The academic field that would become American studies made its first appearance in the 1930s in a few classes and programs at universities like Penn, Harvard, Yale, and Iowa. By the early 1950s American studies was well established at those and several other schools, and had caught the attention of government policymakers and ideologically driven funders like William Robertson Coe, who endowed both the Yale and, later, the Wyoming programs. Like modernist art, jazz music, and exchange students, American studies then joined the United States’ Cold War-era outreach to the world, its attempt to knit together an anticommunist “West” and sway the loyalties of the nonaligned.

So how did American studies move beyond its roots in the 1930s academy and come to be embraced by US cultural diplomacy? In his Nightmare Envy & Other Stories: American Culture and European Reconstruction, which he calls a “centrifugal history” of American studies, George Blaustein of the University of Amsterdam (and a graduate of Harvard's PhD program in American civilization), provides an extraordinarily detailed and useful picture of the progress of American studies in the 1940s, after its outlines had coalesced, but before it came to be deployed as a weapon in the cultural Cold War.

We first, Blaustein insists, should acknowledge that American studies wasn't even originally American. Indeed, the field “had a longer history in Europe and Japan than in the United States” (26), and Blaustein focusses on two early Americanists active in the 1920s and 1930s – German Friedrich Schönemann and Japanese Yasaka Takagi – who both, once hostilities began, had to balance “the tense position of Americanist intellectuals with respect to their governments at war” (64). Their work explaining America to their countrymen, Blaustein suggests, eased the process of postwar reconstruction, making the values that the American occupiers would write into those nations’ constitutions more legible to the German and Japanese citizenry.

For Blaustein, the 1947 Salzburg Seminar culminated the first stage in the evolution of American studies, and set the field on the very different path it would take in the 1950s. The seminar, held at the “slightly bomb-damaged eighteenth-century rococo castle” Schloss Leopoldskron outside Salzburg, Austria, brought boldface-name American writers and academics to teach European students about American civilization (122). An Austrian émigré to the US, Clemens Heller, was the driving force behind the early seminar, securing funding from Harvard's Student Council for its first meeting.

Blaustein describes the first seminar as an “international commune,” along the lines of another experimental school of the time, Black Mountain College. It was “intensely idealistic” and had “nothing to do with American interests, political, diplomatic, or military” (130). And if the organizers had wanted Salzburg to do Cold War work, they made a terrible choice in their faculty members: the Marxist Matthiessen was joined by Margaret Mead and Alfred Kazin. The staff saw the seminar as a “gift” to Europeans – an intellectual gift, in part, but also a practical gift, beds and a (mostly intact) roof and warm meals for Central European students who, in 1947, often lacked these necessities in their war-devastated cities.

While the seminar appealed to the new cultural-diplomatic agencies in the State Department as a potential manifestation of American soft power, the organizers quickly encountered resistance from other authorities – particularly the military occupation government and Congressmen such as Joseph McCarthy – who wanted starker lines drawn between a free West and a Soviet-dominated East. Why was the seminar so welcoming to students from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary? Why was the Hungarian Ministry of Education praising the seminar? Why was Heller calling the occupation of Austria a “colonization”? Where Matthiessen opened the 1947 seminar with elevated rhetoric about “bringing man in communication with man” and by acknowledging how the US often comes short of living up to its ideals, by 1950 sociologist E. Wight Bakke was much more on-message, issuing a warning to any “ambitious individual or nation” who seeks to destroy or undermine “freedom” or “liberty” (168).

In the end, Blaustein concludes, the transformation of Salzburg from “unlikely leftist utopia” (160) to merely another tool of American foreign policy isn't just about geopolitics: it epitomizes the way “the international communion of the humanities [gave] way to the standardization of the social sciences” in the 1950s, and how American studies – born from literary study and intellectual history – became an “area study,” rationalized and instrumentalized (168). Blaustein's careful and deeply researched portrait of this crucial time in the field's development, rooted in both original archival study and insightful critical analysis, should prove invaluable for scholars excavating the roots of American studies and the collaboration between state and academy in the Cold War.