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ix At an American Studies Association session honoring David Noble some years ago, the most arresting tribute came from the Chicana feminist Dr. Edén Torres, a former student of David’s. Torres allowed that in her early encounters with him she harbored doubts about what she had to learn from David across differences in race, gender, generation , and class. The process by which she came to treasure David reflected her political sophistication and good judgment. But it also bespoke his ability to listen to, learn from, and care for students rather than to assume that intellectual pyrotechnics could make differences disappear. Torres’s remarks resonated for me because I had my own doubts about what I would make of David Noble on first meeting him. I had come to the University of Minnesota as a historian in the early 1990s. Although David was the most eminent historian on the campus, he had long since left the history department for work “across the river” in American studies. I came to know more of him—his book Historians against History was familiar and I knew that he was the most-loved feature of the University of Minnesota for my friend George Lipsitz during George’s stay there—through graduate student stories. Those seemed, too, larger-than-life: how he dressed up like Thomas Jefferson or like Norman Mailer to lecture; how the FBI had spied on him; how he would soon supervise his one hundredth dissertation; how he used to, in days of back troubles, lecture lying down, so that stragglers in the back of the room heard a disembodied voice filling the space; how he could seem to sleep through oral examinations—some people swore he was asleep—and then offer summative questions weaving all the strands of the discussion together. FOREWORD David R. Roediger x foreword I had only once encountered, decades before, such extravagant word of mouth about a professor, and in that case he seemed not to live up to the hype at all. Then, too, David was an intellectual historian, not exactly a badge of honor in the eyes of my narrowly trained social history generation. I soon learned also that his radicalism was nourished by an active Catholic religious life; I was a lapsed Catholic and a Marxist. Even when I too moved offices across the river to chair the Program in American Studies I was wary. He did not do e-mail! It was David’s presence that made me love him even before I appreciated how critically important his ideas are. This quality was not “presence” in the marketed, overblown sense that star-system academia can foster, but rather a daily, dropping-by presence. An astonishingly productive writer of books, an incredible teacher, an unsurpassed graduate student mentor, and a spectacularly wide reader, he remained unhurried. The Catholic anarchist Dorothy Day once offered the injunction “Sow time” as a magical realist strategy to be of service and still have something left. David made that injunction work in ways not unconnected with his keen observations on time and season in this book. Again and again, he would end friendly conversation in my office by dropping off a brand-new book he had just read. Offline, usually a no-show at conferences, and past typical retirement age, David was the first to know about new work, especially if it concerned race, sexuality, and gender. Because he mistakenly received free books intended for the “other David Noble,” an important historian of technology and work, he often knew about developments in my specialization sooner than I. David also was present in every important political struggle on campus. On frigid days he was there for campus workers’ union rallies . When the faculty began to organize in the face of attacks on tenure , he was for me the most reliable presence. The resort to settling organizing issues by e-mail was not a temptation to David. He came to meetings. He was also a great supporter of ethnic studies, not just institutionally but in his deep commitments to students. His stories of his doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin illuminated the stories of my social history inspirations, Herbert Gutman and George Rawick, roughly contemporary with him as students there. Through conversations I also came to see that David’s writing reflected his connections to the leading figures in U.S. history of a generation before (especially Merle Curti) and, through his mentors, to the great Frederick Jackson [3...

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