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Acknowledgments  The origins of this book lie in encounters with Columbia as place in my younger days, bus rides through the Oblong country, Copake, Hillsdale, and into Egremont; driving west from Hancock down Mount Lebanon, through the New Lebanon Valley and along Kinderhook Creek over to Albany. They lie also with formal questions about my problem, the delicacy and endurance of the fabric of civil life that has been so apparent around the world in recent decades. It has been a long but very rewarding adventure. The research and writing of this book have been supported variously by a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a sabbatical at Tufts University, and the generous quarter system schedule at Ohio State University. The College of Arts and Humanities at Ohio State University also provided important assistance in the publication of this book. I am extremely grateful to all of these institutions for their very generous support. I owe manydebts to many peoplewhose assistance has shaped myefforts in many ways. First and foremost, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Ruth Piwonka, one of the great authorities on the history and culture of Columbia County and the surrounding region. I knew that we were on the same page from our first phone conversation. I let it be known that I was interested in the question of a revolutionary settlement in Columbia County. There was a long pause, and then she replied, “I don’t think that there has ever been one.” From that moment through to my final inquiries Ruth has been an amazing resource and a great friend. I also owe a great debt to Helen McLallen, Peter Stott, Phil Lampi, Donald Lampson, and Thomas Humphrey. As curator of the Columbia County Historical Society, Helen answered a host of questions and sent me innumerable bundles of Xeroxes. Peter Stott suddenly popped up one day at Tufts and lent me his massive files of research on the rise of manufacturing in Columbia County, the basis of his book,Looking forWork: Industrial Archaeology in Columbia County, New York (Kinderhook, N.Y., 2007). I first was in touch with Phil Lampi many years ago, and since then he has been sending me county and town election returns from what is now the American Antiquarian Society/Tufts University New Nation Votes Project, and I have been able to reciprocate in a very small way. The late Donald Lampson viii ) Acknowledgments was a specialist in the history of the Revolution in Columbia County, especially Livingston Manor, and hewas kind enough to sharewith me his massive collection of transcribed materials. Tom Humphrey shared with me research notes from the early stages of his dissertation and impressed upon me the importance of the various collections of papers left behind by the William Wilson family, a lesson for which I am extremely grateful. Tom Humphrey is the author of one of a group of dissertations that have guided me in the many complexities of the history of New York in the era of the Revolution and the early Republic. Tom’s dissertation is now Land and Liberty: HudsonValley Riots in the Age of Revolution (DeKalb, Ill., 2004). Other fine dissertations-become-books are Martin Bruegel, Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780–1860 (Durham , N.C., 2002); and David N. Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827 (Baton Rouge, La., 2006). I would like also to salute these exceptionally useful but as yet unpublished dissertations: Peter Van Ness Denman, “From Deference to Democracy: The Van Ness Family and Their Times, 1759 to 1844” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1977); John Robert Finnegan, Jr., “Defamation, Politics, and the Social Process of the Law in New York State, 1776–1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota , 1985); Michael Edward Groth, “Forging Freedom in the Mid-Hudson Valley: The End of Slavery and the Formation of a Free African-American Community in Dutchess, County, New York” (Ph.D. diss., SUNY Binghamton , 1994); Diane Helen Lobody, “Lost in the Ocean of Love: The Mystical Writings of Catherine Livingston Garrettson” (Ph.D. diss., Drew University , 1990); Robert E.Wright, “Banking and Politics in NewYork, 1784–1829” (Ph.D. diss., SUNY Buffalo, 1996). A host of scholars have answered my requests for helpwith evidence and interpretationovertheyears .Iwantto thankStephanieAeder,CatherineAllgor, Bliss and Brigitte Carnochan, Thomas Donnelly, Sally Fox, Jim Folts, Christian Goodwillie, Bill Gorman, Jerry Grant,Graham...

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