Many core graduate-level seminars claim to expose students to their discipline's "canon." The contents of this canon, however, can and do differ across departments and instructors. This project employs a survey of core American politics PhD seminar syllabi at highly ranked universities to construct a systematic account of the American politics canon. Our results offer valuable insights into the topics and literature that political scientists consider important and on which future scholars base their work. Our article breaks down the literature into a comprehensive list of topics and subtopics, which allows us to identify both an overall field canon and one for each topic, to assess whether some topics receive more attention than others, and to identify which topics are most clearly defined. We explore the extent to which diverse perspectives and methods are (or are not) taught to young scholars, and, although we identify sets of frequently assigned readings and authors within each topic, we also find considerable variation between seminars.