【正确答案】 D

【答案解析】According to the passage, prior to the early 1960s Negro history was not an object of particularly great renown in academe. In the 1950s, the advice given to Blassingame to avoid black history if he desired "a future in the historical profession" seemed wise— graduate students of the caliber of Huggins and Litwack felt an ambivalence about enter-ing the field because of "practical concerns." What these concerns boiled down to was the sense that to choose black history as one's specialization would be detrimental or harmful to one's career.