For more than fifty years after Tunisian independence in 1956, a small cadre of Western academics and steadily growing numbers of their Tunisian colleagues – historians, political scientists, economists, anthropologists, sociologists, linguists, archeologists, classicists, and others – devoted their professional lives to the study of the country, publishing works that enhanced scholarly knowledge about Tunisia, its people, and their culture. Away from academia, however, Tunisia attracted limited interest. In global corridors of power, the country mattered only rarely and fleetingly. Its essentially moderate, usually Western-oriented political and economic alignment projected an unremarkable blandness that (for good or ill) lacked the anxiety-producing component often generated among international observers and analysts by its near neighbors in the Maghrib, not to mention its more distant Middle Eastern cousins, with whom it shared centuries-old associations rooted in language, religion, and culture. Beyond the specialists, most outsiders familiar with the country knew it as a site of ancient Mediterranean civilizations or, yet more likely, as a superbly endowed and outfitted holiday setting whose proximity to Europe and established record of tranquility heightened its attraction as a venue seemingly immune to the intrusion of disruptive political, economic, and social forces. Indeed, on the strength of that image the Tunisian tourist industry became an indispensable component of the national economy. But like all such idealized constructs, this one could be undermined by realities that were more easily ignored than confronted.