Acknowledgements
My thanks to many wonderful colleagues who have helped with this project over the years. In particular, I would like to thank Jeff Kyong-McClain at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock, who worked with me on a different course reader in the past. That one didn’t pan out, but our work together made this project significantly easier. Alexander Kais, at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, was kind enough to use some of the early chapters in his classes and provide helpful feedback. No one has taught me more about teaching, and about engaging students with large collections of documents, than my colleague in the History Department, Tim Fehler. Tim also deserves thanks for listening to my ideas about this project during countless late afternoon, evening, and weekend conversations. I was fortunate during the latter stages of this project to meet Emily Mokros, who has been a fount of knowledge about the Gazette and its translators.
Special thanks to the reviewers, librarians, and editors who helped see this volume to completion. My reviewers showed exceptional enthusiasm for the project, but more importantly helped me think through several critical issues. Any resulting faults are my own. Qin Higley, my editor at Brill, has been a constant supporter of the project from its inception, for which I am indebted. I would like to thank the staffs at the British Library, the Center for Research Libraries, and the James B. Duke Library at Furman, especially Elaina Griffith, for their always courteous and timely assistance.
Above all, I would like to thank Mei Chun, who has been my partner and scholarly companion over the last fifteen years. As always, she provided me with intellectual sustenance and the project with unflagging support. Without her many sacrifices, both personal and professional, this book would never have been finished. Preston, too, has given up a lot while I worked on this book.
This book is dedicated to my students at Furman University, for it is with them that it began.