Edited sentence: And, above all, why did they feel so strongly about the importance of these small differences.Auslander's extensive travel and experiences living outside the United States as a child and adolescent, as well as her internship as a cabinet and furniture maker during her early adulthood are some of the influences that she cites as pivotal in shaping her path:.Because there was no more wilderness.Did kids who grew up protected by aggressive glass or looking through barred windows become different from those who saw trees or plummeting pigeons.How did quotidian encounters with a cathedral influence a person's sense of time, of place, and of God.How was it that each natives could almost always identify the foreigners.I came, as an adolescent, to wonder about the impact of these different views, different paths, different material cultures and bodily practices.I went looking for the answers to naïve questions: Were Europeans somehow different from Americans because their built environment was so old.In some places I followed paths through a built environment little more than a century old; in others that daily route took me in front of buildings standing for seven or eight hundred years.In some places the human-made cohabited with the natural world, in others it overwhelmed it.Many years later I can still remember why I, as a fifteen year old, decided to become a historian.My family lived and traveled abroad when I was child and I keep in my mind's eye the views from various bedroom windows: the beautiful oak tree I saw from my bed in our suburban New England home; pigeons free-falling from a facing apartment building in Paris' 14th arrondissement; the wall topped with shards of broken glass surrounding the house we inhabited briefly in Mexico City's Zona Rosa; the red roses blooming, to my amazement, in Montevideo's mild winter, and, the feet, wheels, and occasional horses hoofs' that passed by the basement flat in London.Not only did these intimate views, perceived at liminal moments of rising and retiring, change with each new home, but also the landscape traversed on my trajectory to school.Not only were the built-environments very different but so, too, were their inhabitants' eating and dressing habits, ways of moving their bodies, and how they decorated their homes.Why did each national school system have its unique style of handwriting that it insisted all students learn