Service learning, a pedagogy that has many supporters, encourages learning with civic engagement. In addition, according to Department of American Studies, service learning as a required course component is beneficial because it establishes a common ground for dialogue and for synthesis of observations from the community site, and the class…

African American Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Women's Studies programs in higher education have received wide support from faculty members and students, yet few programs offer a major or have tenure-line faculty positions. Our analysis used sociological theories to generate testable implications about the chances that an institution will offer…

Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" describes a callous America in which the dollar trumps justice. It famously exposed the American meatpacking industry's loathsome practices and prompted federal consumer-protection laws. It is, however, primarily a sympathetic sketch of the foreign born, those fabled "masses yearning to breathe free" that Americans…

Provides an interpretation of survey results of historians by an Italian scholar of American studies. Maintains that U.S. historians and historiography are changing the way Italian and other European scholars view history and its societal role. Concludes that cultural and intellectual pluralism is deeply rooted in U.S. political culture. (CFR)

Outlines the education and career of John Hope Franklin, a Black historian. (MK)

The assertion that Chicano Studies lack legitimacy in academe is questioned. Chicano Studies programs and courses have now been in existence for more than 30 years and Chicano scholars have produced an impressive body of literature. The Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Houston is described as an example of the gains that…

The purpose of this study is to explore perceptions of return migration experiences and gain knowledge from rural residents who have left to obtain a college education and start careers in non-rural areas, and who then returned to their rural hometowns with the social and economic benefits of a college education, and other valuable resources. This…

Drawing largely from the realm of performance theory, critical race theory, and Asian American studies, the author examines the ways in which performance, performativity, and the cooptation of aesthetic forms constitute and disrupt racial identity categories. In this article, the author focuses on the growing contemporary artistic practice of…

Ask the average person what comes to mind at the mention of the Black Panther Party (BPP). Odds are the answer involves armed African-Americans winding up in shootouts with police. Those images have overshadowed the Panthers' free breakfast programs, medical clinics and other efforts to improve poor Black neighborhoods in the late 1960s. Also…

A stage model of Black adolescent racial identity from the perspective of its use by educational researchers in the United States who employ it to explain the academic and social decisions that Black youth make in secondary schools was examined. Researchers often draw on stage models to explicitly challenge forms of White dominance in studies…

In this article, the author offers some thoughts on life as native scholars in academia, along with some possible strategies for survival and achievement. Recognizing how hard it is every day, how crazy this life is in the twenty-first century after everything the communities, families, and nations have gone through, the author considers it a…

This article extends and expands the existing literature on critical thinking (CT) by both establishing the need for more student-centered research on the topic and reporting on the findings of a CT research project with two central, related goals: 1) To record and analyze undergraduate students' definition of CT and 2) To create an easy-to-use…

To be educationally sound, the flow of cultures into the United States must be viewed multidirectionally, not as a unidirectional, east-to-west phenomenon. (MM)

Outlines an innovative American Studies program in an Alabama high school. (MD)

This theme issue contains the following articles on libraries as agencies of culture: (1) "American Libraries and Agencies of Culture" (Thomas Augst); (2) "The Sound of the Civic: Reading Noise at the New York Public Library" (Ari Kelman); (3) "High Culture, Low Culture: The Singular Duality of the Library of Congress" (Elizabeth Jane Aikin); (4)…