This chapter explores the use of restorative nostalgic political propaganda by antidemocratic forces to pursue a myth of a “golden age” and reinstate policies built on racism, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny. Although conservative political figures in the US have long capitalized on the allure of restorative nostalgia to delegitimize progressive social and political reforms, today’s populist MAGA movement is different in both kind and degree. In a quest to “make America great again,” the MAGA movement aims to turn the clock back on decades of social justice gains by villainizing the social progress and expansion of rights that have made many of our lives possible. This chapter explains the historic use of restorative nostalgic propaganda by fascist regimes to blame modernity and the expansion of civil and political rights for the loss of a “great mythic past” defined by simplicity and prosperity. Under this view, individuals who advocate for progressive reforms are demonized and branded as enemies of the state. Restorative nostalgic political propaganda demands the exclusion and erasure of nonconforming individuals to restore the “simple life” and regain national glory.

The introduction explores the author’s path into writing this book. It includes a formative experience at age 7, watching the special report on the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968, and, much later, learning of King’s appearance as a commencement speaker at Springfield College, where the author is a professor of communications.

The introduction spells out the book’s focus and structure. It examines St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest city in the United States, one with a fascinating racial history that speaks volumes about the country’s history and present-day struggles. The book is built on a 7-part structure. The first part begins with the March on Washington in 1963, then goes back to the city’s founding in 1565, and examines the racial context between these two dates. The next six parts proceed chronologically through the signing of the Civil Rights Act in July 1964.

The book explores a uniquely double-edged time in American history, as well as a particularly bittersweet time in Dr. King’s life. That period also encompasses the vast majority of the civil rights struggle in St. Augustine. That struggle, the author argues, is one that has been consistently overlooked by historians.

This chapter shifts the setting to New England, where on October 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy travels to Amherst College to dedicate the Robert Frost Library. Kennedy’s visit to campus is covered in part in the student newspaper by a sophomore named Marshall Bloom.

A creative, brilliant, quirky, and effeminate young man, Bloom had grown up in a male-dominated culture in Colorado. He had gotten the journalism bug in high school and yearned to be a writer of significance. Bloom is part of a polite protest at Amherst that greets President Kennedy with signs urging him to recommit to civil rights. The topic is gathering interest at the time on this overwhelmingly white campus.

Kennedy arrives at Amherst by helicopter, then travels across campus in an open-air limousine. He then delivers an eloquent speech that focuses not on civil rights or politics, per se, but on the critical role played by artists. Sometimes, Kennedy acknowledges, a great artist must “sail against the currents of his time.”

One can see the high Cold War era from about 1949 to the early 1960s as a period in which African American literature moved from a sense of rupture to one of renewal. The Black radical tradition floundered as the organizations and institutions of the Old Left were smashed or isolated by the Red Scare and disillusionment due to splits in the left after Nikita Khrushchev’s famous 1956 speech about the crimes of Stalin and the invasion of Hungary. However, the subsequent reinvigoration of the tradition featured a reconstitution of older sensibilities in conjunction with new alliances and allegiances. This came in the wake of a mass, militant Civil Rights movement at home and the emergence of the anti-colonial Non-Aligned Movement abroad, or what Black radicals called a “Bandung World” after the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. The sense of rupture was associated with a move toward a heightened individual subjectivity and away from Black collectivity – or with a defense of an ideology of such Black collectivity that is perceived to be under assault in the early Cold War, often set in the pre–Cold War era.

The Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) was the most important institution for the identification and nurturing of a community of radical economists. The Union for Radical Political Economics was founded in September 1968 at Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, by junior faculty members and graduate students. The immediate circumstances of the founding of URPE were closely related to the anti-Vietnam War movement and to a nationally divisive event. In August 1968, Chicago police violently charged against demonstrators at the Democratic Party Convention. The aftershocks of the police riot were felt in economics through a boycott of the city by some of the rank and file. On its first anniversary, URPE had swelled in members and in ambition. At the next annual convention of the American Economic Association, radicals read a list of grievances charging their peers as sycophants of inequality, alienation, destruction of the environment, imperialism, racism, and patriarchy, and in so doing choosing for themselves an oppositional attitude toward their colleagues, their values, and practices.

Founded at Ann Arbor, the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) was an offspring of the Students for Democratic Society (SDS) and of the politicization of university students inspired by the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s.The adjective radical in radical economics indicates a vocation to orient one’s professional life to progressive social change. To cast a light on the origins of this vocation the chapter reads the Port Huron Statement against the backdrop of debates in social science, notably the “end of ideology” debate, against Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement and the Free University movement that followed it. The radical economists at the University of Michigan were institutional entrepreneurs, having helped to grow SDS to national eminence, they were directly involved in the creation of SDS’s Radical Education Project and the New University Conference. Both of these organizations represented a commitment to intellectual tasks at a time when SDS leadership became a fierce advocate for direct and violent action.

Following the Civil War, Congress used its power under the Elections Clause, the Guarantee Clause, Article I, Section 5, and the Reconstruction Amendments to rebuild southern political systems. Chapter 5 discusses the ratification debates surrounding Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment and the understanding that voting rights, which would now be exercised by a broader swath of the population in the post-war era, supplanted the natural right to alter or abolish government as the mechanism through which the people could express their sovereign authority. Section 2 not only reset expectations around what constituted a republican form of government consistent with the Guarantee Clause, but it is also provided a penalty – reduction of representation in Congress – for states that disenfranchised African American men now entitled to membership in the political community of “We the Voters.”

Part III (Chapters 5 and 6) discusses Reconstruction, focusing on Congress’s post–Civil War power over voting and elections, which was often at odds with the Supreme Court’s interpretation of that authority. Reconstruction was defined, in large part, by the marriage between the Constitutions of Political Structure and Political Rights. This synergy was necessary because the exigencies of war required the creation of new political norms regarding the right to vote, republicanism, and federalism. This expansion of federal power ultimately set Congress on a collision course with the Court as Congress liberally interpreted its constitutional obligation to ensure republican government in the southern states.

This chapter explores thematic repertoire as a hallmark of aesthetic variety in African American novels of the 1940s. Focusing on portrayals of dating and marriage, it charts how Chester Himes, Ann Petry, and William Demby use romantic relationships to express unique creative priorities as they engage Black life in a Jim Crow society. The chapter’s argument builds on recent research about heterosexual intimacy. At the same time, it endorses a patient exploration of mid-century African American novelic production, contending that precisely because the 1940s were moments of unprecedented growth in the publication of Black fiction, that era’s texts provide singular insights into artistic maturation. Today, scholars celebrate the variety of Black expressive styles. While such hoorays often wear theoretical guises, this chapter suggests that fully grasping such plurality requires scrupulous attention to the archive of African American literary and cultural production. It espouses a granular analysis tied to exhaustive inventorying.

The Foxes of Harrow by Frank Yerby, as well as Knock on Any Door by Willard Motley, were widely read novels adapted into films in the 1940s. The tendency among some scholars to not fully acknowledge that The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door explore the negative consequences of discrimination upon African Americans may be because both novels focus on protagonists who are not Black characters. Through the depiction of relationships between white and Black characters, Yerby and Motley subversively highlight ironic historical inequitable treatment of African Americans within a democracy. Film versions of The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door feature less content about civil rights due to concerns that post–World War II attitudes about race would affect profits. This examination contends that Frank Yerby and Willard Motley in The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door strongly advocated for civil rights within African American literature.

War and society scholarship has changed how historians understand the Korean War, reinterpreting the concept of civil-military relations to broaden its reach, introduce new voices, and incorporate fresh perspectives. The traditional model of civil-military relations centers on the linear interactions between a policy maker, who outlines objectives, and the senior commander tasked with implementing military actions to achieve those desired ends. The clash between President Harry S. Truman and General Douglas MacArthur is the most iconic example of this conventional approach and has held sway over much of the literature. However, there are numerous more subtle instances of civil-military relations during the Korean War that illuminate the valuable contributions that war and society scholarship has made to our understanding of this conflict and that highlight the significant possibilities of expanding our conception of civil-military relations writ large. This chapter explores how unpreparedness for the Korean War collided with the structural racism inherent in the nation’s segregated military, producing significant consequences for both the U.S. military and American society.

Mboya’s engagement with the AFL-CIO was a critical stage in his development as a nationalist and Pan-Africanist leader. Cultivated during a hugely successful tour of the United States in 1956, his relationship with figures connected to the American labour federation would last until his death in 1969. But Mboya’s network in the United States stretched beyond the labour movement. By following Mboya on his 1956 tour, the chapter shows his rapidly developing and deep connection to the American Committee on Africa, which had emerged out of the civil rights movement. Mboya returned home to Kenya as a hero, and decided to capitalise on his fame by standing for election to the colony’s legislative council in 1957, the first opportunity Kenya’s African population had to vote for their representatives. Mboya’s charisma, record as a trade union leader and policy platform certainly made him very popular in his Nairobi constituency, but the financial support his American allies provided was also a significant reason for his success. Mboya also leveraged his international profile on the Pan-African stage too, most notably when chairing the All-Africa People’s Conference held in Ghana in 1958.

Mboya’s assassination in July 1969 remains one of the most traumatic and controversial episodes in Kenya’s post-colonial history. This chapter sets his death in its political context. It first shows how the returns on his network-building were diminishing, both for Kenya generally in terms of foreign investment and personally as Kenyans reacted against his close ties to the United States. Nevertheless, Mboya remained committed to working globally, seeking to influence international debates about development at the United Nations, the Economic Commission for Africa and in other settings around the world. At home, he was still determined to extract political advantage from the funding his international network continued to provide. Although Odinga was marginalised by 1969, Mboya’s reliance on external funds now set him at odds with Daniel arap Moi, the vice president and Mboya’s great rival to succeed Kenyatta. The two men were battling to win influence within KANU ahead of a general election due in 1969, the outcome of which would likely determine any process to appoint a new president in the event of Kenyatta’s death. It was in this context that Mboya was assassinated.

During the Cold War, popular culture played an important political role when the US House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) leveraged against each other the two biggest African American stars Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson. HUAC’s investigation into Hollywood “subversives” and Communist media influence is usually remembered for those who refused to cooperate and were jailed (“the Hollywood Ten”) or “blacklisted” and boycotted from working in Hollywood. When Paul Robeson, who viewed his celebrity as a platform for championing social justice, spoke candidly that the United States presumed to be a model democracy for the world while it denied basic civil rights to African Americans, HUAC was outraged. The committee called baseball hero Jackie Robinson as a countermeasure to Robeson’s inflammatory speeches. Robinson, the first Black MajorLeague baseball player, reassured HUAC on a national stage of African American patriotism while trying to convey the importance of Robeson’s civil rights fight.

The Educating for American Democracy report (2021) proposes a national- consensus approach to civics and history education for K-12 public schools, emphasizing civic knowledge and civic virtues as the priority, and the necessary foundations for constructive and responsible civic participation. It then has three sections: (a) Tocqueville, Common Schools, and the Invention of American Civics – including discussion of Horace Mann, and Henry Randall Waite and the American Institute of Civics; (b) Educating for American Democracy: Civic Knowledge and Civic Virtues – summarizing the seven Themes of the report and its Roadmap of curricular guidance (ranging from Civic Participation and We the People to A New Constitution and A People in the World); and (c) American Exemplars of Reflective Patriotism and Civic Honesty – with subsections on Abolitionism and the Constitutional Confidence of Douglass and Lincoln; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and American Justice for Women; and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Persistent Hope in American Justice.

African American English has been one of the most studied varieties of American English, for important social reasons beginning in the Colonial Period. Characteristics associated with African American English come from the Plantation Southern variety, and have been preserved in the Great Migration to northern and western cities. Language change in the complex system of speech has affected African American English, as it has all other varieties.