Robert Redfield's Comparative Civilizations Project and the Political Imagination of Postwar America

In August 1945, Wendell Clark Bennett submitted his history and appraisal of the activities of the Ethnogeographic Board to its sponsors. Established in 1942 under the joint auspices of the National Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Sciences Research Council, and the Smithsonian Institute, the board was “a sample of broader activities” on the part of the scholarly community to establish bodies that would mediate between academic institutions and government agencies to aid in a “successful execution of the war.”2 Bennett, a member of the board, noted and applauded the “marked increase in area consciousness on the part of academic institutions”3 since the beginning of World War 11. He emphasized the