1. A thorough review of this problem, with some suggestions for solution, can be found in Sklar, Robert, “The Search for an American Studies ‘Philosophy’: A Bibliography of New Directions,” American Quarterly, 27 (08 1975), 245–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. For the intellectual functions of paradigms in scholarly communities, see Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 10–51.Google Scholar

3. To date, there is no comprehensive history of the American Studies movement, though Pershing Vartanian is working on one. Cecil Tate has written the only book-length study, a critique of symbol-myth-image works of the 1940s and 1950s. See The Search for a Method in American Studies (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1973).Google Scholar See also, for aspects of the movement's history, Sklar, Robert, “American Studies and the Realities of America,” American Quarterly, 22 (Summer 1970), 597–605CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Spiller, Robert, “Value and Method in American Studies,” in Mickelson, Joel, ed., American Personality and the Creative Arts (Minneapolis, Minn.: Burgess Press, 1969), pp. 1–15Google Scholar; Spiller, , “Unity and Diversity in the Study of American Culture: The American Studies Association in Perspective,” American Quarterly, 25 (12 1973), 611–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wise, Gene, “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement,” American Quarterly, 31 (forthcoming Summer 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Finally, for the wider cultural context out of which academic American Studies was born in the late 1920s and early 1930s, see Cowley, Malcolm, Exile's Return, rev. ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1951)Google Scholar; and Susman, Warren's introduction to Culture and Commitment, 1929–1945 (New York: Braziller, 1973), pp. 1–24.Google Scholar

4. See the 1970 summer supplement to the American Quarterly, which describes the historical evolution of several American Studies programs in the country. See especially the program descriptions of Yale, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Amherst.

5. For critiques of the intellectual consensus within which these works were produced, see Sykes, Richard, “American Studies and the Concept of Culture: A Theory and a Method,” American Quarterly, 15 (Summer 1963), 253–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sklar, Robert, “American Studies”Google Scholar; Tate, Cecil, Search for a MethodGoogle Scholar; Kuklick, Bruce, “Myth and Symbol in American Studies,” American Quarterly, 24 (10 1972), 435–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kelly, Gordon, “Literature and the Historian,” American Quarterly, 26 (Spring 1974), 141–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Berkhofer, Robert, “Clio and the Culture Concept: Some Impressions of a Changing Relationship in American Historiography,” Social Science Quarterly, 53, No. 2 (09 1972), 297–320.Google Scholar For a latter-day defense of this consensus, see Marx, Leo, “American Studies: Defense of an ‘Unscientific’ Method,” New Literary History, 1 (10 1969), 75–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. The fullest account of the 1960s and the shattering of an American cultural consensus is O'Neill, William, Coming Apart: An Informal History of the 1960's (New York: Quadrangle, 1971).Google Scholar

7. For a review of historical scholarship in the 1940s and 1950s, see Higham, John, “The Rise of American Intellectual History,” American Historical Review, 56 (04 1951), 453–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the more recent situation, see Wise, Gene, “The Decline of Intellectual History Studies,” CLIO, 4 (Fall 1975), 55–71Google Scholar; and Hays, Samuel, “A Systematic Social History,” in American History: Retrospect and Prospect, eds., Billias, George and Grob, Gerald (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1971), pp. 315–66.Google Scholar

8. For evidence of recent growth and continued vitality in the movement, see Bassett, Charles, “Undergraduate and Graduate American Studies Programs in the United States,” American Quarterly, 27 (08 1975), 306–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. I have written at greater length on these two positions in “‘Paradigm Dramas.’”

10. Toffler, Alvin, Future Shock (New York: Bantam, 1971), pp. 350–55.Google Scholar

11. See Machlup, Fritz, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962).Google Scholar

12. See Wise, Gene, “Historical Thought and the ‘Invisible Governments’ of Scholarship,” Reviews in American History, 2 (12 1974), 568–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. For a study of this transformation in the historical enterprise, see Higham, John, History: The Development of Historical Studies in the United States (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 6–51.Google Scholar

14. For the two types of history writing during the early and late nineteenth century, see Levin, David, History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, Parkman (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1959)Google Scholar; and Herbst, Jurgen, The German Historical School in American Scholarship (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1965).Google Scholar

15. Adams, George Burton, “History and the Philosophy of History,” cited in W. Stull Holt, “The Idea of Scientific History in America,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 1 (06 1940), 359–60.Google Scholar

16. For a philosophical analysis of this mind-set in the profession, see Kuklick, Bruce, “The Mind of the Historian,” History and Theory, 8 (Fall 1969), 315 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Becker, Carl, “Everyman His Own Historian,” American Historical Review, 37 (01 1932), 221–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. For an analysis of how the academic professions have risen to power in twentieth-century America, see Jencks, Christopher and Riesman, David, The Academic Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968).Google Scholar See also Kuklick, Henrika, “The Organization of Social Science in the United States,” American Quarterly, 28 (Spring 1976), 124–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the late nineteenth-century transition in the scholar's role from amateur to professional, see Haskell, Thomas's brilliant study, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1977).Google Scholar

19. For Franz Boas and the “field work paradigm” in anthropology, see Harris, Marvin, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1968), pp. 250–318Google Scholar; and Wallace, Anthony F. C., “Paradigmatic Processes in Culture Change,” American Anthropologist, 74 (06 1972), 469.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a radical critique of this tradition, see the essays in Hymes, Dell, ed., Reinventing Anthropology (New York: Vintage, 1974).Google Scholar For the Chicago School and its impact on the discipline, see Farris, Robert, Chicago Sociology, 1920–1932 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970).Google Scholar For the wider cultural context in which this information revolution has taken place, see Bell, Daniel, “The Tableau of Social Change—Today and Tomorrow,” The Reforming of General Education (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 69–143.Google Scholar

20. Gouldner, Alvin, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York: Basic Books, 1970)Google Scholar; Mills, C. Wright, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Nisbet, Robert, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966)Google Scholar; Berger, Peter, Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1963)Google Scholar; Friedrichs, Robert, A Sociology of Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1970).Google Scholar Friedrichs' book won the Sorokin Award of the American Sociological Association in 1971.

21. Dahrendorf, Ralf, “Homo Sociologicus: On the History, Significance, and Limits of the Category of Social Role,” in Essays in the Theory of Society (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1968), p. 22.Google Scholar

22. Ibid., p. 35.

23. Ibid., p. 25.

24. Hazel, Erik, “Where Does American Studies Begin?” graduate journal in American Studies 681, Case Western Reserve Univ., Fall 1972.Google Scholar

25. For an early example of a similar genre, see Arthur O. Lovejoy's agenda for the field of intellectual history, “Reflections on the History of Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 1 (01 1940), 1–24.Google Scholar

26. Erikson, Kai, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966), pp. 71–107.Google Scholar

27. Rueckert, William, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1963), p. 22.Google Scholar

28. Commoner, Barry, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (New York: Bantam, 1962), p. 29.Google Scholar

29. For excellent advice on how to employ this “connecting” temper when moving outside one's home discipline, see Hofstadter, Richard, “History and the Social Sciences,” in The Varieties of History, ed., Stern, Fritz (New York: Meridian, 1956), pp. 359–70.Google Scholar

30. Trachtenberg, Alan, Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965).Google Scholar

31. Erikson, Erik, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958).Google Scholar

32. The most substantial critique in the field of the power of academe's conventions—with suggestions on how to transcend them—is Mechling, Jay, Merideth, Robert, and Wilson, David, “American Culture Studies: The Discipline and the Curriculum,” American Quarterly, 25 (10 1973), 353–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. I am presently at work on a book-length project developing this “experience-explanation” strategy at greater length. The present essay is part of that project. The book is to be titled Experience and Explanation in American Culture Studies: An Interdisciplinary Strategy for Inquiry.

34. Smith, Henry Nash, “Can ‘American Studies’ Develop a Method?” American Quarterly, 9 (Summer 1957), 197–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35. Fitzgerald, Frances, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1973)Google Scholar; Halberstam, David, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Crest, 1973)Google Scholar; Wolfe, Tom, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Bantam, 1968)Google Scholar; Wills, Gary, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-made Man (New York: Signet, 1971).Google Scholar

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42. Benson, Lee, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961).Google Scholar

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45. Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967)Google Scholar—see Chap. 1, “The Literature of Revolution,” pp. 1–21.Google Scholar See also Wise, Gene, “From the ‘Modell’ to the Declaration: A Backward Reading in American Social Rhetorics,” Connections II, 3 (Summer 1976), 12–26.Google Scholar For the importance of cultural form in studying historical communications, see Stout, Harry's brilliant piece, “Culture, Structure, and the ‘New’ History,” Computers and the Humanities, 9 (1975), 213–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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48. I have described Faulkner's “perspectivistic” strategy in more detail in American Historical Explanations, pp. 3–56.Google Scholar

49. Berkhofer, Robert, A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis (New York: Free Press, 1969), pp. 319–20.Google Scholar

50. Morgan, Edmund, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975).Google Scholar

51. Ward, John William, “The Meaning of Lindbergh's Flight,” American Quarterly, 10 (Spring 1958), pp. 3–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52. Berger, Peter and Luckmann, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), pp. 47 ff.Google Scholar

53. Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958).Google Scholar Weber's study was first published in German in 1904. See also Tawney, R. H., Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926).Google Scholar

54. Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939), p. viiGoogle Scholar; The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953).Google Scholar

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56. For more on this “range of convenience” idea, and its uses in understanding the dynamic encounter between mind and world, “explanation” and “experience,” see Kelly, George, A Theory of Personality: The Psychology of Personal Constructs (New York: W. W. Norton, 1955).Google Scholar