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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S Quite a few people made important contributions to this book. The content of individual chapters has been strongly influenced by feedback I received from the members of the Rochester University Social Historian (RUSH) draft group. The members of this group gave careful and thoughtful comments on the introduction and the chapter on Garrison and Douglass. I presented a version of the Grimké-Beecher chapter at a conference of the Society for the History of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) and initiated correspondences that helped me contextualize the chapter. Most important in this regard is the help I received from members of the Emerson Society: Ron Bosco, David Robinson, Barbara Packer, and Len Gougeon, who have been in running dialogue with this project for several years. Colleagues at SUNY–Brockporthavealsobeen instrumental.Iam particularly indebted to our former Dean of Letters and Sciences Michael Maggiotto, who helped me arrange a semester leave to work out the relationships of discursive democracy to the extragovernmental organizations that created a culture of reform in antebellum America. Colleen Donaldson was important in enabling me to get funding for research assistance. I am also grateful to colleagues in the Department of English: Mark Anderson, Bob Gemmet, Yuko Matsukawa, and especially Roger Kurtz; and to two chairs, Earl Ingersoll and Elizabeth Hinds. Through their help with the research, Sarah Bendschneider and Zabrina Packard expanded the range of the book and helped me back out of many dead ends. I also want to thank Bernice Graham, Ken Jones, Matt Kilmer, Rob Seguin, and Allison Parker. My friends Olga Zinovieva and Vadim Ptitsyn at the SUNY Center on Russia and the United States in Moscow also generously allowed me to disappear for days at a time to work on revising the manuscript. This is the second book I have done with the University of Georgia Press, and I want to thank the press for the time they have taken with the process and for recruiting careful and thoughtful readers for both projects. The two readers of this text did much to help me figure out, among other things, important continuity issues in the argument. I am also grateful to Nancy Grayson, Jon Davies, Barbara Wojhoski, and Heather Dubnick, who turned the manuscript into a book. This page intentionally left blank ...

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