Once, long ago, I was teaching business and economic history at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Alas,my academic career was stalled in the early 1960s. A distinguished Yale professor had kept the revised manuscript of my dissertation sitting on his desk for a year without reading it or submitting a report to the press. Meanwhile, I had just learned that editors do not want to publish fifty-page academic articles. I was having a wonderful time teaching the talented students at Rice, but it was not at all clear that I was not soon going to be looking for a different job and maybe a different profession.