June 2026 American Quarterly Editor’s Note from Jason Ruiz
Years ago, I helped design my department’s Introduction to American Studies course and have taught it several times since. I suspect that many AQ readers have done the same and that some, like me, have shared the experience of having an earnest undergraduate approach them after a unit on, say Japanese-American internment or Mexican-American repatriation, and ask something to the effect of, “Isn’t this class a little, well, negative about the United States? What about the good stuff we did?” I get where these young adults are coming from. I probably asked the same thing coming out of my own high school, which pitched a triumphalist narrative of U.S. history and civics, back in the 1990s. But an American studies education has taught me that critical analysis is not the same thing as criticism and that anyone who calls themselves an “American” or is interested in what “America” means should do the deeper work of interrogating these categories and how they operate the world—good, bad, and ugly. This is the foundation of a good intro to American studies and, when you really think about it, a hallmark of democratic principles. (Incidentally, AQ published an insightful dialogue on teaching the intro course exactly a decade ago.)
In recent months, American Quarterly has faced criticism that its articles are too negative about the United States, not from undergraduate students but from a report released by a self-described “radically pragmatic” think tank, which claimed that a content analysis of three years of AQ articles revealed our overly negative stance about the United States. The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Wall Street Journal both ran op-eds that summarized the report’s findings and questioned the journal’s practices and credibility (the authors of the think tank report wrote the former, with a headline claiming that “American studies can’t stand its subject”).
None of this is anything new, of course. Early in my graduate training at the University of Minnesota in the early 2000s, the late, great David Noble memorably xeroxed and distributed copies of a long review in The New Republic of his most recent book along with two others that claimed that these then-new works constituted an “Anti-American Studies.” The review’s author, Alan Wolfe, asserted that American studies’ golden age had been in the 1960s and that, by the time his review appeared, the field had been overtaken by a generation of scholars who “not only reject the writers who gave life to the discipline, they have also developed a hatred for America so visceral that it makes one wonder why they bother studying America at all.” Wolfe’s tirade was actually part of a spate of essays and think-pieces that appeared after the turn of the twenty-first century, which included the somewhat infamous 2001 article in the Chronicle that facetiously described that year’s ASA conference as the “People’s Republic of American Studies,” and many others.
Like those from a quarter century ago, the newer criticisms, which aren’t exactly reinventing the wheel, claim that American studies and this journal are too niche, too negative, and too, well, woke. Similar to the wide-eyed undergraduate in an intro course, they seem to want our field to provide a positive spin, or at least a “fair and balanced” take, on the story of the United States. In the words of the Wall Street Journal headline, they claim that “American Studies can’t stand its subject.” On the contrary, American studies as a field and American Quarterly as a journal simply seek to give a complex nation (and hemisphere) the serious-minded attention it deserves; the question of whether we are painting a “positive” portrait of the country does not come into play when we are making editorial decisions. This is built into our DNA as a journal; since our inception in 1949, in the aftermath of a war that had many Americanists questioning the future of the country and its influence in the world, AQ has gone against the grain of dominant, nationalist narratives. As I tell my intro students, those narratives are everywhere in our culture and don’t exactly need another platform.
It would be hypocritical to claim that American Quarterly should be immune to criticism. Personally, I find it productive. But I fundamentally reject the attempts to characterize American Quarterly as needlessly or purposefully negative about the United States. We are interested, above all, in publishing cutting edge research in the field and reflecting the critical ethos of the American Studies Association, for which we serve as the flagship journal. And I question the political motivations of those who would compare our academic work to President Trump’s divisive rhetoric, as does the title of the think tank report. Everyone knows that higher ed is under attack from that administration and that the “studies” fields are especially vulnerable, especially in public institutions. As I write this note, the University of Texas has recently, and scandalously, announced that it is consolidating American studies and other programs into a single unit, a move that erases and marginalizes American studies as well as Latinx studies, black studies, and gender studies. This is on the heels of Texas A & M’s complete elimination of women’s and gender studies and other schools’ cuts and consolidations. In other arenas, the Trump administration is attempting to whitewash American history, as it did when it ordered the removal of a slavery exhibit at the Independence Mall in Philadelphia (it took a district court injunction to put it back in place). The list goes on and on.
So, what comes next? I predict that these battles will continue and that the challenges against this journal will continue in their cyclical manner, but also that we, like countless brave thinkers working inside and outside of academia, will continue our work. And that we will continue to learn alongside our intro students.