The American Studies Blog (ASB) was online from 10 September 2014 to 20 September 2023. It was edited by a team of the Language Center and the Institute of English Studies at Leuphana University Lüneburg.

From the beginning, the blog reached people around the world with information about interesting developments in the United States. In total, the team wrote almost 370 blog entries in the following categories: ‘Access America’ (pop culture, history and current events) – 165 entries, ‘Best Books and Fabulous Films’ (reviews and more) – 78 entries, ‘Creativity Corner’ (all about art) – 58 entries, and ‘Teaching Tools’ (tips, tricks and tools of the trade) – 59 entries. In the blog posts, the team focused on the U.S. Embassy goals, e.g. combating anti-semitism, racism and disinformation.

The main target groups were teachers and students, academics and other interested parties of different ages. With nearly 600,000 readers, 70,000 followers and significant annual growth rates (except for the two years of the Covid-19 pandemic), the American Studies Blog has attracted people from 184 countries. The most readers came from the United States, followed by Germany, China, France, the Russian Federation, Canada and Ukraine.

Initially, the team concentrated mainly on academic writing, but they also used less academic text forms to reach a broader audience. In addition, the team made the contributions more and more multimedia-based by integrating images, video clips, podcasts and film trailers. Guest authors from other countries also shared their views and opinions on US history, politics, art and media in numerous articles.

In 2021 and 2022, Sabrina Völz and Maria Moss introduced students to the world of blogging in their seminar ‘Blogability. In addition to writing blogs, the students developed an advertising campaign for the American Studies Blog and developed strategies to improve it further.

The team expanded its social media presence, particularly on X (Twitter) to gain as many followers as possible. They also advertised the blog in the ‘Maple Leaf & Stars and Stripes’ lecture series, in seminars for students specializing in North American studies, at conferences and at teacher training events.

At the end of the project, the team ensured that the ASB data was included in the Leuphana Digital Archive (https://pubdata.leuphana.de/). This way, the ASB will remain available to researchers and the public even after the project has been completed and after its website will go offline one day.

The team consisted of Maryann Henck, Prof. Dr. Maria Moss, Prof. Dr. Torben Schmidt and Dr. Sabrina Völz; it was supported by student blog assistants who dealt with topic research, the organisation of PR events, image searches, copyrights and technical issues.