Preface:

A long tradition of scholarship dating back at least to Alexis de Tocqueville’s great work, Democracy in America, has argued that the United States has from its beginning had a distinctive political culture, dominated by beliefs in popular self-governance and individual rights and liberties. Many writers argue that commitments to popular self-governance have grown more truly democratic over time, and some have quarreled over whether beliefs in self-governance or devotion to individual rights (including property rights) have been more fundamental in America.

But in recent decades especially, scholars have contended that American political culture has always included much more than beliefs in democracy and individual liberties. It has included powerful religious traditions, originally mostly Protestant, but more diverse over time; traditions of racial and ethnic identities, some repressive, some liberating; contested traditions of gender roles; ideologies of nativism, and also rival ideologies celebrating multi-culturalism.

Participants in this seminar explored primary sources of American political culture – political speeches, government documents, excerpts from some influential political novels, plays, and films – from the nation’s founding to the present. Together, we sought to understand and asses the different, often interwoven, and historically evolving traditions that have made up American political culture, producing an array of curriculum units geared to introduce students of all ages to topics both historical and current that highlight the American experience.