to see our civilization as a whole and study the interrelationship of all its parts as every great civilization of the past has been studied and understood?ö Although Toynbee had not defined America as a self-contained civilization, the scholars of those decades, in which AmericaÆs isolation and safety from the world raging over almost all the rest of the world, seemed to feel that America came close enough to ToynbeeÆs definition of a civilization to make it a coherent field of study in its own right.
Wyld comments that by the 1970s, it seemed axiomatic that American Studies had always operated on the premise that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. He related that the earliest program in American Studies, that at the University of Pennsylvania, began in 1938 as a cooperative program between the departments of History and English Literature, which remain core fields within American Studies. During the following decades, other academic fields came under the purview of American Studies as their importance and relevance for a holistic understanding of American civilization became clear. The fields represented in WyldÆs anthology are political science, history, philosophy, literature, folklore studies, anthropology, art, and music. Currently one would expect the various fields of Ethnic Studies--African-American, Native American, Hispanic American, etc.--to come under the umbrella of American Studies as well.
In pursuing American Studies at most colleges, a student would not usually be taking courses titled ôAmerican Studies 301,ö and so on, unless a special interdepartment
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