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Acknowledgments There is something about acknowledgment pages that I have always loved; perhaps because seeing the network that sustains the work of writing helps to give the lie to its isolation. For even though it is ultimately just a pile of pages, a purple pen, and me, many people and institutions allowed me to shut out all the other parts of my life in order to find the focus and the energy necessary to complete this project. My formal life as a student was bracketed by Adrienne Lash Jones at Oberlin College and my Ph.D. advisor, Julius S. Scott, at Duke University. When I was a college junior, Adrienne Jones introduced me to the idea of African American women’s history, and provided me with a model of academic grace that I continue to emulate. Julius Scott opened up the black Atlantic and did so with a rigor and commitment to the power of the written word that I continue to strive for. They both taught me essential and difficult lessons about integrity and the relationship between my work and myself. I am quite grateful for their presence in my academic life and hope that my work reflects their considerable influence. At Duke University, I was quite fortunate to have the opportunity to study and interact with an extraordinary faculty that included William Chafe, David Barry Gaspar, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Monica Greene, Nancy Hewitt, Julius Scott, and Peter Wood. In particular, Peter Wood’s work has been enormously influential. He taught me that demography held radical truths and was nothing to be scared of. Despite moments of terror, I continue to know that he was absolutely right. Herman Bennett, Matthew Countryman, Ann Farnsworth, Kirsten Fischer, Christina Greene, Deborah Montgomerie, Celia Naylor-Ojurongbe, Andrew Neather, Stephanie Smallwood , Faith Smith, Timothy Tyson, Lisa Waller, and Jocelyn Zivin were all part of an environment at Duke that encouraged the kind of intellectual risk-taking that is the foundation of this project. In Baltimore, Antoinette Burton taught me that continuing to do so is my only option. Since leaving North Carolina for northern climes, good fortune has followed me in the community of friends and colleagues in which my life and work takes 278 Acknowledgments shape. I find myself in a family of formidable intellects; my grandmother Ethel ‘‘Maymette’’ Carter, my parents John and Claudia Morgan, and my brother Zachary R. Morgan have always challenged me—both to get a word in edgewise and to do the work that I love. My friends are enormously supportive of the kind of work I do, and I cannot imagine undertaking this project without the love and kindness of such a beloved circle. Thank you to Steven Amsterdam, Barbara Balliet, Peter Bergman, Cheryl Clarke, Kristen Goldmansour, Adib Goldmansour, Mary Esther Malloy-Hopwood, Sharon Frances Moore, Robert Reid-Pharr, Lisa Waller, Sidney Whelan, and Keith Yazmir. Once released from the confines of graduate school, I couldn’t have found a setting more supportive than the departments of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. My colleagues at Rutgers have supported this project in many ways. The interdisciplinary context of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies has been invaluable, I am particularly grateful for the support and engagement of Barbara Balliet, Ethel Brooks, Harriet Davidson, Joanne Givand, Mary Hawkesworth, Jasbir Puar, and Johanna Regulska. The Department of History has been a most collegial academic home. Nancy Hewitt tailed me from Durham and pushed and prodded with a combination of tenacity and gentleness that is unparalleled, I owe her a great deal. Paul Clemens, John Gillis, Temma Kaplan, Steven Lawson, and Bonnie Smith offered important intellectual support. I arrived at Rutgers as Mia Bay and Deborah Gray White inaugurated the Black Atlantic Project at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis ; the two years of lively discussion and probing intellectual work at the center were extraordinary. It gives me particular pleasure to finish this book while Deborah Gray White is my department Chair. When I was nineteen years old, I caught a glimpse of Deborah at the 1985 meeting of the Association for the Study of African Life and History in Cleveland, Ohio. She gave me my first glimpse of the pure joy and triumph of writing and publishing the history of African American women. What a delight it is for me now to offer up a contribution to a field that she inaugurated. I appreciate the good will...

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