Interdepartmental in character, the program draws its faculty and students from thirteen cooperating departments: Anthropology, Architecture and Urban Planning, Art and Archaeology, Economics, English, History, Music, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Sociology, and the Woodrow Wilson School.
Each student in the program majors in one of the cooperating departments, with as much emphasis on the American field as the regulations of his department permit, and devotes his senior thesis to a topic related to American civilization. He also takes the program's one-term introductory course in the sophomore year, and its two one-term conferences in the junior year. The work of the conferences involves a cooperative study by students and faculty of a significant feature of American civilization, the reading of a paper by each student in the conference, and lectures by faculty specialists, visiting scholars, and public figures. Guest speakers have included Lewis Mumford, Margaret Mead, Reinhold Niebuhr, Frances Perkins, Perry Miller, Helen Lynd, Oscar Handlin -- and Fidel Castro, whose visit to Princeton the night of April 20, 1959, to address the Conference on ``The United States and the Revolutionary Spirit'' soon after he became the premier of the Republic of Cuba, caused a campus-wide sensation.
For the faculty, the conference has been a means of cooperative scholarship and publication. Books that have grown out of the conference have included: Foreign Influences in American Life (1944), Evolutionary Thought in America (1950), Socialism and American Life (2 vols., 1952), Religion in American Life (4 vols., 1961), and Blacks in America: Bibliographical Essays (1972).
Professor Willard Thorp (English), the prime mover in the formulation of the program, was its chairman from 1942 to 1955. Other chairmen have been Stow S. Persons (History), James Ward Smith (Philosophy), John William Ward (History), Laurence B. Holland (English), Richard M. Ludwig (English), James M. Banner, Jr. (History), James M. McPherson (History), Emory B. Elliott, Jr. (English).
During World War II, the program conducted week-end courses in American studies for members of the British armed services stationed in this country. In gratitude the British government later sent the University a stone from the bombed-out House of Commons, which is embedded in the wall at the right of the main entrance to Firestone Library.