ABSTRACT
Putting together a volume of my writings, spanning a publishing career now stretching to almost a half-century,1 has been fascinating in a number of ways. For one thing, it has involved rereading things that in some cases I hadn’t laid eyes on for decades, reminding myself, sometimes happily, sometimes not, of where I was intellectually at various points in my evolution as a historian. For another, it has afforded me the opportunity to play historian to myself, identifying some themes – my teacher Benjamin Schwartz referred to them as “underlying persistent preoccupations”2 – that have endured from the beginning of my writing life right through to the present, although taking different forms at different times, and others that have emerged at one point or another but weren’t there at the outset. In other words, the exercise has enabled me to gain a clearer picture of how my thinking has changed over time and, equally important, how it hasn’t.
