ABSTRACT
Around 1966 or 1967 in the history department at the University of Wisconsin in Madison there circulated a little story that is symptomatic of both a part of George Mosse’s career and the experience of those who studied with him during the 1960s. It was said that in an application for graduate study, a candidate had included among his reasons for wanting to study European cultural history the desire to live among Professor Mosse’s students. Fact or fiction, the tale is surely plausible. By the mid-1960s it was well known along the academic grapevine that the University of Wisconsin’s history department was the site of some substantial scholarly and political developments, and that George Mosse, along with his colleagues William Appleman Williams and Harvey Goldberg, was close to their center. And if Mosse’s students did not constitute a real circle or — since we were virtually without exception males — a young Männerbund of the type on which he often lectured, there nevertheless was a certain coherence and élan among us. This excited self-consciousness stemmed from the mixture of Mosse’s impact as teacher and historian, the special features of the 1960s, and our own needs and fantasies as a young generation of aspirant intellectuals. How far, and for that matter, how the little glow of this experience spread may be hard to determine, but here and there spread it did, and one is not surprised that the young man in the story wanted to get inside.
