For half a century, let us say from 1930 to 1980, there was an intellectual movement, now forgotten, which premised that the queen of the disciplines was tracing how ideas emerged and then, over time, altered or were corrected, and then either ended or were transformed into a different basic idea. What people thought was always framed by where they stood in the development of some key idea and, during that time, history of ideas was more important than, let us say, administrative or political history for explaining how history worked. Many movements came afterwards, such as environmental history or post colonial history, but there it was during its reign. There was Arthur Lovejoy expounding how for many centuries thought was dominated by a great chain of being so that there was an inherent hierarchy whereby every person and every animal had their place in nature. There was Carl Becker’s analysis of how the Enlightenment and the American Revolution ticked. There was Ernst Cassierer’s magisterial view of how the Renaissance and the Enlightenment evolved into Kant. There was F. R. Leavis tracing the moral arc of the English novel from Defoe to Virginia Woolf. There was even the early Herbert Marcuse criticizing, early on, the limitations of the Weberean sense of capitalism before going on to see how Marxism transformed itself into Soviet Marxism before in the Sixties becoming the spokesperson for a leftist ideology in America. That point of view was different from the concurrent interest in intellectual history, which concerned more details, such as what books Rousseau or Darwin had consulted or whether Mendel had faked his counts on whether peas were in proper proportions to what genes would predict should happen. It was about big ideas, how they changed, not how people changed, and I thought of myself as seeing as well that this was the way to unfold history.