I’ll say that from my experience in American Studies there definitely were other currents going on.

Some came from history, which like I said was my focus. My advisor was technically Michael Kammen, but he was on half-time getting ready to retire and had a really easy signature to forge for add/drop forms, a MK with the right stroke of the M serving as the left of the K, so Stuart Blumin ended up being my major influence in the department. That side of things was social/cultural history drawing on Hobsbawm and the Communist Party Historians Group - to my shame, it’s only now that I’m getting around to reading Making of the English Working Class.

That helps account for my Marxian sympathies even though if you’ve been reading my essays lately my history isn’t very materialist at all and I came up through the apparatus of institutional libertarianism. (Back in the ‘90s before blogs and aggregators were a thing, I’d go to free-market.net’s daily link roundup and enter their contest. I finally won in college once - the months ahead of and behind me got I think $50 in gold, I got a paperback copy of L. Neil Smith’s Pallas, a CD of the most atrocious folk music ever recorded and a steady stream of direct-mail appeals from Jews for the Protection of Firearms Ownership.)

The third tendency, which I don’t even think recognized itself as a tendency, was Badass Big Swinging Dick Truth-Telling Journalists/Social Novelists. Mark Twain, Horatio Alger (yes, Horatio Alger, if you know him secondhand then you don’t know him) Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Mencken, Pietro di Donato, Phillip Roth. For some reason not the New Journalism, though jfc, HST and double jfc, Tom Wolfe (an American Studies man himself) would fit right in. That might’ve come after the average professor got tenure, though. (Starting today they’d probably get at least a chubby for Sailer and all of Grantland, too.) That’s got a pretty good socialist streak itself but there’s room for reactionaries and above all Clever White Guys Who Are Really Good At Describing Things so