Definitions

Question 1

Anthropocene

Answer 1

The Anthropocene is a new suggested geological period succeeding
the Holocene (which is actually our own period since the end of the
glacial periods) marking the influence of human beings
(Anthropos) on geology (decrease in biodiversity, climate change,
pollution). It was defined in the 1980s and 2000s.

Question 2

Culture

Answer 2

All material and symbolic practices of a society, which serve as
systems of orientation or interpretation – culture is organized in
discourses

Question 3

American Exceptionalism

Answer 3

The idea that America is not only different from other states but
rather different from all states because it has a specific, perhaps
divine mission in world history. In this sense it is unique,
exceptional and „the greatest country in the world.“

Question 4

American Studies

Answer 4

A mixture of historical and literary scholarship including questions
of urban studies, media studies especially interested in structures of
social differentiation: race, class, gender, ability, age etc.

Question 5

Trickster

Answer 5

Mythological figure in indigenous American cultures: a
transformer, boundary crosser who is both good and bad, male and
female; often a friend and teacher for the human beings, somebody
who stole the fire from the gods. He is often called “Coyote”.
Related to Brer Rabbit, Till Eugenspiegel, Reineke Fuchs

Question 6

Conquest according to Stuart Hall

Answer 6

An act of taking possession that goes along with the idealization or
vilification of the indigenous population through projection and the
imposition of European categories and the failure to respect
difference.

Question 7

Invisible Bullets

Answer 7

Indigenous people believed that they were being killed by the white
people through “invisible bullets” – they died from diseases (such
as smallpox) which the Europeans brought to America.

Question 8

City upon a Hill

Answer 8

John Winthrop used this phrase from the bible to tell his Puritan
brethren what he expected of them: to be a shining example of
Christianity and perfection for the whole world. Perhaps the origin
of American Exceptionalism.

Question 9

Predestination/Providence

Answer 9

Providence, according to the Puritans, is the book of history, in
which all events, past or future, are pre-determined by divine will. As a result all human actions, fates, ideas are predestined/foretold.

Question 10

King Philip’s War/Metacomet’s War

Answer 10

Colonial/Intercultural war between the white population of New
England (the settler colonists) and the Wapanoag Nation with their
sachem (chief) Metacom. It killed 40% of the indigenous
population in New England; prisoners were sold into slavery; the
power of the indigenous nation was broken.

Question 11

American Enlightenment

Answer 11

Also called the Age of Reason, period that led up to the American
Revolution, characterized by writings from John Adams, Thomas
Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin etc. Culminated in the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with the Bill of
Rights (“all men are created equal” etc.)

Question 12

Checks and Balances

Answer 12

The separation of powers (executive, legislative, judiciary) through
specific institutions (presidency, Congress, the courts).

Question 13

Federal Style in Architecture

Answer 13

The Palladian style of architecture (imitations of Greek and Roman
architecture) imported from Europe to America by Thomas
Jefferson to serve as a symbol for the new republic – it suggests
learning, democracy, civilization but also empire, whiteness and
elitism.

Question 14

Ante-bellum Reform Movements

Answer 14

At the end of the Early Republic, during the Ante-Bellum era a
variety of reform movements emerged: abolitionism, temperance,
the Sunday School movement, penitentiary reform, dietary reform
etc.

Question 15

Cult of True Womanhood

Answer 15

Aka the cult of domesticity: a new (sentimental) image of women
as the angel in the house, characterized by the four cardinal virtues
of domesticity, purity, piety and submissiveness.

Question 16

Tocqueville’s America

Answer 16

Alexis de Tocqueville, French noblemen, travelled through
America in the 1830s. He wrote Democracy in America, in which
he described the American character, notably individualism,
restlessness, materialism, tyranny of the majority etc.

Question 17

Manifest Destiny

Answer 17

The idea (in the 1830s) that it is the divine mission of the United
States to overspread the entire American continent because of its
“superior” democratic institutions. A form of exceptionalism,
beginning of American Imperialism.

Question 18

Indian Removal

Answer 18

Policy of the United States against indigenous nations (e.g.
Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Creek), which were
evicted in the 1830s to the areas West of the Mississippi. This was
a policy of ethnic cleansing, which resulted in thousands of deaths
(Trail of Tears, 1830/31).

Question 19

Self-reliance

Answer 19

The concept, made famous by Ralph Waldo Emerson, that the time
has come for individuals and America as a whole to leave behind
imitation (of European ideas) and to rely on one’s own, true self.
Part of the transcendentalist and romantic discourse of selfimprovement

Question 20

Conservation

Answer 20

With the industrialization and romanticism an interest in the
protection, preservation or restoration of natural environments and
ecological communities evolved. Theodore Roosevelt was called
the conservationist president (1901-09), saved Yellowstone and
created the US Forest Service; John Muir, ecologist, philosopher
helped establish Yosemite and Sequoia.

Question 21

Middle Passage

Answer 21

The transportation of millions of people from Africa to the
Americas on slave ships. Many died during the passage. For the
others it remained a traumatic climax and symbol of their
deportation.

Question 22

Fugitive Slave Law

Answer 22

A law according to which fugitive slaves from the South have to be
returned by the North. Part of the Compromise of 1850 between
North and South, it actually deepened the tensions between North
and South and led (among other things) to Stowe’s novel Uncle
Tom’s Cabin.

Question 23

Minstrel Show

Answer 23

Popular entertainment show emerging in the 1830s with skits,
variety acts, dancing and music performed by white people in
blackface. It made fun of black people and affirmed several
stereotypes about African Americans.

Question 24

Plessy vs. Ferguson

Answer 24

Racist Supreme Court decision (from 1896) in which segregation in
the South (i.e. Jim Crow laws) were upheld through the formula
“separate but equal”. The decision was valid until 1954.

Question 25

Indian Appropriation Acts

Answer 25

Several acts (1851, 71 etc.) according to which members of
indigenous nations were moved to reservations in the West. From
1871 on no Indian tribes were recognized as independent nations
and indigenous people were treated as individuals and “wards” of
the federal government.

Question 26

Turner Thesis

Answer 26

Frederick Jackson Turner suggested in 1893 that the American
character and American democratic sentiment were formed through
the frontier between civilization and wilderness. He succeeded to
establish the myth of the West and rugged individualist, but his
thesis is today largely rejected.

Question 27

Realism

Answer 27

Western movement in the arts (starting in France in the 1850s) as a
reaction to Romanticism and Sentimentalism. Realists rejected the
demand for morality in the arts and turned with a vengeance to
mundane topics such as business, science, technology, the social
question and modern problems of life.

Question 28

Gilded Age

Answer 28

Term coined by Mark Twain for the era of big business in
American in the post-bellum time. The Gilded Age was perceived
as characterized by materialism, corruption, exploitation and probusiness ideology.

Question 29

Horatio Alger

Answer 29

Writer of books for boys in the 1870s, 80s, and 90s, who invented
the rags-to-riches formula. In his books, hard-working and
energetic boys, who are also morally good, will rise in society and
become “somebody” – myth of the self-made man.

Question 30

Naturalism

Answer 30

A later version of realism (1890s+) which explored the philosophy
of determinism and social Darwinism. Terms like the survival of
the fittest, natural selection, the struggle for survival and the determination by strong forces/energies (instincts, the environment)
apply.

Question 31

Stream of Thought

Answer 31

William James’s description of human consciousness. James
describes cognition as a “stream of thought, of consciousness, of
subjective life.” All experience takes place within this stream and is
the only known reality for the individual. The law is: “absolute
insulation” (within the individual), “irreducible pluralism” of sense
impressions.

Question 32

Modernism

Answer 32

Name for various cultural movements in the West (Europe, USA,
Latin America) which reacted to the sense of social breakdown,
alienation, acceleration and automation of modern life. It reacted
against the ordered ideas of Victorianism, Realism and tradition.
Examples are Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism etc.

Question 33

Armory Show

Answer 33

Art Exhibition in New York in 1913, which introduced modernist
art to America. First American contact with Picasso, Matisse,
Brancusi, Gaugin etc.

Question 34

Film Noir

Answer 34

Modernist American Cinema in the late 1930s and the 1940s
working with low key lighting (noir), which reacts to the modern
experiences of urbanization, the rise of suburbia, changes in
manners and values, alienation, the transformation of gender roles,
middle class life and doubts about the future.

Question 35

Harlem Renaissance

Answer 35

Lively and multifaceted cultural movement centered in Harlem,
New York, which produced African-American art (literature,
paintings, photography, film, music) characterized by pride and
self-assertion, yet haunted by the trope of “primitivism”.

Question 36

Popular Culture

Answer 36

Popular forms of entertainment, which were exploited by the
culture industry since the end of the 19th century (shows, parks,
radio, film, newspapers, serial novels etc.). According to Ostendorf
they are characterized by a belief in the common man,
egalitarianism, liberalism, the moral community and pragmatic
problem solving.

Question 37

Populism

Answer 37

Agrarian Protest Movement after the Civil War calling for the
support of the “common man” (read: farmer). Objects: Cheaper money (free silver), nationalization of railroads, graduated income tax, direct election of senators. Partly haunted by white supremacy.

Question 38

Progressivism

Answer 38

Reform movement at the end of the 19th Century in reaction to the Industrialization and the problems of the Gilded Age. It called for government activities against corruption and social misery (e.g. muckraking journalism) and for more efficiency in all areas of society.

Question 39

WPA Photography

Answer 39

Documentary photography sponsored by the Roosevelt
Administration in the New Deal through the Works Progress Administration. Examples are Lange’s Migrant Mother and works by Walter Evans and others.

Question 40

Social Realism

Answer 40

A return to realist techniques within modernist literature in order to
explore questions of poverty, history, middle class life etc.
Examples are the works of Steinbeck, Lewis and Faulkner.

Question 41

Civil Rights Movement

Answer 41

African American protest movement led by Martin Luther King and
others. It insisted in non-violent action and civil disobedience and
organized demonstrations, boycotts, sit-ins and legal interventions.

Question 42

Counterculture

Answer 42

Youth Movement in the 1960s inspired by the civil rights
movement, opposing militarism (Vietnam), technocracy,
bureaucracy, conformism. It was influenced by philosophy,
psychoanalysis and Buddhism.

Question 43

Black Panther Party

Answer 43

Militant African American organization founded in Oakland, CA,
inspired by Malcolm X and Marxism. The Panthers patrolled with
arms and organized community social programs (breakfasts,
libraries etc.). It was discredited and destroyed by the FBI.

Question 44

Postmodernism

Answer 44

International movement in the arts that embraces eclecticism,
historical nostalgia, play, paradox, dissonance. Important themes
are identity, history, consumer culture, loss of orientation and the
disbelief in grand narratives.

Question 45

Grand Narratives

Answer 45

Aka meta narratives, belief systems which claim to explain the
course of history and the necessities of the future in a comprehensive and normative way (Liberalism, Marxism,
Christianity, Judaism, the Islam etc.)

Question 46

Gender Performance

Answer 46

The idea that gender (socially sanctioned masculine or feminine
behavior) does not “naturally” follow biological sex, but is in fact a
publicly supported or a suppressed performance, which has a
normalizing consequence.

Question 47

Orientalism

Answer 47

Imitation or depiction of Middle Eastern, South Asian and East
Asian cultures by writers, painters etc. from the West. Very often,
the East has served as “the other” and has been essentialized as
underdeveloped, barbaric, exotic, wild etc. with a patronizing point
of view.

Question 48

Hybridity

Answer 48

The suggestion that on account of various colonialisms and neocolonialisms
(including globalization) cultural identities are not
marked by essential/natural qualities but by blends, mixtures,
appropriations and imitations of diverse elements.

Question 49

Post/Neo-colonialism

Answer 49

Theoretical orientation which explores the consequences of
colonizations, de-colonizations and (capitalist, neo-liberal) neocolonizations.
These consequences are present in questions of
identities (hybridity, nostalgia), observations (orientalism, colonial
gaze), migrations (Diasporas, borderlands) and forms of power
(subalternity, hegemony, othering).

Question 50

Nativism

Answer 50

Anti-Immigration movement in the 1840s and 1850s (Know
Nothing Movement, American Party) that was Anti-Catholic, AntiIrish
and Anti-German. It wanted to reserve America for those born
in America.