ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses American Studies as a specific version of Cultural Studies. It considers the relation between cultures and the institution of the nation in order to understand the connection between the American Studies and the Cultural Studies. The idea of 'culture' complemented 'the nation' as an answer to the problems of modernity. In analogy to the usage of 'history', Europeans and Americans, before the eighteenth century, would have known terms such as agriculture or horticulture, but not the term 'culture' as such. In the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, the Global West began reflecting the idea of culture. Culture is one of the terms that sprang up in the course of a complex self-reflective turn in Western history, which was the effect of the industrialization, of colonialism and empire-building, of the rise of capitalism, the rationalization of political processes, and of what the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann called 'functional differentiation'.
