-American Studies has long been a welcoming home for adventurous intellectuals. Whether blurring disciplines or fighting for social justice, students of the field have generated new ways of understanding the culture and politics of the United States in a global context. But what happens when these innovations become widely adopted? Can a shared set of -rules- become a springboard to creativity? Ideal for classroom use, American Studies: A User's Guide offers readers: a critical introduction to the history and methods of the field useful strategies for textual interpretation, archive building, contextualization, comparative analysis, and theory interwoven toolkits that provide the basic framework necessary to understanding the field---Provided by publisher.