It is a pleasure to have been asked to write a brief introduction to this Jubilee edition of the Journal of American Studies, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the formation of the British Association for American Studies, whose first Chairman and prime mover was the seminal scholar and teacher, Frank Thistlethwaite, my present Vice-Chancellor and old friend. The edition takes the interesting form of seven academic autobiographies written by distinguished European Americanist scholars, telling us in effect how they became involved in American Studies.

The fairly restricted number of first-generation European Americanists in the post World War II era (which is in fact almost to say simply the first generation) is shown by die circumstance that, with the exception of Nikolai Bolkhovitinov, I know them all and most of diem very well. I am perhaps favourably, because centrally, placed to introduce them since three are my seniors and four my juniors. Of my seniors all three had set out on the path that was to lead them to the study of the United States before the war began, but all three, I think it fair to say, even including much the most senior of us, Dietrich Gerhard, only decisively became Americanists as a result of die war itself.

This corresponds with my own experience, though I suspect that I might have become one in any case: I was perhaps die only member of the pre-war generation among die contributors to have made a serious undergraduate study of die United States (in that splendid special subject at Oxford, The American Revolution and, I think it is accurate to add, the Maying of the Constitution, which Herbert Nicholas describes) under the magic yet far from invisible hand of Denis Brogan, the father or grandfather of us all in Britain and elsewhere.