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Acknowledgments
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a C k N o W l e d g m e N t s When I began studying the War on Poverty deep in the recesses of the library at Texas Tech, my wife and I were expecting our first child. Now we have four kids, a ten-year-old boy and his three little sisters. We spent seven years bouncing around the country while my wife, Darby, finished her residency and a service obligation to the Air Force. I worked at six colleges in four states. I spent a miserable year in Kuwait mobilized as an Army reservist. Darby is out of the Air Force now, and we have settled into a relatively pleasant suburb in Las Vegas, a lifetime away from the government documents section in Lubbock. That this book got published in spite of all those complications owes less to my own perseverance than to the help and encouragement of family and colleagues. I would not have completed this book without my wife, Dr. Darby Clayson . For the past fifteen years, Darb has been my best friend and role model. Other than my parents, she is the only person in my life whose confidence in me has never wavered. I owe Joey, Sarah, Elisabeth, and Emily an apology for the fact that the laptop screen has gotten more face time with their dad than they have over the past few years. I also would like to thank my War on Poverty cronies. In the fall of 2003 I received an email out of the blue from Marc Rodriguez, who invited me to a conference at Princeton University. The scholars at that conference reshaped my thinking and have transformed the historiography of the War on Poverty. Along with Marc, the attendees included Annelise Orleck, Bob Bauman, Tom Kiffmeyer, and Rhonda Williams, all of whom have published books on the Freedom Is Not Enough poverty fight in communities around the country. Professor Orleck has become our collective mentor, and as a Las Vegan I am especially thankful for her Storming Caesar’s Palace. After the Princeton conference we took the show on the road and did the 2005 American Historical Association conference in Seattle. In 2007 Lisa Hazirijan and Guian McKee brought an even larger group together at the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Along with the scholars mentioned above, the Charlottesville conference included Susan Ashmore, Dan Cobb, Kent Germany, Laurie Green, Ivy Holliman, Amy Jordan, Thomas Jackson, and Wesley Phelps. In 2009 many from the same group took the War on Poverty tour back to Seattle for the Organization of American Historians conference. Wes and I also did a panel at the Texas State Historical Association conference in Austin that year. These collaborations moved my work into new and unexpected directions, and I am so grateful to the group for its professionalism. My mentors at Texas Tech deserve recognition. Alwyn Barr, a fine scholar who has worked with Tech graduate students through four decades, took great care guiding me through my dissertation. Although George Flynn retired the year before I defended my dissertation, he convinced me that good scholarship is not merely a means to an end but rather the historian’s raison d’être. I am grateful to others who contributed toward this book’s publication. The staff at the Institute of Texan Cultures in San Antonio, especially Tom Shelton and Patrick Lemelle, went above and beyond on short notice to help with photos. And the caring professionals of the editorial staff at the University of Texas Press deserve credit for their part in bringing the project to fruition. When I took my current position at the College of Southern Nevada, it was with the understanding that my scholarly ambition would be secondary to teaching and service responsibilities at the college. Scholarship is not part of the job description for community college historians.Yet my fellow historians at CSN—John Hollitz and Mike Green—have shown me that it is possible to remain professionally engaged while teaching ten sections a year. I like to think that what we community college professionals do is part of the solution to poverty in America. I have taught about 3,500 students in my career, most of whom would have been excluded from higher education without a community college. To these students I offer my sincere thanks for keeping me employed and my apologies for taking too long to grade their papers while I worked...