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A book, I often say, is like a child. Once it reaches a certain level of maturity, it should be permitted to go out into the world to live its own life, to fend for itself. Few performances are, to my mind, sadder than those of author-parents who chase after their offspring, who carp and whine that their brainchild has been misinterpreted or, God forbid, not even noticed. It is, thus, with some hesitation that I am participating in an issue of this journal where a book I completed ten years ago receives attention. The book can stand on its own. It doesn't need me, even when it gets beat up badly. It doesn't, thank goodness, ask for subventions, interest-free loans, or keys to the car! Aside from interviews and lectures where I have been asked to elucidate aspects of its character, I have never deliberately defended or promoted the book. Not once in the decade have I written to an editor or reviewer to complain or explain. So, what in the world am I doing now? Well, I hope that I might be permitted, without surrendering my principles or being insufferably pom pous, to reflect on the fate of my book in the way that a parent might reflect on the development of a child on the tenth anniversary of its de parture from the roost. What hopes did I have? And what happened? I began work on what came to be called Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (nicknamed Rites) in the mid 1970s, fresh from the publication of my dissertation and still in the early throes of teach ing. At the time, social history was on its hegemonic roll. Modernization theory held sway. Quantification was all the rage. These developments?the drift of my discipline of history away from the humanities and toward the social sciences?both excited and disturbed me. Ralf Dahrendorf, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Eric Hobsbawm, among others, lit many a fire under me. But at the same time, the move away from actual human experience in the past to a theory of that experience undermined for me the intensity and immediacy of historical study. Moreover, the progressive context of Western