ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century scholars often talked about “French lucidity,” “German profoundness,” and “American enterprise.” Given their broad circulation, these commonplaces are useful material for comparative histories of the sciences and the humanities. These commonplaces could do what discipline-specific idioms could not: enabling transdisciplinary conversations about the marks of a good scholar. More importantly, the trope of “German thoroughness,” the use of which this chapter examines for the case of Johns Hopkins University (1876–1906), shows how important it is to recognize the rhetorical power of nationalist rhetoric and stereotypical images. No matter how high-minded the discourse of scholarly virtue could be in upholding ideals of truth and integrity, the transmission of this discourse was facilitated by such allegedly low genres as commonplaces and stereotypes.
