Dedication
Margaret Wilhelmina Angela (Jongebloed) Easley (1909-2006)
I grew up on a farm in Boone County, Missouri. Part of the reason that I ended up as a historian, I believe, is that my utterly urban mother, born, reared, and employed in Lower Manhattan until her marriage at age 30, provided a kind of Greek chorus in the background of my childhood, pointing out that not everybody in the world did things the way that the people who surrounded me did them and, moreover, that there was no particular reason why they should.