To say that the United States is a story is not to say that it is fiction; it is, instead, to suggest that it follows certain narrative conventions. All nations are places, but they are also acts of imagination. Who has a part in a nation’s story, like who can become a citizen and who has a right to vote, isn’t foreordained, or even stable. The story’s plot, like the nation’s borders and the nature of its electorate, is always shifting. Laws are passed and wars are fought to keep some people in and others out. Who tells the story, like who writes the laws and who wages the wars, is always part of that struggle.
Jill Lepore, The Story of America: Essays on Origins, 2013, p. 3.
[O]rigin stories are complex, contested, unstable, and sometimes dangerous things. Even as they provide access to a narrativized and usable past to generate community solidarity in the present, origin stories also fracture communities, isolating a hard core of partisan adherents while rendering counternarratives of origin or alternative perspectives unintelligible.
Henry Y. Kirby, “Origin Stories and Early American Studies,” Early American Literature 57, no. 2 (2022): 637–42.
I will tell you something about stories,
They aren’t just entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off
illness and death.You don’t have anything
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, 1981, p. 2.
if you don’t have the stories.
Taken together, these epigraphs introduce the American Studies approach that shapes this course: treating origin stories not as settled truths, but as powerful cultural narratives that organize belonging, exclusion, and political authority across time.
Week 1
Day 1 (2/9) – Introductions
What are “U.S. origin stories”? (Story Map)
Day 2 (2/11) – Why Origin Stories?
Jill Lepore, “Introduction,” The Story of America: Essays on Origins (2012), 1-16.
Ross Douthat, “The Clash of American Origin Stories,” The Seattle Times, February 6, 2017.
Paul D. Miller, “America: Creedal or Tribal?” Providence Magazine, January 21, 2020.
“Telling the Nation’s Story” (Story Map).
Discussion Questions [1] [2] [3] [4] [post you own]
