The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic

Acknowledgments

acknowledgments I began work on The Overflowing of Friendship a few years before leaving Southern California and have finished it almost four years after moving to Miami. Both the University of California at Riverside and the University of Miami have supported this project in important ways. In particular, I would like to express my appreciation to the Center for Ideas and Society at UCR and especially its director, Emory Elliott, for a resident fellowship in the spring quarter of 2003 and a research grant in 2003–2004; I hope that Emory knows how much his support and encouragement meant to me throughout my years at UCR. I am also thankful for funding from the Academic Senate at UCR to support the initial stages of my research for this project. The Interlibrary Loan staff at the Tomas Rivera Library were tireless in their efforts to locate and procure many of the printed sources used in this book; I remember Janet and her wonderful colleagues with much gratitude and affection. Since arriving at the University of Miami, I have rapidly accumulated debts of gratitude to the staff of the Richter Library, especially its director, William Walker, whose decision to acquire for the library digital versions of the Early American Imprints and Early American Newspapers collections made a dramatic difference to the final phase of my research; Bill is a remarkable colleague and friend. I am also very grateful for research support from the Dean of Arts and Sciences and the Department of History, which enabled me to complete the project in a timely fashion. As with previous projects, my visits to archival collections have left me indebted to many curators and librarians for their time, expertise, and good cheer. I am grateful to the staff at the Library of Congress; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Boston Athenaeum; the American Antiquarian Society; Yale University Library’s Department of Manuscripts and Archives; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Library Comix pany of Philadelphia; the Quaker Collection at Haverford College Library ; the New York Historical Society; the Firestone Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Princeton University; the Maryland Historical Society; the Library of Virginia; the Virginia Historical Society; the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University; and the Southern Historical Collection in the Wilson Library at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for their kind assistance. I also want to thank Michael Bernath, Wendy Lucas Castro, Thomas Foster, Wendy Gamber, Christine Heyrman, Mary Lindemann, Elizabeth Reis, and Ashli White for sharing material and citations. But my greatest debt in this regard is to literary scholar Caleb Crain, who alerted me to the survival of the first volume of John Mifflin’s journal and provided me with a copy of the manuscript; my sincere thanks also to the private owner of this journal for allowing Caleb and me to use it. During the years since I started work on this volume, I have been asked many thought-provoking questions at conferences and other venues where I have given papers relating to the project. A panel on “Cultivating Emotion in the Early Republic” at an annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and a roundtable on “Historicizing Gender in Early America” at an annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians proved particularly valuable. My thanks to all of these questioners and to those who organized, chaired, and gave formal comments at these gatherings. My colleagues in the Early Modern Gender Reading Group at UM read part of one chapter and gave me invaluable feedback. And then there is Jim Downs, who encouraged me in his own inimitable way to embrace more forthrightly the multilayered possibilities of my material. Last year several friends and colleagues kindly agreed to read a draft of the entire manuscript. Whatever its faults, this book is certainly much stronger as a result of their comments and suggestions. Catherine Allgor, Jeanne Boydston, Wendy Lucas Castro, Mary Lindemann, Anthony Rotundo , Guido Ruggiero, Sheila Skemp, Ashli White, and Donald Yacovone have all left their mark on the pages that follow. Three of my graduate students—Lauren Lane, Simonetta Marin, and James Smith—also read the manuscript and prompted me to rethink the exposition of my argument at a key moment in the book’s evolution. Three of my readers— Mary Lindemann, Guido Ruggiero, and Ashli White—are fellow early x Acknowledgments modernists in...