids, to documentary footage of the Civil Rights Movement, and William Gienapp’s pioneering short biography of Lincoln in his time. Other clusters explored “Te American Soul,” the expansion and exhaustion of the


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