In this class, whose rigor and supportive environment will enable students to draft four well-crafted essays, we will engage a range of published writing about U.S. citizenship. Its goal is to enhance students’ ability to think critically, analyze persuasively, and produce compelling prose. Toward that end, we will investigate discussions of the formation, preservation, and limitations of American identity.

A widely disseminated definition of the phrase cultural literacy describes it as “familiarity with and ability to understand the idioms, allusions, and informal content that create and constitute a dominant culture.” This definition, which stresses a thorough embrace of putatively mainstream notions of national history and, implicitly, a de-emphasis of competing attitudes and modes of being, helps us to comprehend the acculturative process undergone by aspiring and full citizens of the United States, whose motto, e pluribus Unum (“out of many, one”), acknowledges both the cultural diversity of its population and the necessity of fashioning a cohesive social – and perspectival – unity out of an otherwise unwieldy multiplicity of views. Emphasizing the sometimes-daunting intellectual challenges posed by the subject of American identities, this class will enable students to become more effective writers generally.