A history of Slavic studies in the United States — Context and Discussion

A Tentative Synthesis

Manning repeatedly stresses the provisional nature of his account. In the introduction, he calls his work “highly tentative, subject to correction and amplification.” This is not false modesty but a reflection of the state of the field in 1957: archives were scattered, many records were lost, and the rapid changes of the preceding decades made any firm conclusions elusive. The author’s diction—words like “creditable but small,” “incomplete,” and “difficult, if not impossible”—reveals a historian working with gaps. He does not pretend to offer a definitive story. Instead, he invites future scholars to fill in the blanks. This methodological honesty is one of the book’s quiet strengths, and it shapes every chapter.

The Language of Institutional Growth

Manning’s prose is dense with institutional names, dates, and titles. He writes of “Professor Alfred Senn, a Swiss philologist from the University of Kaunas,” who “became Professor of German Philology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1938” and later “Professor of Balto-Slavic Philology.” The accumulation of such details—Cornell’s appointment of Jack Posin, Syracuse’s Albert Menut developing Russian courses within a Romance Languages department—builds a picture of ad hoc expansion. Manning rarely pauses to evaluate the quality of these programs; his focus is on their existence and the circumstances of their founding. The effect is a kind of institutional cartography, mapping where and when Slavic studies took root, often through the efforts of a single determined individual.

Refugee Scholars as Agents of Change

A recurring pattern in Manning’s narrative is the arrival of European scholars fleeing Nazi and Soviet power. He notes that “the chief counterweight” to anti-intellectual trends was “the arrival in the United States of many distinguished scholars who had escaped the holocaust of Nazi rule.” The Poles were “more fortunate” in their escape routes; the Czechs were largely trapped; few Russians came; only one Ukrainian arrived, “almost by accident.” Manning’s language is precise about the mechanics of displacement: scholars “escaped north into Lithuania or south into Romania,” then made their way west. Organizations like the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences provided a “center” to keep them “from being lost in American life.” These passages show Manning’s attention to the human logistics behind institutional growth.

War and the Shifting Public Mood

Manning contrasts American reactions to World War I and World War II. In 1914, Slavic studies were negligible; by 1940, despite anti-Nazi sentiment, there was “no attempt to exclude German from the curricula of any important institution.” Instead, Russian enrollments rose, and “governing bodies of institutions without Slavic departments began to think of introducing them.” Manning attributes this not to a sudden love of Slavic culture but to geopolitical necessity. His phrasing is measured: war “produced, at first, relatively little effect upon Slavic studies as a whole.” The change came gradually, and Manning tracks it through administrative decisions—new departments, new hires—rather than through grand pronouncements. The result is a quiet, evidence-based account of how world events reshaped American academia.

Manning’s history is best read as a primary document of mid-century academic self-consciousness. It reveals how a field understood its own origins at a moment of rapid expansion. Readers interested in the sociology of knowledge, the impact of exile on scholarship, or the institutional mechanics of area studies will find here a wealth of specific detail. The book’s tentative tone is not a weakness but a feature: it reminds us that all disciplinary histories are provisional, shaped by the archives available and the questions their authors choose to ask.

I kept thinking about how Manning shows those early scholars quietly building something lasting, shaped by displacement and fragile hope. It reminded me of arguments in The higher education of women — Key Ideas to Explore—how certain doors only open slowly, through patient conviction. That sense of time passing with real changes underneath stayed with me long after I closed the book.