“The children of California shall be our children,” Leland Stanford told his wife, Jane, when they decided to build Palo Alto. It’s a grandiose claim, but as applied to me it’s not as inaccurate as I’d prefer. History doesn’t stay put: It works itself under your skin in fragments like shrapnel; it steals into your bloodstream like an infection. I’m a product of my environment, and I’m shot through with its symptoms. If that experience is to be useful rather than obfuscating, then it’s as a place to start, a set of intersections between biography and history.