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Iextend my profound gratitude to my family, friends, colleagues, and mentors for helping me envision and finish this book. At Columbia University, Alan Brinkley, Elizabeth Blackmar, Kenneth Jackson, John Witt, and David Weiman were supportive in guiding me through the dissertation process. My sincere thanks also to M. K. Stack, retired member of the New York Stock Exchange, for his enthusiasm for this project and his keen insights, garnered from his more than three decades on Wall Street. Further enriching this book were my discussions as a graduate student with Rud Lawrence, former vice president of public relations at the NYSE during the Own Your Share years. In those talks, he awakened my understanding of the genuine passion that he and NYSE President G. Keith Funston exhibited toward their task of “democratizing ” the stock market. At key junctures in my work, I benefited from opportunities to do archival research supported by fellowships. An Alfred Chandler Fellowship at Harvard Business School allowed me access to a wonderful collection of material at Baker Library and the time to explore it. My thanks to Laura Linard and the rest of the dedicated staff at Baker Library for being so accommodating. A Rovensky Fellowship in American Business History also enabled me to deepen my research by exploring several archives, including the New York Stock Exchange Archive (NYSEA). I owe a significant debt to Steve Wheeler and Janet Linde at the NYSEA for their assistance and patience on my numerous lengthy visits there, with the most recent one being facilitated by an untenured leave grant from Bucknell University. I also thank the staff at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, the Ad Council Archive at the University of Illinois (Urbana), and the Truman Archive in Independence, Missouri. Many individuals provided much-needed encouragement along the way. My entire family, most especially my mom—Anne Traflet—as well as Dianne, Jeannie, Steve and Cathy, and Bob and Barbara, along with my nieces and Acknowledgments x Acknowledgments nephews, deserve thanks, most particularly for having faith in this project and faith in me. Having successfully written her own book (albeit on sainthood , not Wall Street!), Dianne was an inspiration as well as a font of helpful advice. My twin sister, Jeannie, with her own career in public relations, helped shape this book on the NYSE’s image transition in many key ways. Jeannie also provided great moral support, along with sustenance, on my research trips to New York City. To my mom, for her love and also for her contagious excitement about learning; I am much blessed. I grew up listening to her fascinating stories about her own childhood living on the Upper West Side in the 1940s and 1950s, and when I moved to New York City for graduate school, I found it every bit as stimulating as she had said. I thank my mom for encouraging me to go down the grad school path and also my dad, who had a deep interest in education and the stock market. With his wry sense of humor and his interest in Wall Street, he definitely would have gotten a kick that I had written this book. I also had an amazing team of friends from Columbia who seemed to never tire of providing feedback. I thank especially Lisa Ramos, Nancy Kwak, and Betsy Herbin. At the Business History Conference (BHC) and the Economic Business History Society (EBHS), I took advantage of numerous opportunities to share my research on the stock market. Lynne Doti, Jeffrey Fear, Robert Wright, Neil Forbes, Stephanie Crofton, Luis Dopico, Erik Benson, Ranjit Dighe, and Jari Eloranta all helped sharpen my analysis. Ed Perkins, Matthew Fink, and Michael Adamson were very generous with their time and willingness to share their comments on various drafts. Ed Perkins also kindly shared with me material from his own collections to which I would never have had access otherwise. Friends and colleagues also were instrumental in helping bring this book to fruition, most especially William Gruver, Sue and Skip McGoun, Maria Fiori, Michael and Clare Coyne, Chris and Tammy Phillips, Tammy and Lee Masden, Mike and Sally Kobus, and last but not least, Karen, Joe, Dan, and Christian Gallagher. Friends provided food, sustenance, and even essential dog-sitting at critical points in the writing and research process . Not to be forgotten are my students who did their own part to help me better understand popular perceptions of equity investing, then and now. I thank Erin Mackin, Kaitlin Albright...

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