I spent some months in Scotland in 1997, during the months leading up to the vote that led to a devolved Scottish Parliament. A footnote in an essay on Scottish history opened up a new research topic, the life and times of Thomas Muir, a political reformer of the late 18^th century who became radicalized by both his encounter with the French Revolution, and the severity of response of the British authorities to his rather mild pleas for change. I spent hours in the Scottish National Library archives, the Edinburgh Room at the Central Library in Edinburgh, and later at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. I also spent a month at the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale researching their extraordinary collection of political caricatures from that period. The results were several small chapbooks, a couple of exhibitions, and a secondary series of paintings that ultimately took me in a different direction.