Features a subject-based directory of online resources related to the study of American culture, presented by the American Studies Crossroads Project within the American Studies Program at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Lists and links to electronic resources in the categories of American economy and politics, race and ethnicity, literature and hypertext, philosophy and religion, art and material culture, sociology and demography, and gender and sexuality, among others. Includes a site search engine and provides access to the Crossroads Project's home page.

American Studies has long been a home for adventurous students seeking to understand the culture and politics of the United States. Despite being taught in universities around the world, American Studies has resisted developing a coherent methodology for fear of losing the flexibility and freedom to imagine new avenues of thought. But what if these fears are misplaced? Through a fresh look at the origins of the field, this book contends that a shared set of “rules” can offer a springboard to creativity. American Studies: A User’s Guide offers readers a critical introduction to the history and methods of the field, useful strategies for interpretation, curation, analysis, and theory, and case studies of American Studies in practice.

This brand new addition to the acclaimed "History Highway" series is essential for anyone conducting historical research on North, Central, or South America. Complete with a CD with live links to sites, it directs users to the best and broadest, most current information on U.S., Canadian, and Latin American history available on the Internet. "The American History Highway": provides detailed, easy-to-use information on more than 1,700 websites; covers all periods of U.S., Canadian, and Latin American History; features new coverage of Hispanic American and Asian American History; includes chapters on environmental history, immigration history, and document collections; all site information is current and up-to-date; includes a CD of the entire contents with live links to sites - just install the disc, go online, and link directly to the sites; and, also provides a practical introduction to web-based research for students and history buffs of all ages.

How FBI surveillance influenced African American writing Few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover's white-bread Federal Bureau of Investigation. But behind the scenes the FBI's hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, F.B. Eyes exposes the Bureau’s intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. Starting in 1919, year one of Harlem’s renaissance and Hoover’s career at the Bureau, secretive FBI "ghostreaders" monitored the latest developments in African American letters. By the time of Hoover’s death in 1972, these ghostreaders knew enough to simulate a sinister black literature of their own. The official aim behind the Bureau’s close reading was to anticipate political unrest. Yet, as William J. Maxwell reveals, FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century. Taking his title from Richard Wright’s poem "The FB Eye Blues," Maxwell details how the FBI threatened the international travels of African American writers and prepared to jail dozens of them in times of national emergency. All the same, he shows that the Bureau’s paranoid style could prompt insightful criticism from Hoover’s ghostreaders and creative replies from their literary targets. For authors such as Claude McKay, James Baldwin, and Sonia Sanchez, the suspicion that government spy-critics tracked their every word inspired rewarding stylistic experiments as well as disabling self-censorship. Illuminating both the serious harms of state surveillance and the ways in which imaginative writing can withstand and exploit it, F.B. Eyes is a groundbreaking account of a long-hidden dimension of African American literature.