This book is the product of a long, sometimes exasperating, sometimes exhilarating collaboration. Certain values helped us through, chief among these the value of friendship. We began more than twenty years ago when casual conversations about politics and history led us to create a journal outlet for scholars with similar interests, Studies in American Political Development. Among the benefits of editorship has been regular contact with a wide range of perspectives and participation, however vicariously, in each. In this way, our collaboration has included the unwitting persons whose names are found on Studies' tables of contents.

That said, we are inclined to add something more than a routine statement absolving others of responsibility for what we have written here. While in editing the journal we seek to present historical research by political scientists in all its variety, in writing this book we set out to craft a statement of our own. The title of the book is meant to capture the dual nature of “the search” for American political development as we see it today: in part, it is an effort to bring a story – the story of America's political development – into sharper relief; in part, it is an effort to bring into sharper relief an academic subfield, “APD,” within the discipline of political science. How this subfield defines itself will have a lot to do with how it tells the story, and the time seems ripe for a considered treatment.