As we now know, the growth of galaxies and their central black holes is connected through some unknown mechanism. The cosmic  X-ray background encodes within it the entire history of accretion onto supermassive massive black holes and so provides an unique view of the role of AGN in the assembly of galaxies. This talk presents results of recent work that is attempting to exploit the information contained in the X-ray background (and ancillary multiwavelength studies) to construct a testable scenario for the evolution of AGN and their host galaxies.