I grew up in a small town east of San Francisco where summers were spent living out untold (and, to adults, untellable) adventures in the yellow, oak-sprinkled foothills of Mt. Diablo, the steady pole of my childhood's inner compass. I've recently returned to the Bay Area after thirty-seven years in Japan, raising a family there and becoming rather Japanized in my ways. I capped my career in Japan as a visiting professor at Hosei University, where I taught linguistics, American society, and the history of US-Japanese relations. Through it all, I kept tabs on America with both the intimate understanding of an insider born there but also the perspective of an outsider. My history books are written from a constitutionalist, somewhat libertarian, and always (I hope) sympathetic point of view. The great American experiment is in crisis but not yet buried. May my books, in their small way, help revive it.