Additional information on "What is an American?" Essay.

A student wrote me and asked for additional information on the essay, "What is American?" Below find my reply: 

The basic idea of this essay is--at first--fairly straight forward. Pretend you are writing to someone in 2012 who is considering immigrating to America. They only know what they've heard about America, but they have never visited. Explain what is American and what it means to you to be American. You would think that folks living in America for any length of time would know what it means to be American, but the task of explaining it to another requires us to distill our knowledge. In the process of distilling it for another, we clarify it for ourselves. Distilling some of the ideas behind what it means to be American and the role played by literature in defining America is a lot of what the study of American Literature is about. In particular, Early American Literature helps us better understand who and what America is. 

Defining what is American for himself and would be immigrants is the task that de Creveceour set out for himself in the late 1770s and, in specific, in Letter III of Letters from an American Farmer. In particular, he was writing back to France and to others who were struggling with understanding how the ideas which produced the American Revolution came into being among a scattered diverse group of colonists. In a few years, France would be in the throws of its own Revolution, where the French tried to put in place democratic ideals in a land where almost of the institutions revolved around privilege and hierarchy. Defining what is distinctly American is a surprisingly difficult task to accomplish when you put any kind of limitations on length, because you are then limited in the approach you can take, and the topic is not one easily captured. You've a minimum of 750 words. My advice is to carefully consider what being American means to you and why you hold these ideas. This is again the approach de Creveceour took. You might carefully consider what he said and talked about, and adopt his approach. Extra points on the essay if you can ground part of what you have to say in the reading you have done for our class.   Remember to cite all the use of sources.

Right now, I want you to be thinking of the term "American" and struggling with what you think the term means. As you read the literature over the fall, your take on what being American is should develop, get challenged, and change. You'll be reading the documents produced by those new to America, those who defined the Revolution against England, those who struggled to create the original documents which defined the United States, those who struggled with establishing the American relationship between the individual and society, those who struggled with the relationship between the individual, American society, and the land, etc. Each of these struggles helped to define who you and I are today. 

Steve