American studies terminology

Terminology of American Studies

Settler colonialism

A continuing system wherein settlers seek to eliminate and replace Indigenous societies on the land they occupy; enacted via law, violence, markets, and cultural narratives. 

Indigenous sovereignty

Inherent authority of Indigenous nations to govern their peoples and territories, predating and not granted by the U.S. state.

Nation-to-nation relations

Diplomatic framework recognizing Indigenous polities as distinct nations; historically formalized via treaties. 

Doctrine of Discovery

Legal-religious rationale used by imperial powers and later the U.S. to claim preeminent title over Indigenous lands upon "discovery."

Northwest Ordinance (1787)

Organized governance for the Northwest Territory; included a pledge of "utmost good faith" toward Indigenous nations, often contradicted by practice. 

Trade & Intercourse Acts (from 1790)

Federal statutes asserting U.S. regulation over trade and land transactions with Indigenous nations; aimed to prevent unauthorized private purchases. 

Removal

Policies promoting or coercing Indigenous relocation west of the Mississippi (formalized later in the 1830s but rooted in earlier practices and pressures). 

Allotment

Later 19th-century policy dividing communally held lands into individual parcels; included here to forecast continuity from early legal logics to later dispossession. 

Indian Country

A legal-geographic term designating territories under Indigenous jurisdiction and federal oversight, evolving over time. 

Blood quantum

A contested, externally imposed metric of "Indian" identity used by states/federal authorities; contrasted with community-based citizenship. 

Survivance

Active Indigenous presence and resilience, beyond mere survival, asserting agency and continuity. 

Antebellum

In Latin “before the war”: in U.S. contexts, the decades before the Civil War, especially the 1820s–1850s.

Market Revolution

Expansion of wage labor, transport, commerce, finance and consumer culture; the backdrop for Thoreau’s critique of work and money

Reform culture

Abolitionism, women’s rights, temperance, education reform and religious experimentation; conscience becomes public.

Manifest Destiny

The belief that U.S. expansion across North America was providential, natural, or inevitable

American exceptionalism

The idea that the U.S. has a special mission or destiny; can appear as covenant, freedom, progress, or moral example.

Transcendentalism

A loose intellectual and reform movement.

Core claim: “Truth is reached through intuition, conscience, and direct relation to nature, not only through inherited institutions.”

Self-reliance

Trusting one’s own perception, conscience, and moral insight rather than borrowed opinion.

Nonconformity

Refusal to let social approval, tradition, or “respectability” determine one’s judgment.

Consistency

For Emerson, a false standard when it means repeating yesterday’s opinion rather than speaking today’s truth.

Intuition

Immediate moral or spiritual perception; for Transcendentalists, a way to know beyond convention.

Nature

Not merely scenery: a spiritual, philosophical, and symbolic space where the self encounters larger truth.

The Over-Soul

Emerson’s term for a shared spiritual reality linking individual minds and the universe.

Idealism

The belief that mind, spirit, or ideas are fundamental to reality and moral action.

Anti-institutionalism

Suspicion that churches, schools, parties, and governments can deaden moral judgment.

Moral perfectionism

The belief that self-culture and ethical reform can remake life, not merely interpret it.

Civil disobedience

Conscientious refusal to cooperate with unjust law or state power; associated with Thoreau’s tax resistance.

Abolitionism

Movement to end slavery; important to the reform context in which conscience becomes a public duty.

Wage labor

Paid labor organized by the market; Thoreau asks what kind of life is sacrificed to earning a living.

“Living” vs “getting a living”

Thoreau’s distinction between life as moral/spiritual experience and life reduced to work and accumulation.

Gold Rush / speculation

For Thoreau, a symbol of restless acquisitiveness and destructive national fantasy.

Conscience

An inner moral authority that may conflict with law, public opinion, and economic pressure.

Elitist

A person, system, or attitude that favors a small, select group of people (often base on walth, education, social status)

Settler narative

A cultural and historical story that frames the arrival and establishment of foreing colonizers as a natural, progressive and rightous act of survival.

Spectralization

Living people become ghosts/traces

Paratext

Intro, footnotes, headings, captions around the main text

Vanishing narrative

Story that imagines Indigenous disapperance as inevitable or complete

Elimination logic

Methods that erase, remove, absorb, or narrate away Indigenous presence

Mediation

How a source filters what we can know

Sovereignty

Political authority and self-government

“City upon a hill”

Used as a symbol of civilised, democratic and moral leadership (=American exeptionalism)