George Mosse once explained to his graduate students how to put a book together: take notes until the shoe box is full, throw the box out the window, and write. Ah, but we were young, and the smell of revolution was in the air. Social history, with its need for stakhanovite heroes, beckoned and promised to overturn our understanding of the past. We were to spend long hours in the archives, years filling out family reconstitution forms, and more years figuring out what to do with them, all the while (although we did not suspect it at the time) shunting data from one outmoded technological system to another. Today I see more clearly how astute the practical advice was, but I also see how much I was building on the sure foundations George had already provided and how pervasive his influence has been. He taught me to pay close attention to the symbols and ideas that have moved people in the past. There was no great leap, apart from methodological razzle-dazzle and less readable prose, from his kind of cultural history to my kind of social history. Most important were his broad understanding of what constituted political practice and his sympathetic grasp of concrete existence. He understood that just those areas of life that people develop to avoid power, flee self-interest, and obtain distance are as much inflected with politics and with material culture as anything else.