The issues in this study were apparent to me several years before the argument took shape. A number of friends and colleagues validated my work and helped me formulate the lines of argument. I wish to thank Myra Jehlen, Amy Lang, Michael T. Gilmore, John Stilgoe, and Emily Wallace, each of whom contributed time and expertise so generously that I learned from them how helpful friends and colleagues can be to one’s own work.
Along the way friends, scholars, and informal consultants made helpful suggestions or engaged in the informal discussions that proved most valuable to my thinking. In this regard I am thankful to Burton Cooper, Bonnie Costello, Eugene Green, Jeffrey Halprin, Ron Mistratta, William Newman, Mary Panzer, Mary Ann Stilgoe, William Vance, Helen Vendler, Sam Bass Warner, Jr., and Marjorie Wekselman.
The work of this book was supported by a generous research grant from the Humanities, Science, and Technology Program of the National Institute for the Humanities. The project officer, Dr. David Wright, provided excellent advice, as did Dr. David Berndt of Boston University’s Office of Sponsored Programs. Professor David Billington, Department of Civil Engineering, Princeton University, agreed to serve as consultant to the project and provided a number of helpful suggestions in response to a draft of the manuscript. The research itself proceeded expeditiously and thoroughly because of my good fortune in having Diana Kleiner and John Pearson work on it. Robert Vogel and Anne Golovin of the Smithsonian Institution were most generous and helpful during my research there. As the manuscript took shape, Iris Tillman Hill, editor-in-chief of the University of North Carolina Press, undertook its direction with care and dispatch, for which I am grateful, and Sandra Eisdorfer, senior editor, scrutinized the text with an astute eye and keen ear. I thank Townsend Ludington for his appraisal of the manuscript and John Seelye for his continual help and suggestions. Two manuscript-preparation grants from the Graduate School of Boston University were helpful at timely moments. Portions of this material have appeared in somewhat different form in Prospects: The Annual Journal of American Cultural Studies 7 (1982); William Carlos Williams Review 9, nos. 1 and 2 (1983); Essays from the Lowell Conference on Industrial History 1982 and 1983 (1985); When Information Counts: Grading the Media, ed. Bernard Rubin (1985).
Long-term projects inevitably become a part of personal life. On the home front, therefore, I want to thank Bill Tichi, to whom this book is oral history.