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 Acknowledgments I am happy to have this opportunity to acknowledge the persons and institutions that helped me to write this book. I am grateful to those readers and audiences who at various stages in the work’s progress offered criticisms and suggestions that made my work harder but also helped make the book better. On this count, I am particularly grateful to the anonymous readers for the University of Minnesota Press and to Richard Morrison, all of whom offered advice that was instrumental. Thanks to Natania Meeker for inviting me to present an early version of chapter  to the Department of French and Italian at the University of Southern California, where I benefited from the tremendously generous and incisive questions. Thanks to John Williams and the Americanist Colloquium at Yale University for an invitation to present an early draft of chapter , where I received a number of excellent challenges and suggestions that changed the shape of the finished project. Thanks to Susan Scott Parrish for reading a version of chapter , for sharing her own work in progress, and for her enthusiasm for the project. Thanks to Thomas Hallock for sharing his unpublished work on Bartram with me. Thanks are due Erika Stevens, who read various portions of the manuscript and whose editorial assistance was invaluable in the manuscript’s final stages, and also to my production editor, Barbara Goodhouse, and to my excellent copy editor, Vickie West, for their extraordinary work. I am grateful to the institutions and especially the people who supported me with their belief in my work and this project. I would like to thank Brook Thomas, who first got me thinking about American mythologies when I was an undergraduate at University of California–Irvine. Thanks are also due Chris Newfield, who was my advisor during my master’s work at the University of California–Santa Barbara and whose example inspires my own effort to elucidate the larger stakes and passions driving intellectual work. My greatest debt is to Priscilla Wald, whose scholarship led the   ACKNOWLEDGMENTS way for my own, who was a stellar advisor, and whose commitment to addressing the problems and possibilities of American literary studies remains a motivating inspiration. I am grateful to the other members of my committee , Cathy Davidson, Jan Radway, and Houston Baker. Their forthright criticisms, sound advice, support, and the bravery of their own work helped me to produce this book, which turned my earlier work inside out and left most of it on the wayside. I gained immensely from seminars and discussions with professors and students who were at Duke University during my time there, including Srinivas Aravamudan, Ian Baucom, Matt Cohen, Joe Donahue, Tom Ferraro, Sibylle Fischer, Michael Hardt, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, Jenny Hubbard, Jaya Kasibhatla, Julie Kim, Rob Mitchell, Vin Nardizzi, Eden Osucha, Thomas Pfau, Jimmy Richardson, Maurice Wallace, and Jini Watson. During my final year at Duke, I was awarded a McNeil Center fellowship , which allowed me to access Philadelphia archives and where I benefited from conversations with a number of excellent Americanists working there at that time. Particular thanks to Chris Iannini for his intellectual generosity. I was very fortunate to have a fellowship at the Cornell Society for the Humanities. My thanks to the extraordinary staff—Mary Ahl, Megan Dirks, and Celeste Pietrusza—and to all of the members of the – seminar. Particular thanks to Sam Baker, Christine Marran, Tim Murray, Marcus Rediker, and Aaron Sachs. In the fall of , I was lucky to have had a research fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library, and I thank all the staff there, particularly Allison Rich, Val Andrews, and Ted Widmer. Thanks to the English Department and College at Emory University for allowing me to take research leaves. Special thanks to my colleagues Jonathan Goldberg, Rick Rambuss, Ben Reiss, Deborah Elise White, and especially Michael Elliott. I could not imagine a better first job, and I could not have written this book without the support of these colleagues as well as that of the members of my writing group at Emory: Andrea White, Michele Schreiber, and Dierdra Reber. I also benefited from the excellent contributions of the graduate students in my  seminar “Elements Atlanticisms Ecologies.” Thanks, finally, to Jennifer Heil, Ania Kowalik, and Elliott Zink for their work as research assistants. Over the years I have presented my work at a number of conferences and am grateful to all of the Americanist colleagues who invited me to speak on panels and who helped the project...

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