Introduction to Part I

More than many academic fields, American Studies has been open to the claims and approaches of gender, race, and ethnic studies. As Linda Kerber pointed out in her 1988 presidential address to the American Studies Association (Kerber 1989, 420), some of the major early essays in women's studies first appeared in an American Studies context. On the other hand, the decade in which American Studies first appeared strongly in the acad- emy—the 1950s—was a very "macho" period. And the 1960s were even more so. The paradigmatic "American" who emerged from the studies of those founding decades was quite literally a "New Man"—whether riding alone into the Western sunset, or paddling down the Mississippi. However open the field has lately been to multicultural and gender considerations it has proved hard to shake the conviction that the "American" is white and male. Moreover, American Studies has not in fact, as some initially hoped, provided the sheltering intellectual and academic umbrella for these new forms of enquiiy. Women, African Americans, Hispanics, "ethnics" of all varieties have spun off into their own "Studies" programs, with their own personnel, canonical texts, interdisciplinary approaches, problems, and periodical crises of method, rationale, and direction

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