In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Acknowledgments More than once I thought this book would never be completed; now that it is I can offer thanks one more time to all those people who patiently tolerated my desire to talk about incest. Thankfully, in this age of austerity in higher education, the research and writing of this book have been generously funded. For that I would like to thank the Barra Foundation; the University of South Florida College of Arts and Science, for support through a Creative Scholarship Grant; Department of History at the University of South Florida; the Center for Historical Analysis and Department of History at Rutgers University; and the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. Also important have been the various networks of people who have supported me through the example of their scholarship, their patience in reading the manuscript, and their willingness to discuss the various ideas that make up this book. This support started in graduate school, where the Department of History at Rutgers University provided a warm and intellectually challenging environment to develop the ideas here. There I especially thank Jim Livingston, whose example even when I was an undergraduate was what prompted me even to ponder graduate school at all. Nancy Hewitt supported me and this project from the beginning with sympathetic encouragement and the kind of insightful criticism that we all hope for. In addition I would like to thank Herman Bennett, Ann Fabian, and Temma Kaplan for the time they spent supporting me while at Rutgers. Having now been out in the wider world of academia for a while, I have come to appreciate even more just how intellectually generous and expansive the history department at Rutgers was, and I am truly grateful for it. More than anyone else, Joan Scott has been at the center of my intellectual life since the very beginning of graduate school, when she saw something (or at least I think she saw something) in a relatively unread master’s student and encouraged me to continue on for a doctorate. Since then she has read nearly every word I have written, always supportively pushing me  Acknowledgments to produce something better. She has been a model of critique and politically engaged scholarship, and I hope this book comes close to the example she has set for me. Two groups in particular—the scholars at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the my coeditors at History of the Present—made this book much stronger than it would ever have been. When Dan Richter called informing me that I would be a postdoctoral fellow at the McNeil Center at the University of Pennsylvania, I was both elated and apprehensive . By the end of my tenure there, my book was immeasurably better as a result of the intellectual vibrancy of the center and the wider community at Penn. Being afforded the time to research and write with so many other scholars working on the same period is, I have realized, a rare treat. And Dan has created an environment in which one is always being challenged to produce better work, through both the more formal events and the informal conversations that are the life of the center. In that spirit I would like to thank Dan, Amy Baxter-Bellamy, Irene Cheng, Sean Harvey, Hunt Howell, Carrie Hyde, Dawn Peterson, Joe Rezek, Elena Schneider, Christina Snyder, and Megan Walsh. At the same time that I was at the McNeil Center I started another project only tangentially related to my book and not related at all to early American studies. That project resulted in a journal devoted to critical history , History of the Present. Too often, I think, historians eschew the critical and theoretical in favor of an empirical fantasy. So I would like to thank my coeditors—Andrew Aisenberg, Ben Kafka, Sylvia Schafer, Joan Scott, and Mrinalini Sinha—for being so wonderful to work with and reminding me that there is a community of like-minded historians out there. Their critical and political commitments are models of historical practice, and it was always nice to have ideal readers in my head as I brought the book to completion. The University of South Florida has proved a welcome place to begin my career. My department chair, Fraser Ottanelli, has been unflaggingly supportive of my career, bending over backward to make sure that I (and my colleagues) received as much support as possible in this age of limited funds. I am particularly...

Share