The authors were asked not for comprehensive chronicles, nor for research monographs or new data for scholars. Bibliographies and footnotes are minimal. Each author was asked for a summing up—interpretive, sensitive, thoughtful, individual, even personal—of what seems significant about his or her state’s history. What distinguishes it? What has mattered about it, to its own people and to the rest of the nation? What has it come to now? —James Morton Smith, General Editor