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Emily J. Levine, Levke Harders. American Studies: Disziplingeschichte und Geschlecht., The American Historical Review, Volume 120, Issue 1, February 2015, Page 270, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.1.270
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Extract
It is a testament to the growing interest among European scholars in American history that the first full-length study of the history of American Studies has been authored in the German language. That the German-trained author Levke Harders studied Wissenschaftsgeschichte, the broadly conceived history of science, network theory, and gender studies, means that her American Studies: Disziplingeschichte und Geschlecht offers more than a narrow disciplinary history. The connection between disciplinary history and gender (the subtitle of the book and its distinguishing factor from the numerous articles on this subject) might seem arbitrary at first. However, Harders persuasively argues that “American Studies (re)produces epistemological and structural inequalities,” including race, class, and gender (p. 304).
American Studies is organized into four sections. The first section considers the development of the field from the first decade of the twentieth century through the 1960s. Harders's useful synthesis shows how an increased interest in American literature led in 1921 to the founding of the American Literature Group of the Modern Language Association. In this first phase scholars left English to teach such interdisciplinary courses as “American Thought and Civilization” at Yale University. That university awarded the first doctorate in American Civilization in 1933; Harvard University created the first full-fledged Ph.D. program in American Civilization in 1937. Harders demonstrates how the development of the field paralleled the national consciousness of America. During the New Deal these new courses drew on the contemporaneous preoccupation with exceptionalism and the common man. Similarly, when scholars founded the academic journal the American Quarterly and the American Studies Association in 1949 and 1951, respectively, these projects received money from foundations active in the promotion of American culture during the “Cultural Cold War.”
