My wife and I began the first six years of the 21st century in England. As Americans, we’d fallen in love with another country, with the customs and habits of people quite different from us, with the architectural layers of medieval towns like Cambridge where I had done my PhD, and where I was working as a Research Fellow. After our eldest son was born at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, I had to go to the embassy in London to get a “Consular Report of Birth Abroad”. Having grown so comfortable in Cambridge, I recall a certain inexplicable shock in holding that document. It was a powerful reminder that for all the things I loved about England, for all my newfound “transatlantic” savvy, I was inescapably American.