Levine: “The seminar emerged in Germany in the eighteenth century. Though various in its first incarnations, it soon took on a recognizable shape: a professor chose a small body of talented students and shifted them away from the usual tasks of mastering a prescribed body of materials toward the active production of original knowledge through the use of specific disciplinary methods. Enclosed in a room—sometimes even behind locked doors— charismatic individual historians, philologists, and philosophers introduced intimate cohorts of students to source materials and research questions, and expected them to arrive at new truths through interpretation and discussion, collaboration and competition. Writing became the new test of success, displacing older modes of oral examination. Some Americans who had studied in Germany became enthusiastic proponents of seminar methods, and by the 1880s these had become a staple of US colleges and universities.”