Unlike the situation in World War I, the United States government actively encouraged these studies and assigned draftees as well as volunteers to special units for the study of languages, and special language schools were established for the Armed Services throughout the country. This created still another problem. Wartime conscription reduced the number of students alarmingly causing nearly all colleges and universities to become dependent upon government funds for their continued functioning. The larger institutions, with their highly developed laboratories and opportunities for scientific training, received most of the students to be trained in technical subjects. The government, therefore, often opened language centers in smaller institutions, many of which lacked necessary libraries and, in some localities, secured a proper staff of instructors only with difficulty. Thus, Bulgarian was assigned to the University of Denver, which was fortunate to find in that city an educated Bulgarian lady. She agreed to help, although she had never seriously considered teaching Bulgarian, and was compelled to prepare most of her materials from original Bulgarian texts which she owned. With the reduction of the armed forces after the War, many of these courses were suspended, although both the Navy and Air Force still send selected students to various universities. The Army, however, has established its own language school at the Presidio of Monterey. With a well selected civilian faculty, many of them former members of university staffs, this is rapidly becoming one of the best institutions of its kind for the study of the Slavic as well as other languages. It is preparing, for its own use, its own courses and it promises to become an important testing ground for Slavic and East European studies. In addition to this, Russian has been introduced into the curriculum of such service academies as West Point, where the work which was tentatively started after World War I is now on a definite and secure basis. This period, too, saw the beginning of the organization of the so-called area studies. In these, the history, geography and economics of the given area are stressed. Such efforts represent an attempt to overcome the gaps which have developed between historical, literary and cultural studies through the departmentalizing of institutions. But as they have developed, historical and economic elements have been stressed more than cultural and literary. This was perhaps natural. However, during the War, at the height of the enthusiasm for the USSR, studies of this kind tended to accent the Soviet version of the relations between the nationalities of the Soviet Union, and the old Russian concept of a single Russian people. There was thus, a perpetuation of the previous confusion in American thinking; and, it was not overcome even when the Ukrainian and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republics were included as charter members in the United Nations.