The subject of Chapter 2 is the tradition of the apotheosis in Mesoamerica, principally Central Mexico. The chapter opens with the context of indigenous political and social organization, and a summary of Spanish penetration of Mexico from 1519. There follows a fictive reconstruction of dialogue between the Aztec ruler Moctezuma and his counsellors in order to offer one plausible, source-based scenario for how the ruling elite might have interpreted the advent of the Spaniards on the basis of rational, pragmatic considerations. The chapter then analyzes the response of Moctezuma and the Mexica, outlines the lack of evidence for an apotheosis in the Spanish and native chroniclers, and examines the significance of Nahuatl terminology, in particular the concept of teotl, which was the word often translated as “god.” The Quetzalcoatl myth (the notion of the identification of Cortés with the god Quetzalcoatl) is presented as a post-conquest construct, devised retrospectively to make sense of the momentous events. The tradition of pre-conquest omens is discussed. No evidence is found that the emperor Moctezuma treated Cortés as a god at their meetings.

This considers the role of Thomas Clarkson as peace campaigner. Clarkson played a leading role in the campaign to abolish the slave trade in the 1780s. Much of his thinking about peace was influenced by the prospects of colonial development. His Portrait of Quakerism (1806), a pioneering explanation of pacific Quaker principles, was followed by his Memoirs of William Penn (1813), the pacifist founder of Pennsylvania, which recommends setting up seminaries to teach the children of the rich, and offers Penn as a model of peaceful colonial relations. As a member of the Africa Institution and the Sierra Leone Company, Clarkson was personally involved in plans for peaceful colonizing. This interest is reflected in The Herald of Peace, the journal of the Peace Society Clarkson helped to establish, in which the example of Penn is often cited. The peace campaign was rooted in the goal of spreading Christianity and European influence globally.

Whereas links between Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche and revolutionary extremism are debatable, Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism is unquestionable. He saw Nazism as a revolution of the German people to throw off the alien values of liberalism and embrace their collective destiny in an encounter with global technology, the culmination of modernity. To a more radical degree than Marx and Nietzsche, Heidegger rejected everything that happened in history between the ancient Greeks and Germany’s destiny as valueless and totally alienating. He urged Germany to revive the pre-Socratic account of existence as violent strife and thereby resist the relentless working out of Platonic metaphysics in the form of technology, a dynamic for bringing all of existence under the control of rational efficiency. When Nazism failed, in Heidegger’s view by itself succumbing to the technological imperative, he abandoned hope in any political movement or people, forecasting instead a looming global encounter with technology in which all mankind would either become fodder for efficiency or emerge into a new epoch of closeness to all that is, the Shepherd of Being, an either/or choice or eschatological reversal resembling Marx’s dyad of bourgeoisie versus proletariat and Nietzsche’s dyad of Overman versus herd morality.

For Puritans living in a “New” England, the promise of Jesus Christ’s return was a source of both dread and hope, a paradox that lay at the heart of their eschatology. In their writings, the end times was figured, by turns, as an epoch unfolding in the churches of New England, a cataclysmic "Day of Doom" and judgment, and a ray of hope for physical and spiritual restoration. Jesus’s words recorded in Matthew 24:42, "Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come," commanded righteous vigilance and detachment from worldly things; they also spurred paranoia and a keen attention to world affairs, especially in Palestine. Though Puritan theologians did not agree on the time, manner, or place of Christ’s return, they imagined a unique role for New England, even if as a "specimen of the new heavens and new earth," as Increase Mather wrote. This essay examines how Puritan writers dramatized and tested these apocalyptic visions in a range of literary forms, from sermons and treatises to epic poetry and meditative verse.

In addition to evoking western lands and democratic politics, the very name of America has also encouraged apocalyptic visions. The “American Dream” has not only been about the prospect of material prosperity; it has also been about the end of the world. Final forecasts constitute one of America’s oldest literary genres, extending from the eschatological theology of the New England Puritans to the revolutionary discourse of the early republic, the emancipatory rhetoric of the Civil War, the anxious fantasies of the atomic age, and the doomsday digital media of today. For those studying the history of America, renditions of the apocalypse are simply unavoidable. This collection brings together two dozen essays by prominent scholars that explore the meanings of apocalypse across different periods, regions, genres, registers, modes, and traditions of American literature and culture. It locates the logic and rhetoric of apocalypse at the very core of American literary history.