American Studies Program

American Studies was the first interdisciplinary program offering both  major and minor courses of study established at Manhattanville College.   Its core sequence of courses introduces students to interdisciplinary approaches to the interpretive study of  North America's rich and diverse array of social phenomena, political institutions and ideals, intellectual life, spiritual and religious beliefs, film, literature and forms of artistic expression.  

Flexibility and an individualized approach are hallmarks of the American Studies program.  Students self-design much of their interdisciplinary course of study through participating departments such as Art History, English, History, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology and World Religions. 

The links on this site provide introductory information on courses, faculty, career opportunities, resources, recent graduates and their work in American Studies.  Please contact Professor Colin Morris, the program director, if you have further questions or to arrange a meeting to discuss your interest in the program.

Professor Colin Morris 
Program Director
Office: Founders G-25D
Telephone: 323-5144
morrisc@mville.edu

An American Crossroads
In 1883, William Frederick Cody, known as Buffalo Bill, created the Wild West show, a spectacularly successful piece of mass entertainment and marketing that propelled him to wealth and worldwide celebrity and helped create a lasting image of the American western frontier as an inevitable and glorious triumph of progress and American civilization over wilderness "savagery."  In 1893, at the Chicago World's Fair, his show was attended by Susan. B. Anthony, the renowned suffragist who had been put on trial for illegal voting in 1872.  Cody stopped the show to salute to Anthony in the stands.  She waved her handkerchief in response.  The new mass circulation media of the day quickly circulated the story of this unlikely celebrity encounter across the nation.
At the Fair, historian Frederick Jackson Turner had announced that the American western frontier had finally closed.  The meeting of Buffalo Bill and Susan B. Anthony, in its own way, also represented the end of the western frontier era and its mythologizing in popular entertainment. It also pointed to the opening of a modern America in which new and unfamiliar "frontiers"of "progress"--technological, industrial, cultural, political, individual--would be promoted and contested.

http://www.nypl.org/research/chss