In 1957 American linguistics seemed to have reached a plateau of achievement and acceptance on which its practitioners could pause in retrospective pride. That year saw the publication, under the aegis of the American Council of Learned Societies, of a sampling of papers, edited by Martin Joos (Readings in Linguistics) and documenting, according to its subtitle, “The development of descriptive linguistics in America since 1925.” In a period of about five years around that date H. A. Gleason, Jr., Charles F. Hockett and Archibald A. Hill published textbooks which summarized and extended current views on linguistics, while another leading linguist, Kenneth L. Pike, summed up his considerable experience in a preliminary version of a major work on Language. In the same year there appeared a slim volume which was to have a startling impact on linguistics. Its author, Noam Chomsky, was a student of Zellig S. Harris who himself had codified the methods of structural linguistics in 1951 and was one of the leading proponents of the assumptions and goals of American linguistics attacked so sharply by its new critic. Truly a paradigm of the Hegelian myth of history.