Humanities from classics to cultural studies: notes toward the history of an idea

demic organizations that we think of as constituting the humanities are today undergoing a course of change that is entirely in consonance with their history. The idea of the humanities, in point of fact, 1⁄2rst appeared in the United States early in the twentieth century and has altered greatly in meaning ever since, thanks to the intellectual, social, cultural, and educational developments that have taken place over the last hundred years. These alterations are to be understood, in the 1⁄2rst instance, as parts of the evolution of the American university and college system beginning after the end of the Civil War and accelerating steadily as the century ended. At the macrolevel of ideal-typical structure, that set of institutions in its historical formation borrowed something from each of the three great European systems from which it also departed. From the nineteenth-century German universities, it adapted Humboldt’s animating conception of dedication to original research, combined (often secondarily) with instruction. From Oxford and Cambridge, it secured the notion of the undergraduate residential college, in which teaching included, ideally, educating the social and elevating the moral character of privileged young men, and where, in a community of learning, community often counted for as much as, if not more than, learning. And from the universities of France, the American institutions imported the idea of training young, middle-class men to be of1⁄2cials of the state and servants of society: in America, the land-grant colleges, numerous state universities, and even some normal schools took over the functions that bore upon the formation of middleand uppermiddle-level elites at regional, state, and, occasionally, national levels. This three-part system that began to evolve in the latter half of the nineteenth