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Taking Stands: American Studies at Century's End Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 29, 1999

"Diversity," "Radical Roots," "Transformation," "Disturbing the Peace," "Loose Change"-the titles of past presidential addresses to the American Studies Association invoked inspired challenges to the status quo, to the conventional, to what passed and passes for common sense. In addition to these creative provocations and imagined transformations, my predecessors took stock of the current state of American studies, intellectually and institutionally. I shall try to follow their lead. My own engagement with American studies dates from my days as a graduate student in the American Civilization Program at New York University. Already the field I encountered in the late 1960s was not, if it ever had been, the monolithic American studies described by Jesse Lemisch as a triumphant exceptionalism, celebrating the United States' supposed "unity, consensus, classlessness, lack of conflict."' True, in the courses that I took with Paul Baker, who fifteen years later would be with Charles Bassett the first recipient of the Mary Turpie Award, we were still reading Gabriel, Tyler, Curti, and Matthiessen. These were the magisterial texts that Linda Kerber, in her presidential address eleven years ago, cited as typical of the post-World War II curriculum. But we did not swim entirely in these Olympian waters. Concurrently with Matthiessen's formalist analyses, stocked with the traditional