Skip to content
Home/ From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, & American Studies
From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, & American Studies

From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, & American Studies

by Lauter, Paul
No customer reviews yet ISBN 9780822326717

Paul Lauter, an icon of American Studies who has been a primary agent in its transformation and its chief ambassador abroad, offers a wide-ranging collection of essays that demonstrate and reflect on this important and often highly politicized discipline. While American Studies was formerly seen as a wholly subsidiary academic program that loosely combined the study of American history, literature, and art, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park reveals the evolution of an independent, highly interdisciplinary program with distinctive subjects, methods, and goals that are much different than the traditional academic departments that nurtured it.

With anecdote peppered discussions ranging from specific literary texts and movies to the future of higher education and the efficacy of unions, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park entertains even as it offers a twenty-first century account of how and why Americanists at home and abroad now do what they do. Drawing on his forty-five years of teaching and research as well as his experience as a political activist and a cultural radical, Lauter shows how a multifaceted increase in the United States' global dominion has infused a particular political urgency into American Studies. With its military and economic influence, its cultural and linguistic reach, the United States is--for better or for worse--too formidable and potent not to be understood clearly and critically.

About the author

Product details

Pub dateApr 17, 2001
ISBN-10082232671X
ISBN-139780822326717
LanguageEnglish
Last updated 2026-09-07 23:21
$36.64
In stock — ships in 24 hours with free tracking
Delivery by Monday, September 14, 2026
Qty
Sign in to Add to Saved list
Free delivery on orders over $35.
15-day returns. Any reason.
Secure checkout. We never store card details.

Readers who bought this also bought

More from Study & Teaching
See all
Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America's School Curricula
Reilly, Wilfred
$21.09
Standardized Test Skills Practice Workbook
Available
$6.80
History of Universities: Volume XXXIV/1: A Global History of Research Education: Disciplines, Instit
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. <p/><em>History of Universities XXXIV/1</em> contains the customary mix of learned articles which makes this publication an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education. This volume offers a global history of research education in the ninteenth and twentieth centuries. <p/>This volume compares the training of scholars in different disciplines and countries across the globe in a century that laid the foundation for modern academia. The articles in this volume examine the different training "instruments" and methods for text-based disciplines (history and philology), laboratory sciences (such as chemistry), theoretical sciences (mathematics, for instance), fieldwork disciplines (linguistics and paleontology), and clinical science (medicine). They consider countries or societies in Europe, North America, South and East Asia, and Latin America, and analyze the roles of the state, nationalism and internationalism that shaped the institutions and policies for research education. Some of these articles are comparative, while the others are in-depth case studies of individual disciplines in specific countries at different stages of scientific developments. The introduction and conclusion of this volume bring together the important themes that run across the article and make necessary supplements to present a synthetic picture of the global history of research education.
$121.00
Learning Languages in Early Modern England
Gallagher, John
$44.18
History of Us: Book 10: All the People 1945-2001 Teaching Guide
Oxford University Press, USA
$28.01
Guide to Oral History and the Law (Revised) (Revised)
Neuenschwander, John A
$57.36