American Studies – the Local and the Global

Abstract

American Studies is one of the first unique interdisciplinary areas of inquiry, emerging in the 1930s, strengthening and getting more and more popular after 1960s and 1970s, when
inter-, multi-, cross-, and trans-disciplinary exertion spread everywhere. Scholars found it enlightening and enchanting to “smudge genres”, to trespass the boundaries between
disciplines and borrow methods, sources, and subjects of other fields to open up their minds. Subsequently, not only in diverse of states in the U.S. universities, but according our
research, in different parts of the globe the universities (International Black Sea University – Republic of Georgia; Akaki Tsereteli State University – Republic of Georgia; The George
Washington University, Washington D.C. US; Penn State University – Pennsylvania, US; University of Michigan – US; University of New Mexico, US; University of SZEGED, Hungary;
have freedom and are encouraged to add, subtract, and rearrange curriculums of American Studies programs on all three levels (B.A., M.A., Ph.D.), depending on geography,
history, time, the groups of professors, the mission. And the mission is one: to describe the social, political and economic “rules” that have caused and are causing inequality in the U.S.;
to strengthen democratic institutions on the example of the history of the United States of America.
Keywords: Culture, curriculum, exceptional, interdisciplinary, transnational