
The quality of their own work has many times been an inspiration and encouragement to me.ĭuring my teaching career at Berkeley, a Doreen B.

Two students of mine, Sandra Gustafson and Lori Merish, have also proved to be not only wonderful but patient colleagues as I worked my way through Roads to Rome. I wish to thank my research assistants who have cheerfully helped me track down many volumes: Anna Chodakiewicz and Carolyn Guile. Walter Herbert of Southwestern University read the manuscriptĪt an early stage and used it as an opportunity to encourage my intellectual growth and our friendship in several respects, this book in its final form has emerged from his mentorship and his own profound insights into human motivation that have helped me considerably to understand antebellum Protestantism. I owe a very particular debt to one scholarly friend who kept this project going when it threatened to languish into private contemplation.

Farther afield, Norman Grabo of the Department of English, University of Tulsa, has been an irreplaceable friend and mentor who long ago introduced me to the splendors of American literature. My especial thanks to Dell Upton for sending me items of nineteenth-century "Romanism" discovered during his own research travels. In other departments of the Berkeley campus, Margaretta Lovell in Art History, Dell Upton in Architecture, and Larry Levine in History have all been valued colleagues. I also owe a particular debt to Mitchell Breitwieser for his deeply attentive reading of this work at an earlier stage that opened new perspectives upon the project. In particular, James Breslin, Frederick Crews, Catherine Gallagher, Stephen Greenblatt, and Steven Knapp have all forwarded the progress of this book by their friendship and warm support. I also wish to thank my colleagues in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. I especially want to acknowledge Professor Jay Fliegelman, who not only directed the dissertation but who has continued to share his brilliance and his humor, encouraging me at crucial moments to take heart and complete the book. The encouragement and guidance I received while a graduate student there was critical to this undertaking. First I wish to thank the English Department faculty at Stanford University, where I began this project as a dissertation.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the many people who have helped to bring this book into being.
