Fenced In

Fenced In is the culmination of a unique project. When Max J. Skidmore received a request from the Policy Studies Organization to prepare a number of articles on freedom, he accepted readily. For a decade, he had been publishing a series of books, five in all,  dealing broadly with American political culture, the emerging attacks on freedom, democracy, and established American traditions. His series also considered the burgeoning of corruption at the highest levels. To distinguish those books from the many other political works that were appearing, he employed a different approach for each: reviews, discrete analyses, fiction in the form of a utopian novel, deep analysis of a specific public policy, and poetry. 

His freedom articles formed  a special issue of Proceedings of the Policy Studies Organization. Collectively, these became the nucleus for Fenced In, and enabled it to become a capstone for Skidmore's series of works, adding new emphases, and providing evaluations of the series, identifying what was, and was not, accurate in their predictions and to what extent they were reasonable in their prescriptions, given actual developments. "The Closing of the American Mind" does not appear as a phrase in the book, but it nevertheless can be considered as the overall subject of Fenced In.

Skidmore is University of Missouri Curators' Distinguished Professor Emeritus. He has published widely in several fields, has been Distinguished Fulbright Lecturer to India, where he was director of a library and research center on Americana; and later was senior Fulbright Scholar at the University of Hong Kong. He considers himself fortunate to have taken his PhD at the University of Minnesota during its "golden age" of American Studies.