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1 Introduction David A. Hollinger The academic humanities in the United States after World War II were a major institutional apparatus for bringing evidence and reasoning to domains where the rules of evidence are strongly contested and the power of reason often doubted. These domains, on the periphery of an increasingly science-centered academic enterprise, embraced the messy, risk-intensive issues left aside by the more methodologically confident, rigor-displaying social sciences. These domains constituted the borderlands between Wissenschaft and opinion, between scholarship and ideology. Here in these borderlands, the demographic and cognitive boundaries of the entire academic enterprise were the least certain. This book explores that ill-defined intellectual and social territory. At issue was not only the incorporation of what today are called underrepresented demographic groups. At issue, too, were the specific fields and subfields that would be included at the expense of others, the directions taken in expanding the study of foreign cultures in relation to the study of the United States itself, and the role of the academic humanities in American public discourse. Who was included in or excluded from the community of inquirers? What was within or beyond that community’s subject matter? On what basis was this or that idea, text, project, or social group included or excluded? To what extent was scholarship expected to reflect the ethnoracial, religious, or gender group of which a scholar was a member? These questions were presented to academic humanists after World War II by unprecedented opportunities to expand their ranks and to extend the scope of their operations. The sciences had their own “frontiers,” justly if romantically celebrated in 1945 by Vannevar Bush’s epic brief for the federal funding of research, Science —The Endless Frontier.1 But many of the least clearly mapped cognitive and demographic frontiers of the larger, shared academic program of bringing evidence and reasoning to inquiry were confronted by humanists. Before I indicate what this volume tells us about these borderlands and about the process by which humanists mapped, colonized, and organized them, I want to emphasize that the humanities experience after 1945 is a distinctive David A. Hollinger 2 historical episode, not just another instantiation, under slightly different circumstances , of a virtually timeless set of behaviors and relationships. Questions about cognitive and demographic borders were not new in 1945, and it is too easy, in the wake of that insight, to assume that the boundary disputes and clarifications analyzed in this volume are merely repeats of old quarrels. Professors of humanities had not been obliged to deal with these questions so directly and persistently. Historically unique ideological and geopolitical conditions did much to create this obligation and to give it period-specific shape. Ideologically, World War II itself, simply by being directed against overtly racist enemies, discredited the complacent practice of excluding from humanities faculties those individuals who were not of Anglo-Protestant background. The same prejudices operated also in the sciences and the professional schools during the 1920s and 1930s, but not as severely as in the humanities, where the strategic foundations of the culture were understood to be at stake. Geopolitically , the postwar engagement with the non-European world, significantly propelled by cold war concerns, greatly enlarged beyond the venerated Mediterranean and European pasts the inventory of cultures that humanists were invited to study and to teach. Asia, especially, but also Africa and Latin America were less easily ignored with a clear conscience. These basic ideological and geopolitical transformations of the 1940s and 1950s forced new and sustained attention to questions of inclusion and exclusion . Later these same questions were underscored yet more vividly by domestic social movements on behalf of women and nonwhites and by quarrels about the impact of American power on populations in “developing” countries . These successive ideological and geopolitical challenges to traditional disciplinary agendas and constituencies helped make the period after World War II a distinctive episode. But there is more to it. Academic humanists found themselves expected to serve a much larger segment of society. We all know that the humanities shared with the sciences and social sciences in the prodigious growth attendant on the increase of public funding provided by the G.I. Bill and later by the perceived imperatives of the cold war.2 A much greater percentage of the population was attending college, which brought academic humanists into the leadership of designing and providing educational programs not simply for the elites, but for masses of Americans , for the “democratic society” heralded...

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