Humboldt not only offered a theoretically much more diverse program of Americanist linguistics than conventionally recognized, ranging from fundamental analytical issues, historical problems, and sociohistorical descriptions to comparative studies, typological questions, innovative notions, and programmatic statements across much of Middle and South America and eventually eastern North America; significantly, the present book also covers a longer historical period, from the early nineteenth century through the years after World War I, during which he exerted direct and indirect influences on four generations of linguists and anthropologists. Although the present discussion does not address the developments of the twentieth century, it answers a question that half a century ago Dell Hymes raised in wonderment about the continuous reinvention of Humboldtian notions: American Humboldtians then offered a long, sociohistorically diverse and rich platform for a broadly defined comparative linguistics to reinvent itself in various forms.