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Welcome to American Studies On-Line |
You are about to embark on a journey that explores many aspects of American Culture. You will travel back in time to before Europeans colonized America and follow the development of the country through major historical episodes including; Colonization, the American Revolution, the Civil War, abolitionism and women’s suffrage movements, World War I & II, waves of immigration, the Great Depression and through the Civil Rights Movement. Along the way you will meet influential figures and get to know them through their writings, speeches, and sermons.
As ideas are expressed directly through nonfiction and indirectly through fiction, both types of literature will be explored. The story of America will unravel through these sources and you will come to find it an interesting epic full of conflicts. Some conflicts occur between nations, but many important battles will occur among those people making up the country. There will be struggles between racial and ethnic groups, political parties, and social classes. There are many aspects worth exploring whenever history is studied; literature usually embodies a number of these including culture, societal norms and ideologies. Therefore, the literature and articles selected for this on-line text have been chosen because they will provide an accurate picture of these aspects.
Henry James once wrote, ""The moral is that the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion."