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IN THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY MANY U.S. CITIZENS ARE AWARE OF a few great U.S. universities that happen to be located in the South. Some of these institutions have been around for more than two centuries, and all of them have contributed to shaping U.S. higher education as it exists today. But in doing so, they did not simply copy northern models. They sought inspiration whenever and wherever a promising opportunity arose. In early 1881, for example, Charles Forster Smith of Spartanburg, South Carolina, wrote from the University of Leipzig to his friend and student James Hampton Kirkland back home that Germany "is a glorious place to study in." Kirkland would find there "an intellectual life of which you never dreamed." Smith continued, "It is a considerable leap from Yale or Harvard to a German University; from a college like our Southern institution, it is a change almost beyond conception." (1) Of course, one might interpret this statement as a concession that the South was sadly lagging behind in providing academic opportunities of the highest order. After all, even though Smith, as well as some of his students, would subsequently prove their scholarly and administrative worth in the U.S. South (and elsewhere), he constructed higher education in hierarchical terms. Smith, however, not only observed that southern institutions fared less well than northern and the then highly praised German-speaking universities. He also expressed a determination and ambition to ameliorate the situation. In this, he did not lag behind his northern fellow countrymen. Rather than treating southern academia as an isolated subtopic and measuring it by northern standards, we should study the men and women who spent their lives making the most of the educational opportunities and possibilities in the New South. This article traces a late-nineteenth-century academic network that connected southern academic institutions with German ones. To what extent did these southerners embrace German universities? Why did they do so, and what did they expect and ultimately gain from the experience? We know hardly anything about late-nineteenth-century student migration from the U.S. South to Europe, as literature in this field tends to focus on institutions in the North, including Johns Hopkins University, which in spite of its location in Maryland is not usually discussed as a southern academic outpost. (2) We need first to create a picture based on archival sources and other primary documents before we can start to interpret it. We need to determine the educational backgrounds of southern educators before we can examine what the South did or did not contribute to U.S. national educational culture. Recent publications in regional studies illustrate that southern academia before and after the Civil War was not provincial, backward, or intellectually isolated. (3) Dan R. Frost argues that many former Confederates saw scientific curricula as one way to build up the South. (4) According to Frost, some southerners concluded that the South had lost the Civil War because it lagged behind the North in scientific advances and instruction. They believed that the 1870-1871 war between Germany and France had been won by a "superior educational system" that provided the German (or Prussian) "nation with the industrial strength necessary to win the war." (5) But the post-Civil War South was not exclusively concerned with utilitarian education or reconstructing an infrastructure. New approaches to philology were then being developed in Europe, particularly at German-speaking universities. Southerners were as enthusiastic about such new ideas as were their peers from across the United States. Southerners, too, earned Ph.D. degrees in linguistics from German universities. One might argue that German scientific methods in the humanities provided avenues for southerners to reconstruct their regional identity by becoming modern, cosmopolitan (white) southern scientist-scholars. …