The Conclusion returns to the need for historians to recognize the topic of cowardice in combat in order to gain a fuller understanding of war. Recovering the complicated histories of the Fire Zouaves and the 2nd Texas further helps to disassemble the glorification of war-making.

Chapter 4 introduces the second regiment in this study, the 2nd Texas Infantry. It describes its founding and officers, largely representative of the Texas elite. Like the Fire Zouaves, white male Texans had a reputation for bravery, so the expectations that they would make good and courageous soldiers were equally high. But there were signs of problems even in their early days, including discontent by some of their leaders and concerns over supplies. The chapter ends with the regiment hurriedly rushing to the front for expected battle.

Chapter 4 introduces the second regiment in this study, the 2nd Texas Infantry. It describes its founding and officers, largely representative of the Texas elite. Like the Fire Zouaves, white male Texans had a reputation for bravery, so the expectations that they would make good and courageous soldiers were equally high. But there were signs of problems even in their early days, including discontent by some of their leaders and concerns over supplies. The chapter ends with the regiment hurriedly rushing to the front for expected battle.

Chapter 16 reconstructs Ilf and Petrov’s visit to the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It argues that their encounter with the Lab’s exhibits and its assistant director Kenneth Chapman did not generate new knowledge. Rather, it affirmed their assumptions about both capitalism and American Indians. Even without understanding the Lab’s current financial crisis, they highlighted the irrationality of having a Rockefeller, rather than the state, support scientific institutions. The Laboratory’s exhibits, and perhaps Chapman’s explanation of them, offered confirmation of their view of American Indians as romantic relics.

This book concludes in 1952, the year that the Miracle decision (Joseph Burstyn Inc. v. Wilson) established motion pictures as protected speech, to suggest one way to mark a common endpoint to the eras of the studio system and American modernism. That year, several books were either completed or published that serve as early instances of genres or attitudes that would come to the fore in postwar American fiction. This conclusion briefly addresses three such works: Lillian Ross’s Picture, James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain, and Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe. These books suggest a transformation of writers’ attitudes toward Hollywood, one that coincides with the identification of artistic strategies – the nonfiction novel; the conception of moviegoing as an experience worthy of artistic rendering; the campus novel – that would become increasingly prevalent in subsequent decades. The conclusion ends by giving Hollywood movies the chance to speak for themselves, attending to two MGM films of 1952: Singin’ in the Rain and, more intently, The Bad and the Beautiful. I read the latter as MGM’s version of a literary history of the studio system.

Margaret Bonds conceived The Montgomery Variations during a thirteen-state Southern tour in the spring of 1963 – a tour that took her not only to Montgomery, Alabama (a fiercely contested battleground in the ongoing Civil Rights Movement), but also to Birmingham in the same state – the latter at the beginning of Dr. Martin Luther King’s difficult Birmingham campaign. Of her experiences there was born a programmatic composition that used the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” as the basis of a symphonic variation set that drew on models including J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote and Death and Transfiguration to trace the history of the Civil Rights Movement from the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56) through the Sixteenth-Street Baptist Church bombing (Birmingham, 1963), with a radiant “Benediction” evidently born in the wake of the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. This chapter situates The Montgomery Variations in the personal, professional, and societal developments traced in Chapter 1 and analyzes the music and program to explore how Bonds used it to advance her activist agenda.

This chapter reconstructs an anti-imperial popular sovereignty. Via Martin Luther King, Jr.’s essay “Beyond Vietnam,” I theorize how peoples are lured to partake in imperial projects that benefit global oligarchies. In response, King proposes a geopolitics of popular sovereignty that calls peoples to position themselves historically vis-à-vis other peoples who are the targets of aggression. This requires the people to differentiate their own popular will from oligarchic projects of outward domination and to withdraw demands for well-being that depend on the exploitation of others and the crushing of revolutionary movements. This tradition of popular sovereignty urges worldliness and historical awareness among western peoples and extends anti-oligarchic discourses of peoplehood to criticize unholy western alliances with elites in the developing world. I juxtapose this account with Frantz Fanon’s writings on postcolonial democracy, national consciousness, and transnationalism, which criticize postcolonial oligarchies that remain wedded to empire and demand a parallel recognition. This reading yields a renewed language of popular sovereignty that identifies potential radical affinities between differently located collectives struggling against global capitalist accumulation violently enabled by dominant states.

The modern civil rights movement in America was directed and sustained by ministers and churches fervently proclaiming Judeo-Christian religious beliefs. Its leaders were mostly black ministers, who preached religious sermons inside and outside churches, insisting on promised rights. Its organizations were primarily black churches, along with an association of ministers; and the demonstrators were mostly their congregations. Though the movement’s base of support grew to include many who acted on other impulses, and its approach adopted tactics from Gandhi and others, the civil rights movement remained primarily a product of Judeo-Christian faith and its religious speech. Its religious speech was evident in the leadership by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was "first and foremost ’a clergyman, a Baptist preacher,’ a Christian," and he led by the religious speech of sermons, addresses, books, interviews, and demonstrations. That can be seen in each of King’s major campaigns in the modern civil rights movement. Other leaders also advocated Judeo-Christian principles and nonviolence, through speeches and pamphlets, marches, and church rallies. The triumph of the modern civil rights movement came mostly from the religious speech of the larger religious wing of ministers and congregations, not of the much smaller secular wing.

Samuel Clemenss changing views about phrenology and its purveyors did not occur in a vacuum. Here we see how he was not the first person or even the first American to use humor to poke fun at the doctrine or to “expose” how its purveyors operated in public venues. He was preceded by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Boston physician whose widely disseminated criticisms of phrenology helped open his eyes to the head readers and influenced how he would lampoon them. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1809, Holmes received his Harvard undergraduate degree in 1829 and then attended a private medical school closely associated with Harvard. He proved to be an exceptionally bright student with a penchant for writing poetry and prose. He bore witness to how phrenology was the talk of the town when Spurzheim arrived in Boston in 1832. Many of his teachers were interested in phrenology and he joined them to hear Spurzheim. He also kept notes on Spurzheim’s autopsy and read about phrenology. But although he might have been skeptical about how much might be gleaned about the brain by studying skulls, he did not reveal what he was thinking while still a student in Boston.

The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., is the armature supporting James Baldwin’s 1972 book, No Name in the Street. Just a few pages into the book, Baldwin observes: “Since Martin’s death, something has altered in me, something has gone away.” A spate of assassinations, and particularly King’s, prompts a profound crisis in Baldwin, forcing him to reexamine the ultimate power of love that had governed his life and work. Indeed, a decade earlier in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin had identified love as the key existential and political instrument to guide America out of its “racial nightmare,” in the same way that King had drawn on the Christian notion of agape love to imagine and enact nonviolent direct action to transform Jim Crow America. For Baldwin, King’s murder begins to actualize the apocalypse against which he had forewarned in the early 1960s, and moreover forces him to reckon with his own worldview of human life: “Perhaps even more than the death itself, the manner of his death has forced me into a judgment concerning human life and human beings which I have always been reluctant to make.” At the end of the 1960s, gone is the tempered optimism of Fire, the hope of achieving America, and instead we find in No Name a markedly new form of disenchantment that even love couldn’t temper. This essay traces how Baldwin’s perspective on love, loss, and life is altered by a decade rife with transformation and devastation, illuminating not only a pivotal period of Baldwin’s life and writing, but also of American life and letters.

This Chapter tells the story of the author’s Chair – the Royall Chair at Harvard Law School – and of its donor and his marks. Isaac Royall, Jr., was during his lifetime the largest slaveholder in colonial Massachusetts. The Isaac Royall, Jr., brand has risen, and fallen, and risen again, and fallen again in political struggles spanning from his grandfather’s arrival in Maine as an indentured servant, to Isaac Royall, Jr.’s own precipitous flight from Boston after the commencement of the American revolution, to his former slave Belinda’s struggle for her due at his hands in which she denounced him for exploiting her, to Harvard University’s acceptance of his bequest of the Royall Chair, to the University’s adoption of his heraldic shield as a symbol of the Law School, to the conversion of the hagiographical Royall House museum to the Royall House and Slave Quarters, to a years-long struggle over racial justice at the Law School.It is the story of both the fragility and the durability of a brand that is rich in social meaning and unimportant enough to be transformed into the language of ever-shifting contemporary political struggle.It ends in medias res, the author being uncertain what comes next.

Taking up Lynn White, Jr.’s argument that Christianity is largely responsible for contemporary ecological crises, this chapter develops an environmental historical reading of the Christian just war tradition’s transition from its late medieval into its early modern forms. That reading reveals not only the flaws in White’s argument but the many ways that the nonhuman natural world was understood by late medieval just war thinkers, including as resource, brake, enemy, and collection of signs. Attending to the environmental conditions and human interactions with the nonhuman natural world that shaped late medieval Europe and gave rise to early modern projects of colonialization and conquest helps to clarify the range of forces at work in shaping just war thinking and modernity. Among the implications of an environmental historical reading of the history of Christian just war, thinking is not only a recognition of the ways that the natural and the political interact but the need for a richer vocabulary to express those interactions in a time of growing climate-shaped violence.

Chaney investigates the "changing same" of visual self-presentation in African American autobiography, history, biography, and fiction, paying attention to two forms: frontispieces and illustrations of the nineteenth-century ex-fugitive and comics from twenty-first-century African American artists and writers. The bridge between these two zones of history is not to be erected or traversed in the name of a naïve comparison, nor is it to be drawn from the coincidence of similarity arising from the fact that all the texts involved are partly visual. Rather, the gulf separating Frederick Douglass and Matt Johnson, for example, and their time periods is itself an assumption that the graphic works discussed in this chapter all seek to dismantle. Insofar as the traumatic Black subject is nearly always also a historical one in contemporary entertainments, African American graphic novels reclaim the past in the name of the present: through a style, voice, or look that is unavoidably "presentist" in its approach — since even a comic designed to resemble antebellum illustrations always does so in a manner that contrarily flaunts what is more contemporary than historical about the text.

This chapter argues the writings published by Blacks in the early national US must be understood in relation to the history of slavery in the British Empire. The author examines diverse forms of African American literature, which were focused on transatlantic concerns, such as “Orations on the Abolition of the Slave Trade” (1808–1823), given annually on January 1. These texts tell powerful stories of the history of the slave trade, and particularly its violence to familial ties, from the trade’s inception in the fifteenth century until its abolition in 1808. Written by free Black churchmen and intellectuals in New York and Philadelphia, including Absalom Jones, Peter Williams, Jr., Russell Parrot, and William Hamilton, these orations demonstrate a deep interest in the actions of the British Parliament and the state of slavery in the West Indies. This chapter also considers direct allusions to British and Afro-British abolitionists and their writings, from Clarkson and Wilberforce to Equiano, in the work of William Miller, Russell Parrot, William Whipper, David Walker, Maria Stewart, and others. The chapter concludes with a discussion of The History of Mary Prince (1831), the most important slave narrative to emerge from the British colonies and questions the inclusion of Prince’s narrative in a history of African American literature.

William James was one of the most influential American psychologists and philosophers. His writings remain thought-provoking and relevant more than a century after his death. His seminal ideas range from free will, determinism, the nature of consciousness, the mechanisms responsible for our emotions, religious and spiritual experiences, psychic phenomena, and the veracity of mediumship. This chapter focuses on what is less well known, that behind the appearance of success he lived a life burdened with recurrent depression, hypochondria, and myriad physical afflictions, most of them psychosomatic in nature. His search for a career path was long and torturous. At different stages in his life, he was a frustrated artist, a reluctant physician, and a drifter. He found his calling in teaching. His lifelong search for the nature of the mind and the soul was deeply entangled with his father’s, whose tragic and accidental loss of a leg in childhood led to a relentless lifelong quest for “real” answers. The chapter also touches on Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godfather, and includes brief descriptions of William James’ famed novelist brother, Henry James, Jr., as well as his sister, Alice James, the brilliant reclusive diarist.

I took the opportunity to come at the problem from a different angle from that of the New Atheists’ anti-theism strategy of attacking religion directly, and argue instead for raising consciousness for religious skepticism through political freedom, namely protecting the rights of believers so that the rights of nonbelievers are equally protected.

This essay was first published in the online magazine Quillette, in which I addressed the growing problem of identity politics, intersectionality theory, and the tribal divisiveness that has polarized politics today, particularly down racial lines, which is a perverse inversion of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of judging people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin, or their gender, or religion, or whom they are sexually attracted to, or any of the other intersectional categories, such as ethnicity, language, dialect, education, generation, occupation, political party, disability, marital status, veteran status, and more.

In the 1930s, with the rise of Adolf Hitler, mental health professionals grew concerned about the future of Europe and sought an understanding of Nazism. Psychoanalysts Walter Langer and Erik H. Erikson formulated the psychology of Hitler for William Donovan and the OSS. Langer emphasized Hitler’s psychodynamics, while Erikson focused on cultural issues in Germany and on Hitler’s appeal to his followers. Psychiatry and psychoanalysis triumphed after the war, yet as Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare came to dominate the landscape, liberal émigré psychoanalysts came under suspicion. A few, like Erikson, declined to sign loyalty oaths or became critics of American society. Newspapers seemed to flourish, but circulation actually lost ground in relation to population growth. The rise of television changed the news business, but like traditional media, it had differential effects by region. TV was available sooner in the urban areas of the East, and the liberal editorial stance of the large urban dailies had less appeal in the small towns of the Midwest and West. Drawing on these regional differences, Barry Goldwater came to prominence as a presidential candidate.