ABSTRACT
Developing a programme of academic study of traditions and practices in the United States did not seem in these circumstances a matter of urgency. However, as global dynamics shifted in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, with the US now an increasingly powerful force, it became more pressing not only for Americans themselves but for others across the world to consider in a systematic way what kind of nation this was. In February 1941, the US magazine publisher Henry Luce temporarily swapped the executive office for the editorial floor, writing a long piece under the title of ‘The American Century’. Luce is emphatic in his article, however, that it is not material assets alone that define America. Rather than a matter simply of economics, the power that the United States possesses is also cultural and ideological.
