I remember when I first met with Dean Cloke about entering the American Studies program as a second semester freshman. I have always had a passion for American history, but I wanted to make sure that becoming an American Studies major was the right course for me. So I asked him what it was all about, and why it would be more interesting than, say, being a history major with a concentration in North America. He basically told me (and I say basically because it was early in the morning, and I’m not much of a morning person) that it was a different approach than a standard history take on things. It involved things most history majors wouldn’t necessarily cover, like art, literature, and other cultural aspects that can often go unnoticed. And throughout the course of CIV’s I and II, I could see what he was talking about. I must admit that at first I was a little apprehensive—I didn’t really see what studying Thomas Cole et al really had to do with American history.
After this semester, though, I’ve realized that the point of American studies really is to take a more unconventional approach. I found that CIV’s I and II prepared me for learning about America in different ways that I had never done before, and that this semester further cemented that.
Take a subject like immigration. Before entering this program, my study of immigration was relegated to simple statistics, with little or no focus on the human element—i.e. not only that Irish, Italians, Germans, and so on came to America, but why they did so, what they experienced when they got here, and why they experienced the things that they did. Before reading essays like Ngai’s article on the Immigration Act of 1924, it never occurred to me that, in many ways, there were singular events that determined the social position of a particular immigrant group. Before reading Levitt’s book on Mary Mallon, my knowledge of the experiences of many of those immigrants was limited to generalities, not specifics. I could tell you that, in general, the Irish routinely and systematically got the shaft from their Anglo neighbors, but if you pressured me to come up with a specific example, I couldn’t have given you one.
Take another subject like the New Deal. Before reading Cohen’s book, if you asked me how I thought it was possible for such a radical change in the government’s role in people’s lives to take place, I would have given you a “great man” approach centered on Roosevelt. I never would have taken into account the fact that no one man (or woman), no matter how great, can single-handedly galvanize such a large coalition of supporters. It never would have occurred to me that a lot of forces outside of FDR’s control were necessary for those events to happen. It never would have occurred to me that it required a change of perspective within the working class—one in which people to a certain extent ceased to think of themselves in terms of ethnicity, and began to develop a class-consciousness that transcended both ethnic and racial boundaries—in order for the entire New Deal to happen.
In the end, then, the most important thing that I’ve taken out of this semester and last year with Dean Cloke and Professor McKeown is that we can’t take history at face value. History—whether cultural, political, social or gender-based—is inherently subjective. What I previously was willing to accept as fact I have now come to question. Obviously, there are some basic facts that are indisputable; however, it is important for us all to realize that what we learn in textbooks is what one person or one group of people feels is important. Just because two authors disagree on the cause or effect of a particular event does not make either one right. In fact, they are often both right for different reasons.
This all takes me back to another “Clokism” that we heard so often last year: that American Studies as a program, and CIVs I-III in particular, calls on us to “dig deeper,” to question what we know as conventional United States history and see if what we have been taught from middle school on up is what we really believe to be true. Whether it is because we haven’t been taught about certain “in-between” groups like the ones we’ve studied this semester, or because we simply haven’t considered largely-known aspects of American history like art and literature, there is and always will be some aspect of any particular time, place or event in US history that we have not yet considered. And while that is in some respects a sobering realization, if not a depressing one, it is still an important one. We must realize that history is about more that dates, facts, and statistics—it is inconceivably complex, and to reduce it to a 400-page US history textbook is in many ways disingenuous.