In the course of this project, we have benefited enormously from the generosity and support of many institutions. Before the revolution in digitization, we camped out for long stretches of time at the New England Historic Genealogical Society, leaning heavily on their knowledgeable staff, including Jerome Anderson, David Dearborn, Julie Otto, and Marie Daly, and profiting from the stalwart support of D. Brenton Simons, president and CEO. At the Massachusetts Historical Society, Peter Drummey, Brenda Lawson, Jennifer Smith, Jennifer Tolpa, Conrad Wright, Anna Cook, and others were of inestimable help. At the Massachusetts State Archives, Elizabeth Bouvier put up patiently with our many requests. Laurie Rofini, director of Chester County (Pa.) Archives and Records Services, helped us extend our search for warning outside of New England.
Wonderful graduate students assisted us. Keith Pacholl, while studying at the University of California, Riverside, supported us at the project’s inception, shaping the initial database and calmly taking our phone calls while we were on the East Coast and he was in the West. Andrea Maesterjuan, also of the University of California, Riverside, helped with data management, as well. In Boston, archival hounds Sharon Braslaw Sundue, at Harvard University, and David Byers, Brian Carroll, Rob Haberman, and Patrick Blythe, all of the University of Connecticut, followed the warning trail. Michael Limberg in Connecticut, and Alisa Wankier in Irvine, were ace fact-checkers. We owe the staff in the Dean’s office in the Division of Undergraduate Education at the University of California, Irvine, an enormous debt for bailing us out of technical problems, giving us crash courses on Excel, and performing wizardry in formatting: Roxanne Taylor, Jennifer Aaron, Cassandra Jue Low, Matt Dobashi, and Sabella Hess. Tony Soeller, in the Office of Information Technology at the University of California, Irvine, contributed the figures on movement into Boston.
We were also extremely fortunate to have a full draft or sizable portions of the manuscript critiqued by Richard D. Brown, Elaine Fordham Crane, Ruth Wallis Herndon, Daniel Kanstroom, Norma Landau, Lori Miller, Gary B. Nash, Carla Pestana, Seth Rockman, Carole Shammas, Billy G. Smith, and Daniel Vickers. Fred Anderson, Emerson Baker, Patricia Cleary, Brendan McConville, Marcus Rediker, Jean Soderlund, Alan Taylor, Lorena Walsh, and Serena R. Zabin patiently answered research queries. The late Al Young, who read the manuscript as a referee and repeatedly offered to read subsequent revisions, was unflagging in his encouragement. We very much wish he had lived to see the book completed.
We received invaluable feedback when pieces of the project were presented at conferences and seminars, including the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute seminar; the McNeil Center for Early American Studies; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Conference on Law, Religion, and Social Discipline in the Early Modern Atlantic World (hosted by the Newberry Library, Chicago); Boston College Law School’s legal history seminar; the British Group in Early American History; the Bay Area Seminar; the French Colonial Historical Society; and the Organization of American Historians. An earlier version of Chapter 3 appears in Daniel J. Hulsebosch and R. B. Bernstein, eds., Making History Legal: Essays in Honor of William E. Nelson (New York: New York University Press, 2013). We thank the publisher for permission to reprint the revised work.
One summer, the Huntington Library provided us with concurrent two-month fellowships, as well as an office with an Internet connection, and, of course, access to the gardens, the art collections, and even a blooming corpse flower for inspiration. We also received financial assistance from the University of Connecticut, the University of California, Riverside, and the University of California, Irvine. Dayton worked on parts of the book while a fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute.
At the University of Pennsylvania Press, Robert Lockhart and Daniel Richter have been extremely helpful, especially in guiding the final revisions. Kathleen Kageff did a superb job of copyediting, as did Noreen O’Connor-Abel in shepherding us through the final phases.
Over the years, our family, friends, and neighbors have sustained our collaboration and pretended not to be fatigued with talk of Robert Love and the strangers he warned. Our profound thanks go to Aaron Salinger, Maria Ambriz, James Boster, Thérèse Wilson and the extended Wilson clan, Susan Foster, Susan Rose, Susan Jarratt, Donna Schuele, Carolyn Beck, Carolyn Boyd, and other boosters.