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Acknowledgments
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Acknowledgments T his book would not exist without the inspiration and support of family, friends, teachers, and colleagues over the last decade. My gratitude cannot be adequately expressed in the pages here. Scott Campbell, Robert Fishman, Matthew Lassiter, and Joseph Grengs oversaw this project from its beginnings as a dissertation. From the moment I first considered the University of Michigan for graduate school, Scott has been an invaluable resource and mentor. As an advisor, he was always willing to take time to talk about coursework, research, career, and life. Robert was remarkably encouraging as the project took form, offering insight and constructive critique at a number of extremely important moments. His scholarship has been the model that I have tried to follow throughout, though I am still far from reaching the standard he has set. As a fellow Atlantan, whose work on the transformation of the postwar urban South helped provide a framework for my study, Matt played a critical role in encouraging me to expand the original scope of the research to include a much longer time frame. He was a precise blueprint of what an outstanding instructor and advisor should be. Joe asked insightful and timely questions that helped me improve the focus of the project in its early phases. He also generously offered his friendship and advice over the years, which included some rather interesting music trading. That this project got off the ground owes a great deal to my classmates at Michigan . Thank you for making Ann Arbor more fun than it had any right to be. Though at the time the hours spent in the windowless interior rooms of the Taubman College viii | Acknowledgments seemed almost endless, the conversations, arguments, and gripe sessions proved to be worth more than I can even begin to describe. Chris Coutts and Sanjeev vidyarthi have my deepest gratitude for making Room 2208I not only a place to get a little work done but also a refuge and a space in which brutal honesty could be mixed with ridiculousness (and impromptu interior design projects). With them, happy hours were frequent, Friday cookouts were the highlight of the week, and friendships will last a lifetime. For Dan Spiess, heartfelt thanks for making the difficult transition to graduate school and southeastern Michigan bearable and, more than that, fun. Images from our numerous adventures are permanently burned in my mind. I owe Raju Mann for bringing a healthy dose of skepticism to all our Ph.D. bullshit and for a bit of Detroit magic when it was needed. Elijah Davidian offered unconditional friendship and an amazingly optimistic outlook on life. nina David became a good friend and has become a good coauthor to boot. I thank neha Sami and Anirban Adhya for commiseration, food, drink, and a forgiving form of friendship. I also thank Caroline Low, Taejung Kim, Phil D’anieri, and Xiaoguang Wang for lively hallway conversations , resource sharing, and advice. The generosity of numerous people and institutions made the research this book is constructed on possible. The Georgia Archives staff, now scattered, deserve special acknowledgment for making a huge amount of obscure state government documents available. The papers in those boxes of materials form a critical foundation of this book. Despite operating on the stingiest of budgets and in an environment in which the fate of the institution itself was in doubt, the staff made Georgia’s primary archival repository (a treasure for the people of the state) a relaxing place to do research. I am especially in debt to Renate Milner and Amanda Mos. Both endured my seemingly endless requests with good grace and made the days upon days spent in the frigid air of the Government Documents Reading Room not only productive but pleasurable. I thank them for advice on finding my way through the voluminous collection that documents Georgia’s history, occasional lunches in Jonesboro, and gossip. It is not every day that a researcher meets a gang of archivists so unfailingly helpful and so warm and welcoming. Erica Danylchak at the Atlanta History Center was a huge help during my many months there. She provided insight and access to the massive Atlanta Regional Commission collection, still in the midst of processing, that was critical to this project. I commend the efforts of Sue verHoef and Paige Adair, who provided guidance through the process of securing digital reproductions. Likewise, Helen Matthews provided guidance to the Atlanta History Center’s vast collections at several critical moments. The staff at...