The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History

All books rely on the help of many individuals and organizations, and that is especially the case with an edited collection like this. This volume grew out of two conferences held at MIT in Septem- ber 2000 and May 2001. We would like to thank MIT’s Provost Fund, Dean’s Fund, and History Faculty for their generous funding of those conferences. The Center for Comparative Legal History at the University of Chicago also provided additional support. We would like to thank all the contributors for making this a rewarding collaborative experience and for working hard on their many drafts. Elizabeth Sanders, David King, Jim Morone, and Sid Milkis read and commented on the essays, and for that we are thankful. Nelson Lichtenstein and Gary Gerstle pro- vided helpful feedback on the volume’s introduction. All of the readers’ reports for this volume were extremely constructive. We want to thank especially Jim Kloppenberg and Ira Katznelson for their integral involve- ment from beginning to end. We are also deeply grateful to Brigitta van Rheinberg at Princeton University Press for her enthusiasm and support of this project. We would also like to thank William Hively for his great work as our copyeditor. Finally, the book is dedicated to Meg’s daughter Abigail and Julian’s daughter Sophia, both of whom were born during the course of this project. They are our proudest accomplishments.

-xiii-