Nationalism, Internationalism, and the Origins of the American Research University, 1785-1915

Adam Nelson

Historians have long recognized the extent to which the origins of the American research university depended on international scholarly exchange. Over the course of the nineteenth century, hundreds if not thousands of Americans studied abroad—primarily in Germany—and many of these scholars, both men and women, went on to pursue active research and teaching careers. When one sees these internationally educated Americans as a group, however, one notices a surprising paradox: namely, that the proliferation of overseas academic exchanges in the nineteenth century did not necessarily foster more open, tolerant, or cosmopolitan views in the American academy; instead, international education tended to promote more nationalist views. When Americans ventured abroad to study classical or biblical philology, political economy, comparative religions, archaeology, or applied science, they generally assumed that their imported knowledge would advance distinctly American aims, over and against the aims of other peoples or nations. My project—a collective biography of nineteenth-century Americans who studied abroad and later held prominent academic posts—explores why international scholarly travel contributed to a more nationalist outlook in America’s emerging research universities. My project follows a particular group of student-scholars—representing a wide range of academic interests—who traveled abroad and later became recognized university leaders. The group includes Francis Wayland (Brown; political economy and comparative religion), William Dwight Whitney (Yale; philology), Charles W. Eliot (Harvard; chemistry), Daniel Coit Gilman (Johns Hopkins; geography), G. Stanley Hall (Clark; psychology), Andrew Dickson White (Cornell; history), M. Carey Thomas (Bryn Mawr; literature), and Elizabeth Cary Agassiz (Radcliffe; biology). Revisiting the work of previous historians who have emphasized the importation of “German scientific research methods” in the nineteenth century, I stress the extent to which these methods themeselves were infused with nationalist ideology. Far from being objective, impartial, or disinterested, German scientific research, chiefly as it developed in Berlin after the reforms of Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1810, was inseparable from Prussia’s increasingly nationalistic political culture. My project shows how Americans studying in Berlin in these decades adopted not only the methods but also the nationalist motives of their mentors’ work. My project explains this process of “learning nationalism” by revealing the ways in which German scholars themselves culled nationalist meaning from overseas research in the Middle East and South Asia—research that sought to bolster a still-nascent conception of a unified German nation with classical and Christian as well as Sanskritic (Aryan) roots. In the end, my project argues, Americans who studied with these scholars used strikingly similar strategies to facilitate a process of national-identity formation in the United States.

About Adam Nelson

Adam R. Nelson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his B.A. in History and American Studies from Saint Olaf College in 1993 and his Ph.D. in History from Brown University in 1998. From 1998 to 2000, he taught in the Program on History and Literature at Harvard University, and, in 2000-2001, he was Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Education and Democracy: The Meaning of Alexander Meiklejohn, 1872-1964 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2001) and is currently completing a book on the history of federal aid to the Boston Public Schools. His most recent project concerns the relationship between nationalism and internationalism in the development of American research universities in the nineteenth century.