85: Neil Foley's The White Scourge

Neil Foley's The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture uses whiteness studies as a model for investigating intraethnic divisions and the interactions between race, class, and gender in central Texas cotton culture between 1820 and the early 1940s, when the industry moved from small family farms run by white tenant families and white, Mexican, and black sharecroppers, to agribusiness dominated by nonwhite workers.  Foley pulls his title from a book that characterized poor white cotton farmers as the scourge of the south, but he argues that "the scourge of the South and the nation was not cotton or poor whites but whiteness itself - whiteness not simply as the pinnacle of ethnoracial status but as the complex social and economic matrix wherein racial power and privilege were shared, not always equally, by those who were able to construct identities as Anglo-Saxons, Nordics, Caucasians, or simply whites."

64: Sean Wilentz' Chants Democratic

In Chants Democratic, New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850, Sean Wilentz describes the process of "metropolitan industrialization" - aka the alienation of labor - and its impact on emerging class relationships in New York during the Jacksonian era.  In particular, he's interested in the development of class consciousness among the city's artisans.  Like other scholars indebted to E.P. Thompson and the new social history, Wilentz is profoundly interested in the whole lives and particularly the agency of his subjects, but he is careful to integrate the world of the artisans into a more traditional economic and political framework.  He combines these micro/macro approaches to argue that class formation was critical to the social and political crises of the era.

62: Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land

Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, is an American Studies classic.  In it, Smith both explains and justifies the American Studies myth-and-symbol method as the way to access and interpret American culture, and he applies this method to a study of the myth of the American West.  He argues that the difficulty of the myth of the American West, which is actually a subset of a larger agrarian tradition coming out of Jeffersonian democracy, is that it "accepted the paired but contradictory ideas of nature and civilization as a general principle of historical and social interpretation."  In other words, American culture comes out of an unresolved tension about what to do with the machine in the garden.

For Smith, myths and symbols are larger and smaller units of the same thing: "an intellectual construct that fuses concept and emotion into an image."  Further, these images are not just the world of a single mind; they are collective representations, symbols pointing to a particularly American worldview.  This worldview itself has a history, and analyzing its various incarnations in connection with their historical context helps us understand it.  In other words, myth and symbol is of necessity interdisciplinary, because it situates literary analysis within history.