It feels like flying with one wing, writing without being able to ask advice from my mentor, Edmund Morgan. Fortunately, two other trusted critics, Richard Godbeer and Ryan Smith, stand at the ready, unsparing as only former students can be. I owe another large intellectual debt to several learned colleagues at the University of Delaware who have brought me up to speed on countless subjects: Anne Boylan, James Brophy, Peter Kolchin, Rudi Matthee, Patricia Sloane-White, and Owen White. Others who have seen me through this project with their expertise and encouragement include Joe Califano, Mary Kupiec Cayton, Catherine Clinton, Emily Conroy-Krutz, James West Davidson, Jerrold Epstein, Ernie Freeburg, Angie Hoseth, Mary Kelley, Timothy Marr, Louisa Bond Moffitt, and Danielle Rougeau. Librarians throughout New England and New York have also made invaluable contributions, even if some might have wanted to hide in the stacks when they saw me coming yet again. Most notable is the longtime (and now emeritus) head of special collections at Middlebury College, Andrew Wentink—every scholar’s dream archivist—who introduced me to the single most important source for this study. After swearing never to get an agent, now I can’t imagine publishing a book without the help of Dan Green, who set me up with two extraordinary editors. Dan Gerstle helped me to develop the possibilities that he glimpsed in an early draft, and Alex Star favored successive versions with his sharp eye and this author with his unstinting intellectual generosity. Alex’s assistant, Laird Gallagher, who answered my e-mails even on weekends, shepherded the manuscript through the press, ably supported by its production editor, Elizabeth Gordon, and production manager, Peter Richardson. Thanks also to the designer, Abby Kagan, and to Debra Helfand.
The blame for making me feel equal to anything—this book included—belongs to my fast friends. For decades of inspiration, I am indebted to Emily Grosholz, poet and philosopher; Lisa Keamy, physician and gardener; my niece, Rachel Speer, neuroscientist and Sacred Harp singer; and my sister, Anne Heyrman-Hart, scholar of world religions and culinary deity.
That leaves the best friend of all, my husband, Tom Carter, who was until his retirement a logistics specialist in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. As we followed the path of the first Palestine missionaries through the Levant over the last several years, he developed other remarkable skills—haggling with shopkeepers in Egyptian bazaars, finding the most splendid mosques in Turkey, and saying exactly the right things to guards at the border between Syria and Lebanon. I feel so lucky, having a boon companion. And never luckier than on that September day in 2001 when he called from the Pentagon, told me not to worry, and then came safely home.