Leo Marx recounts a story, told to him by the eminent British literary historian Richard Hoggart, of an encounter in the mid-1950s between Hoggart and a young Fulbright scholar who identified himself as a teacher of American Studies.

At this point, Hoggart understood completely just what the young man meant, although he also noted that no British scholar would ever be heard saying, “I believe in Britain!”

The anecdote is representative of the degree to which American Studies, as practiced by Americans in the United States at least, developed out of the political (and personal) convictions of its adherents. Although certain aspects of its work could be tied more directly to this or that program that is explicitly in the service of national and international political aims, such as the CIA’s involvement with literary magazines or the operations of UNESCO, it is clear that American Studies as a whole was always already ideological. As a disciplinary (or interdisciplinary) field, American Studies functions not only to study America, but to promote it: it being the idea of “America” itself, something that was not coextensive with the political or geographic entity known as the United States. Contrary to the many accusations by revisionist critics or even apologias by supposed traditionalists, the early practitioners of American Studies were not blind adherents to a particular government or political policy (far from it!). Rather, they were or became something like disciples of a new religion, one whose system of belief they were in fact helping to create.