most broad-gauged intellectual concerns of 19th-century Americans: the question of whether a new culture could be fabricated out of the pioneer experience, especially by those who were consciously concerned with putting old systems and traditions behind them; the confrontation between sophisticated culture and the expressions of the populace; the related face-offs between the agrarian and the technological world views and between the resultant competing economic, social, and political interests of different parts of the country; the concurrent existence of the many within the one, especially as diversity was dramatized by differences in languages and systems of interacting; and the sense of the past coming into collision with the demands of the present and the future, especially with regard to the size and composition of the population, and the characteristics of geographical and psychological place. Folklorists from the beginnings of our discipline have addressed such problems, usually without attempting to solve them. To be sure, there have been those who actively involved themselves with one controversy or another, but members of the discipline have attempted primarily to fill in the sociocultural picture through the collection, description, and analysis of the "things" of culture: the material objects central to fashioning an existence, the texts of performances by which the various American groups gave voice to themselves, and the belief and value systems underlying folklife. We take as our task in this article not so much to provide a comprehensive bibliography on folklore and American Studies as to delineate the practical and conceptual organizing principles of this field. This should help the student of American Studies to understand how any specific work relates to the literature as a whole. There are numerous bibliographical tools to guide