The Program in American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania is devoted to the exploration and interpretation of the diverse cultures that, in past and present, have together shaped America. This involves the cultures of the colonized and colonizers of European possessions in North America, as well as those of the contemporary United States, the Caribbean, Mexico, and Canada. The Program's approach is both historical and ethnographic, and emphasizes the plurality of subcultures that condition any understanding of the dominant culture, and the relationships among ethnic, religious, racial and ideological groups in American society.
The distinctive aspect of the Program in American Civilization at Penn is its long-standing commitment to theoretical approaches to culture and society. This commitment is pluralistic. The program draws from diverse disciplinary bases, each of which offers its own specific theoretical contribution: cultural anthropology, literature, political science, history, folklore and folklife, sociology, and other fields. The Program is also creatively eclectic in its methods, embracing positions ranging from statistics to material culture, textual analysis and cultural studies.
Students in the Program have prepared for a wide range of careers, including academic research, teaching, curating and directing museums, government service, communications, politics, religion and business. The Program seeks to further the career goals of its students and works with the University Career Planning and Placement Service to help students find work after they receive their degrees.
The Program in American Civilization began as an interdepartmental degree program in the Graduate School in 1937 combining history and literature. It expanded to the undergraduate College in 1942, and added courses in political science to the program. By 1946, an introductory core course at the undergraduate level specifically in American Civilization was introduced under the leadership of Robert Spiller in English and Philip Jacobs in Political Science, with additional elective courses drawn from Sociology, Geography, Fine Arts, and Philosophy, as well as Literature, History and Political Science. A required senior seminar was added two years later. At the same time, the graduate program was reorganized with a broadened interdisciplinary structure.
In 1949, Anthony N. B. Garvan was appointed as a Fellow in American Civilization to specifically design and teach the introductory course, and he subsequently became the first faculty member to hold a regular appointment in the field of American Civilization at Penn. Shortly thereafter, John Cotter offered the first historical archaeology course in the field. Murray G. Murphey received the second regular faculty appointment in 1956, following upon a Rockefeller Fellowship. The graduate program was strengthened by representation from Anthropology and Thomas C. Cochran from History joined the interdisciplinary effort. A major grant from the Carnegie Foundation supported a five year effort to examine and redesign the program under its own budget, which resulted in departmental status in 1960. This also marked the emergence of American Civilization at Penn as a distinct area studies discipline grounded in cultural anthropology, which integrated theories of culture with American data and with theories and methods from other disciplines. Thus, the study of material culture was added to the Department's offerings as well as courses in literature, the arts, and statistical analysis.
By the mid-1960's, the undergraduate major involved required courses on both the American North and the American South, along with a wide selection of electives, including the first course on African-American experience in the University curriculum. In 1970, Melvyn Hammarberg was one of several new faculty added to the Department, which experienced a major expansion. The department adopted an ethnographic model of cultural description as a basis for courses on both the graduate and undergraduate levels. This model emphasized comparative study and the analysis of primary data, whether documentary, auditory, material or visual, and the integration of this data as evidence for the understanding subcultures in relation to each other and to the dominant culture. A required course on the American West was added at the undergraduate level. Drew Faust joined the faculty as a student of the American South. The 1980's saw the addition of courses in popular culture and the development of the program in Historical Archaeology as a distinctive component under the direction of Robert Schuyler, reinforcing the anthropological direction of the Department.
In the late 1980's and early 1990's, the School of Arts and Sciences embarked on an administrative restructuring that disbanded the department, dispersed the faculty to disciplines, and recreated American Civilization as a Program at the undergraduate level parallel to the Graduate Group at the graduate level. Upon recommendation of the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, the Department of American Civilization was officially ended by action of the University Trustees in March of 1994. This was part of a shift emphasizing traditional disciplinary departments rather than interdisciplinary ones, and was intended to recast the study of American Civilization at Penn in this new interdepartmental program and graduate group mode.
In the 1995-96 academic year, the Deans decided to suspend admissions to the Graduate Group in American Civilization, and one year later the Dean of the College chose to close the undergraduate American Civilization major. In both cases, students currently enrolled were to be supported in completing their respective courses of study. Thus, a major era in the study of American Civilization at Penn has come to an end.
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Revised 16 June 1998