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Acknowledgments It has been a privilege to work with so many fine people and institutions in the preparation of this volume. Jim Oakes’s astute and insightful commentary at a 2007 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) panel provided the rationale for this volume. Peter Onuf and Dick Holway at the University of Virginia Press have enthusiastically supported this project since we first pitched the idea to them. Peter, along with Don Ratcliffe, graciously served as unofficial, unindicted coeditors of the volume: both offered constant good advice about the shape and direction of the volume; both provided needed critical readings of the introduction. François Furstenberg also offered sharp criticism that forced us to rethink the introduction along with the significance of the volume. The outside readers for the University of Virginia Press also provided helpful criticism and support as this volume moved from conception to finished manuscript. Institutions as well as individuals provided important support. The Rocky Mountain Seminar in Early American History, sponsored by Brigham Young University, the University of Utah, and the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center in Salt Lake City provided a valuable forum for thinking about the focus of the collection at a critical time. The Sixteenth Annual Meeting of British American Nineteenth Century Historians provided an equally valuable opportunity to rethink our arguments as we readied the volume for publication. The Purdue Research Foundation provided a Summer Faculty Development Grant that helped get this project started. Penn State University and Brigham Young University generously provided the time and support needed to see a project like this through to completion. That included support for Britt Wilkinson’s excellent services as a research assistant in the preparation of an early version of the manuscript by BYU’s History Department. Under the auspices of SHEAR, specialists in the early American republic continue to produce some of the best scholarship in American history, as indicated by the excellent essays in this volume. The robust, high quality of scholarship on the early republic is well represented by two of the persons to x Acknowledgments whom we have dedicated this volume, Lance Banning and Ira Berlin. It is hard to imagine two scholars whose interests are more different, yet it is testimony to their commitment to scholarship that two of their former students have collaborated to produce a volume that treats social and cultural history as critical to understanding the politics of slavery. Finally, thanks and praise are due to the authors who contributed such fine pieces of scholarship to this collection. ...

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