In the decade from 1943 through 1953, the Social Science Research Council led the founding movement of area studies in the United States. This movement was not only to address the problem of the shortage of expertise about the world, but also to realize an overall transformation of American social sciences amid concerns and reflections about American culture and public intellectual life. American areas studies took “interdisciplinarity” and “global coverage” as its core tenet and goal, which was expected to transform American social sciences and to deepen and expand the present state of academic professionalization. The “cross-cultural understanding” and “cultural relativism”, as advocated by the movement, constituted a major self-conscious endeavor by American social scientists and intellectual elites to countervail American ethnocentrism and Western cultural parochialism.