For decades, American scholars have been studying one aspect or another of the African experience. From 1927 on, Professor Melville J. Herskovits used his field research and scholarly insights to fashion courses on Africa offered as part of the regular curriculum at Northwestern University. Northwestern and Indiana graduate students, and possibly others, were already completing distinguished Ph.D. dissertations in the late 1930s that were based on field research in Africa or other types of original data. What we generally mean by African studies developed at a later stage, when the scholarly interaction of specialists on Africa drawn from a number of disciplines is formalized through a structure established by their institution.