Note from the editor

John Higham the historiographer would have approved of the forum in this issue on Higham the historian of ethnicity and nativism. As Alan Kraut recounts, Higham persistently applied his own critical and historiographic skills to himself. While he would have disagreed with this or that point in the four essays and the forum comment, he would have been pleased by the forum’s dual agenda. The essays attempt to examine his Strangers in the Land as a product of the intellectual and academic atmosphere of the 1950s. Yet they also dwell on ways that the book might or might not be relevant to scholars of these same issues nearly fifty years later, when intellectual outlooks and historical methodologies have shifted. This balanced attentiveness to the past on its own terms and to contemporary uses of past thought sums up Higham as an historical thinker.