Excerpt from The Lincoln Theme and American National Historiography: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 19 November 1947
This point would seem less significant in actuality, I suppose, than it does nominally, especially when one considers how much the historical literature of Great Britain would be impoverished without the scholarship of Oxford, but even as a nominal arrangement, it still seems paradoxical that the only nation whose history monopolizes a professorship at Oxford is not the British nation, and that for an alien appointee you sanction a nationalistic preoccupation which is not accorded to any national citizen.
