American Cultural History

Front 1

Culture (analytic definition)

Back 1

*All material and symbolic practices of a society, which serve as systems of orientation or interpretation

*culture is organized in

discourses

Front 2

American Exceptionalism

Back 2

The idea that America is not only different from other states but rather different from all states because it has a specific, perhaps divine mission in world history. In this sense it is unique, exceptional and „the greatest country in the

world".

Front 3

American Studies

Back 3

A mixture of historical and literary scholarship including questions of urban studies, media studies especially interested in structures of

social differentiation:

-race

-class

-gender

-ability

-age

...

Front 4

Conquest according to Stuart Hall

Back 4

An act of taking possession that goes along with the idealization or vilification of the indigenous population through projection and the

imposition of European categories and the failure to respect difference

Front 5

City upon a Hill

Back 5

John Winthrop used this phrase from the bible to tell his Puritan brethren what he expected of them: to be a shining example of Christianity and perfection for the whole world. Perhaps the origin of American Exceptionalism

Front 6

Predestination/Providence

Back 6

Providence is the book of history, in which all events, past or future, are pre-determined by divine will. As a result all human actions, fates, ideas are predestined/foretold

Front 7

American Enlightenment

Back 7

*1714-1818

Also called the Age of Reason, period

that led up to the American Revolution, characterized by writings from

-John Adams

-Thomas Jefferson

-Thomas Paine

-Benjamin Franklin

etc. Culminated in the

Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with the Bill of Rights (“all men are created equal” etc.)

Front 8

Checks and Balances

Back 8

The separation of powers (legislative, executive and judiciary) through specific institutions (presidency, Congress, the courts)

Front 9

Federal Style in Architecture

Back 9

The Palladian style of architecture (imitations of Greek and Roman architecture) imported from Europe to America by Thomas Jefferson to serve as a symbol for the new republic

it suggests learning, democracy, civilization but also empire, whiteness and elitism.

Front 10

Age of Reform

Back 10

Period spanning the end of the Early Republic and the Ante-Bellum era (~1830-1850), in which a variety of reform movements emerged:

abolitionism (Grundsatz d. Sklavenbefreiung)

temperance,

the Sunday School movement,

penitentiary reform (=prison & asylum reform)

dietary reform

etc.

Front 11

Nativism

Back 11

Anti-Immigration movement in the 1840s and 1850s (Know Nothing Movement, American Party) that was Anti-Catholic, Anti-Irish and Anti-German. It wanted to reserve America for those born in America.

Front 12

Cult of True Womanhood

Back 12

= the cult of domesticity: a new (sentimental) image of women as the angel in the house, characterized by the four cardinal virtues

of

domesticity

purity

piety (=Frömmigkeit)

submissiveness

Front 13

Tocqueville’s America

Back 13

Alexis de Tocqueville, French noblemen, travelled through America in the 1830s. He wrote Democracy in America, in which

he described the American character, notably

individualism, restlessness, materialism, tyranny of the majority etc.

Front 14

Manifest Destiny

Back 14

The idea that it is the divine mission of the United States to overspread the entire American continent because of its “superior” democratic institutions. A form of exceptionalism, beginning of American Imperialism

Front 15

Indian Removal

Back 15

Policy of the United States against indigenous nations (e.g. Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Creek), which were evicted in the 1830s to the areas East of the Mississippi. This was a policy of ethnic cleansing, which resulted in thousands of deaths (Trail of Tears, 1830/31)

Front 16

Self-reliance

Back 16

The concept, made famous by Ralph Waldo Emerson, that the time has come for individuals and America as a whole to leave behind imitation (of European ideas) and to rely on one’s own, true self. Part of the transcendentalist and romantic discourse of self-improvement.

Front 17

Middle Passage

Back 17

The transportation of millions of people from Africa to the Americas on slave ships.

Many died during the passage. For the

others it remained a traumatic climax and symbol of their deportation.

Front 18

Fugitive Slave Law

Back 18

A law according to which fugitive slaves from the South have to be returned by the North. Part of the Compromise of 1850 between

North and South, it actually deepened

the tensions between North and South and led (among other things) to Stowe’s novel Uncle

Tom’s Cabin

Front 19

Minstrel Show

Back 19

Popular entertainment show emerging in the 1830s with skits, variety acts, dancing and music performed by white people in blackface. It

made fun of black people and affirmed several

stereotypes about African Americans

Front 20

Plessy vs. Ferguson

Back 20

Racist Supreme Court decision (from 1896)

in which segregation in the South (i.e. Jim Crow laws) were upheld through the formula “separate but equal”. The law was valid until 1954

Front 21

Indian Appropriation Acts

Back 21

Several acts (1851, 71 etc.) according to which members of indigenous nations were moved to reservations in the West. From 1871 on no Indian tribes were recognized as independent nations and indigenous people were treated as individuals and “wards” of the federal government.

Front 22

Turner Thesis

Back 22

Frederick Jackson Turner suggested in 1893 that the American character and American democratic sentiment were formed through the frontier between civilization and wilderness. He succeeded to establish the myth of the West and rugged individualist, but his thesis is today largely rejected

Front 23

Realism

Back 23

Western movement in the arts (starting in France in the 1850s) as a reaction to Romanticism and Sentimentalism. Realists rejected the demand for morality in the arts and turned with a vengeance to mundane topics such as business, science, technology, the social question and modern problems of life.

Front 24

Gilded Age

Back 24

Term coined by Mark Twain for the era of big business in American in the post-bellum time. The Gilded Age was perceived as characterized by materialism, corruption, exploitation and pro-business ideology.

Front 25

Horatio Alger

Back 25

Writer of books for boys in the 1870s, 80s, and 90s, who invented the rags-to-riches formula. In his books, hard-working and energetic boys, who are also morally good, will rise in society and become “somebody” – myth of the self-made man

Front 26

Naturalism

Back 26

A later version of realism (1890s+) which explored the philosophy of determinism and social Darwinism. Terms like the survival of the fittest, natural selection, the struggle for survival and the determination by strong forces/energies (instincts, the environment) apply.

Front 27

Progressivism

Back 27

Reform movement at the end of the 19th Century in reaction to the Industrialization and the problems of the Gilded Age. It called for government activities against corruption and social misery (e.g. muckraking journalism) and for more efficiency in all areas of society

Front 28

Modernism

Back 28

Name for various cultural movements in the West (Europe, USA, Latin America) which reacted to the sense of social breakdown, alienation, acceleration and automation of modern life. It reacted against the ordered ideas of Victorianism, Realism and tradition. Examples are Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism etc.

Front 29

Armory Show

Back 29

Art Exhibition in New York in 1913, which introduced modernist art to America. First American contact with Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, Gaugin etc

Front 30

Harlem Renaissance

Back 30

Lively and multifaceted cultural movement centered in Harlem, New York, which produced African-American art (literature, paintings, photography, film, music) characterized by pride and self-assertion, yet haunted by the trope of “primitivism”.

Front 31

Popular Culture

Back 31

Popular forms of entertainment, which were exploited by the culture industry since the end of the 19th century (shows, parks, radio, film, newspapers, serial novels etc.). According to Ostendorf they are characterized by a belief in the common man, egalitarianism, liberalism, the moral community and pragmatic problem solving.

Front 32

WPA Photography

Back 32

Documentary photography sponsored by the Roosevelt Administration in the New Deal through the Works Progress Administration. Examples are Lange’s Migrant Mother and works by Walter Evans and others

Front 33

Social Realism

Back 33

A return to realist techniques within modernist literature in order to explore questions of poverty, history, middle class life etc. Examples are the works of Steinbeck, Lewis and Faulkner

Front 34

Counterculture

Back 34

Youth Movement in the 1960s inspired by the civil rights movement, opposing militarism (Vietnam), technocracy, bureaucracy, conformism. It was influenced by philosophy, psychoanalysis and Buddhism.

Front 35

Postmodernism

Back 35

International movement in the arts that embraces eclecticism, historical nostalgia, play, paradox, dissonance. Important themes are identity, history, consumer culture, loss of orientation and the disbelief in grand narratives

Front 36

Grand Narratives

Back 36

=meta narratives, belief systems which claim to explain the course of history and the necessities of the future in a comprehensive and normative way (Liberalism, Marxism, Christianity, Judaism, the Islam etc.)

Front 37

Gender Performance

Back 37

The idea that gender (socially sanctioned masculine or feminine behavior) does not “naturally” follow biological sex, but is in fact a publicly supported or a suppressed performance, which has a normalizing consequence

Front 38

Orientalism

Back 38

Imitation or depiction of Middle Eastern, South Asian and East Asian cultures by writers, painters etc. from the West. Very often, the East has served as “the other” and has been essentialized as underdeveloped, barbaric, exotic, wild etc. with a patronizing point of view

Front 39

Hybridity

Back 39

The suggestion that on account of various colonialisms and neo-colonialisms (including globalization) cultural identities are not
marked by essential/natural qualities but by blends, mixtures, appropriations and imitations of diverse elements.

Front 40

Post/Neo-colonialism

Back 40

Theoretical orientation which explores the consequences of colonizations, de-colonizations and (capitalist, neo-liberal) neo-colonizations. These consequences are present in questions of identities (hybridity, nostalgia), observations (orientalism, colonial gaze), migrations (Diasporas, borderlands) and forms of power (subalternity, hegemony, othering)