Definitions Flashcards
Culture
All material and symbolic practices of a society, which serve as systems of orientation or interpretation - culture is organised in discourses
American Studies
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 etc.
American Exceptionalism
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”
Checks and Balances
The separation of powers (executive, legislative, judiciary) through specific institutions (presidency, Congress, the courts)
Trickster
Mythological figure in indigenous American cultures: a transformer, boundary crosser who is both good and bad, male and female; often a friend and teacher for the human beings, somebody who stole fire from the gods. He is often called “Coyote”. Related to Brer Rabbit, Till Eugenspiegel, Reinike Fuchs
Conquest according to Stuart Hall
An act of taking possession that goes along with the idealisation or vilification of the indigenous population through projection and the impositions of European categories and the failure to respect difference
Invisible Bullets
Indigenous people believed that they were being killed by the white people through “invisible bullets” - they died from diseases (such as smallpox) which the Europeans brought to America
City upon a Hill
John Winthrop used this phrase from the bible to tell hid 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
Predestination / Providence
Providence, according to the Puritans, 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.
King Phillip’s War / Metacomet’s War
Colonial/Intercultural war between the white population of New England (the settler colonialists) and the Wapanoag Nation with their sachem (chief) Metacom. It killed 40% of the indigenous population in New England; prisoners were sold into slavery; the power of the indigenous nation was broken.
American Enlightenment
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.)
Federal style in Architecture
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.
Age of reform
Period spanning the end of the Early Republic and the Ante-Bellum era, in which a variety of reform movements emerged: abolitionism, temperance, the Sunday School movement, penitentiary reform, dietary reform etc.
Nativism
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
Cult of True Womanhood
Aka 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 and submissiveness.
Tocqueville’s America
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.
Manifest destiny
The idea (in the 1830s) 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
Indian Removal
Policy of the United States against indigenous nations (e.g. Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Creek), which were evicted in the 1830s to the areas west of the Mississippi. This was a policy of ethnic cleansing, which resulted in thousands of deaths (Trail of Tears, 1830/31)
Self-reliance
The concept, made famous by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the time has come for individuals and America as a whole to leave behind imitation (of European ideas) and to rely on ones own, true self. Part of the transcendentalist and romantic discourse of self-improvement
Middle passage
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
Fugitive slave law
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’
Minstrel Show
Popular entertainment show emerging in the 1830s with skits, variety acts, dancing ad music performed by white people in blackface. It made fun of black people ad affirmed several stereotypes about African Americans
Plessy vs. Ferguson
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 decision was valid until 1954.
Indian Removal Act
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 recognised as independent nations and indigenous people were treated as individuals and “wards” of the federal government.
