Scholars who are committed to single disciplines occasionally appear to lose sight of the fact that these disciplines are conventions, designed to enable the scholar to neglect, while clearly signifying his neglect, many aspects of life in order to concentrate on a few. We historians tend, I believe, to give ourselves license to warn our readers rather less explicitly of our neglect than do economists, political scientists, sociologists, or anthropologists. Yet, we have trained ourselves to pay particular attention to certain facets of the human experience. Some of us compromise with the positions of those we occasionally think of as our more exacting colleagues in the social sciences by adding to the term ‘historian’ various adjectives– ‘social’, ‘economic’, ‘cultural’, or ‘political’.