Gene Wise outlines in his article, the evolution of our pursuit to understand the American culture from more than one academic discipline, the birth and history of American Studies.
In his pursiut to capture the history of American Studies, Gene Wise states that, “we should try to understand our own movement as we would any other experience in America-that is, critically, in cultural and institutional context” (Wise 167). In studying this field, Wise suggests we see changes as ‘paradigm dramas’ so we can study movements or shifts in America from more than one perspective. It was thought that people were only studying what was happening but not fully understanding why they happened and the repercussions. We have different periods of scholarship the 1930’s-1950’s “functioned to make the American past intellectually ‘usable'” (Wise 179) based on asssumptions that the ‘American Mind’ had a unique sense of self based on their past experiences. So American Studies began organically through integrated studies of historical events by examining underlying forces and revolting against academic formalism (Wise).
Tricia's thoughts 
Hello triciaterhune. Reading Gene Wise. I understand his theory.of the mind. This is a new world with new minds.
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In your tweet sized summary, I was wondering who “our” is in the “pursuit to understand”? Would it be scholars, can it be everyday people, or is it someone else? Why do you think that it is important and is still important today to understand American culture, especially through different academic perspectives?
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In your tweet sized summary, I was wondering who “our” is in the “pursuit to understand”? Would it be scholars, can it be everyday people, or is it someone else? Why do you think that it is important and is still important today to understand American culture, especially through different academic perspectives?
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I meant the ‘our’ as scholars or students, anybody interested in learning in a more in-depth way. By looking at history from many perspectives, we better understand the causes and effects of our past. We should continue looking at our past and present through multiple disciplines to have a better understanding of our strenghts and short comings.
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I meant the ‘our’ as scholars or students, anybody interested in learning in a more in-depth way. By looking at history from many perspectives, we better understand the causes and effects of our past. We should continue looking at our past and present through multiple disciplines to have a better understanding of our strengths and shortcomings.
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Do you agree that emphasis is on the drama of transactional interplay in doing cultural history. It is not on charting a succession of more or less static “climates” of intellectual opinion.
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