Given this longstanding tendency to define America in mythic terms, we must be skeptical of the common boast that the United States is the only modern nation founded on an idea—democratic equality—rather than on a shared tribal or racial ancestry. Such a claim to exceptionalism is of course particularly appealing to intellectuals, who traffic in ideas. In the early years of American studies as an academic discipline, in the 1950s, the field’s foundational texts located the essential meaning of America variously in its history of westward movement, in religious and philosophical individualism, or in the worship of progress and modernity. As the discipline has evolved, it now attempts to show how such mythic definitions arise in response to historically specific needs and conditions. When we go in search of what is most profoundly American, scholars now insist, we blinker our sights to the ways in which the actual history of U.S. actions and policies may have diverged from those expectations. Moreover, any single response to the prompt to define “America” tends to imply that this larger idea or ideal has remained essentially unchanged over time, transcending ethnic and racial differences. “America” has generally been used as a term of consolidation, homogenization, and unification, not a term that invites recognition of difference, dissonance, and plurality—all issues of crucial import in the post–civil rights movement era.

This is an excerpt from Kirsten Silva Gruesz's entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 20).