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Acknowledgments

This work has benefited from a number of readers whose comments and suggestions have made it a markedly better book than it would have otherwise been. John Gillis’s encouragement to think about this material within the framework of family, class, and community was the single greatest influence on what was originally a much narrower project. His suggestions were reinforced by the community of scholars at Rutgers University, where Bonnie Smith, Jennifer Jones, and Ed Cohen provided the comments that helped link the implications of this study to questions that were originally outside my area of interest. Randolph Trumbach’s close readings of many chapters over the years and insistence on the importance of eighteenth-century precedents improved this work in numerous ways, as did my participation in the New York Gay and Lesbian History Seminar, which he ran for four years.

The final stages of this project were carried out with the funding and support of the Florida State University Department of History, during which time George Robb, Anna Clark, Ed Gray, Sean Brady, Niels Hooper, and Erika Büky each gave insightful comments on the final drafts of the work. Research assistance was provided by the staffs of the National Archive in London, the British Library, Bobst Library in New York, and Perkins Library in Durham, North Carolina. This work is also indebted to Bruce Kinzer, Kathleen Berkeley, Andy Dowless, Max Likin, and Joe Merieux, each in different ways.

Fred Bernstein provided invaluable help in the final stages of this project, as well as at many other points along the way.