ABSTRACT
Few scholars would nowadays question the importance of the United States in the world of learning; but the process whereby that nation attained its present eminence still remains obscure. Among the cognoscenti, it is generally acknowledged that American scholarship had come of age by the early 1900s, whereas fifty years earlier there had been only a handful of American scholars and scientists of international repute, and the country’s higher education lagged far behind its European counterparts. Yet despite the recent popularity of intellectual history and research in higher education, which has produced a veritable flood of publications touching on various aspects of this theme, the heart of the process-the emergence of the academic profession-is still inadequately documented and imperfectly understood.1
