I have had the good fortune of growing up in a department filled with first-rate scholars and gentle colleagues, who over the years have supported and sustained me in any number of ways. Successive chairmen - the late Richard Hunt, Peter Karsten, Seymour Drescher, Richard Smethurst, Edward Muller, and Reid Andrews - have encouraged and prodded in equal measure, and I am genuinely grateful to them. My friends and colleagues have also been ever ready to serve as sounding boards and to read whatever I handed them, responding with incisive and on-the-mark criticisms
