For their kind assistance I wish to thank librarians at the College of Emporia, The Henry E. Huntington Library, and at the following universities: Columbia, Cornell, DePauw, Harvard, Yale, the University of Washington, and the University of Wyoming. I have also received cordial aid at the Oral History Collection of Columbia University. Quotations from Charles A. Beard’s letters to Oswald Garrison Villard are with the permission of the Harvard College Library; from his letters to Carl Becker with the permission of the Cornell University Library; from his letters to Harry Elmer Barnes with the permission of the library of the University of Wyoming. Quotations from the letters of Frederick Jackson Turner are with the permission of The Henry E. Huntington Library. If I refrain from acknowledging the several scholars who read drafts of chapters, it is only to spare them association with my judgments and to avoid the impression that this work aims to convey something like a professional consensus; but they will know that they have my gratitude. Alfred A. Knopf gave me access to the relevant portion of his own memoir in the Columbia Oral History Collection; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., permission to consult that of his father; Harry Elmer Barnes to consult his correspondence with Charles and Mary Beard. Others provided me with distinctive information or unpublished materials: Ray Allan Billington, Stuart Bruchey, E. H. Eby, Isabel Grossner, Alfred Kazin, Everett Sims. Vernon Parrington, Jr., generously made available the papers of his father and the use of his study, corrected some errors in my first drafts of Chapters 10 and 11, and tolerantly bore with many criticisms he thought excessive. The completion of this work was hastened by a fellowship in 1966–7 from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and at other times by the assistance of the Henry P. Kendall Foundation. My research assistants, Edwin G. Burrows and Michael Wallace, brought to this undertaking exceptional diligence and warm concern, as well as independent views. It would be hard to enumerate the many contributions of my secretary, Jane Slater, not least her keen interest in the development of the argument. As always, I have relied more than I can say upon my wife’s taste and candid judgment, and her informed feeling for American history. To my daughter, Sarah K. Hofstadter, armed with a copy of Fowler and an exceptional dialectical hardihood, I owe my reluctant decision to depart from a habit of long standing and write “a historian” instead of “an.” A version of Chapter 10 was given as the Stephen Allan Kaplan Memorial Lecture at the University of Pennsylvania, November 1967; a version of Chapter 12 as a lecture before the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University, March 1968. Some sequences from Chapters 6 and 7 appeared in Dissent, January–February 1968.