The purpose of this book is to provide an introduction to suspension dynamics, and so we (the authors) thought it would be good to give some historical (as well as personal) perspective on the study of suspensions. Early development of the subject was largely due to two “schools,” one in England and one in the United States. In England, the subject developed from the fluid mechanical tradition at the University of Cambridge, dating from the work of G. G. Stokes and H. Lamb in the mid- and late-1800s. The subject developed in earnest from the work of George Batchelor and collaborators at Cambridge's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP). In the United States, the development of the discipline took place primarily in chemical engineering departments, largely through the efforts of Andreas Acrivos and a number of his students at the University of California Berkeley, Stanford University, and the City College of New York (CCNY). The authors' approaches to suspensions owe much to these “schools” of suspension dynamics. Élisabeth Guazzelli was introduced to the subject by Bud Homsy at Stanford University and extended interactions with John Hinch of the University of Cambridge. Jeff Morris received his introduction to suspensions as a doctoral student of John Brady (a student of Acrivos) at the California Institute of Technology.