This chapter reveals the weakly transformative effects of political disavowal, focusing on a humor writer and comedian who claimed to have “no politics” during the American Civil War. Artemus Ward was a humor writer and comic lecturer who toured the United States and London during the 1860s. His performance style was characterized by gravity and digression: he earnestly delivered a lecture that never got around to its stated subject. Ward’s grave, seemingly incompetent comic delivery is among the clearest progenitors of the deadpan performance styles that are still ubiquitous in stand-up comedy. Across his career, Ward avoided divisive politics. This chapter argues that the weak politics of Ward’s deadpan can help shift a persistent debate about whether comedy is normative or transformative. The way Ward constitutes his audience as the people who get his jokes shows the weakly transformative potential of normative comedy.

This chapter introduces readers to the formative ideas and debates of nineteenth-century African American political thought. This period covers the era of antislavery activism before the US Civil War (1861–65), which abolished slavery, to the immediate aftermath of that period, known as Reconstruction (1865–77). It was in this latter period in which the US federal government intervened militarily and economically in the US South to ensure newly emancipated Black citizens would have their freedoms protected. Through figures such as David Walker, Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Frances Harper, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Delany, readers will learn how Black thinkers confronted slavery, racial hierarchy, and gender oppression while generating some of the most influential theories of freedom and equality in American history.

A central learning objective of this chapter is to show how political theory emerges not only from institutions but also from lived experience, moral outrage, and collective struggle. By the end of the chapter, readers will be able to explain how African American political thought identified the contradictions at the heart of American democracy and articulated powerful visions for racial justice and human liberation.

Chapter 4 develops a core claim about “war powers of necessity”: When national self-preservation becomes paramount, the constitutional focus shifts from whether to make war to how far each branch may go in adopting – and later unwinding – extraordinary measures. The chapter shows how Civil War strategy and constitutional argument became mutually reinforcing. Lincoln’s early actions – mobilization, blockade, and detention – highlight the problem of unilateral executive initiative when Congress is absent, while Congress’s later ratification and responsive legislation demonstrate how legislative approval can legalize, channel, or defer resolution of the deepest separation-of-powers questions. The chapter then broadens from emergency action to the constitutional mechanics of sustaining mass war. It shows how “military necessity” operated less as a law-free exception than as a mode of legal reasoning that expanded the scope of both Article I and Article II powers, as the war’s means—including conscription and economic mobilization—merged with its ends, above all preservation of the Union and emancipation. Courts appear not as consistent referees but as sites of competing constitutional models. The chapter concludes by examining war termination, showing how the Civil War blurred the boundary between war and peace and made unwinding extraordinary authority a constitutional problem in its own right.

Tells the story of Andrew Johnson’s presidency and how he used the pardon power in an attempt to impose his vision of post-Civil War Reconstruction in place of the version of Reconstruction legislated by Congress.

Explores President Abraham Lincoln’s use of presidential clemency powers during the Civil War. Examines Lincoln’s pardons in ordinary criminal cases and in cases of military crime or crimes of allegiance. Focuses particularly on Lincoln’s offers of clemency to former Confederates or Confederate sympathizers as a tool of wartime policy and attempted reconciliation. Notes tension between Lincoln and Congress over which branch controlled general pardons or amnesties.

In this account of the life of Marc Antony Plutarch offers insight on some of the most iconic moments in Roman republican and imperial history. He comments on his family origins and early corrupting influences as well as his talents for military command and nurturing the loyalty of his troops. Antony facilitated Julius Caesar’s seizure of power. The power struggle issuing from Caesar’s assassination was briefly resolved with the institution of the triumvirate, giving Antony authority over the eastern territories of the Empire. Cleopatra was successful in seducing him, still Antony agreed to marry Octavia, who was the sister of Caesar Augustus. Antony’s infidelity towards his new wife was to become a major irritant and an important cause of the subsequent civil war. At the Battle of Actium Antony famously abandoned his troops to follow his lover Cleopatra, leading to his military defeat. In the end, both Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide, acknowledging their military failures and with power consolidated in the hands of Caesar Augustus.

Chapter 2 explores 300 years of St. Augustine history, from its founding in 1565 until the end of the Civil War in 1865. The chapter demonstrates the city’s many connections to American slavery—well beyond the Slave Market in the center of the Plaza. These include:

• An argument that the first slaves in land that became the United States arrived in St. Augustine in 1565, rather than in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619.

• The fact that St. Augustine had a free community of former slaves more than a century before the end of the Civil War, in Fort Mose.

• The fact that a public slave sale in the center of the city was witnessed—and written about—in the 1820s by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

• The fact that St. Augustine fought on both sides of the Civil War. First, St. Augustine was part of the Confederacy, but Union troops took control of the city in 1862.

• One consequence of that was that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation actually freed slaves in St. Augustine before the war ended—something that was written about in colorful fashion in The New York Times.

This chapter shows how Sallust developed the motif of language change during civil conflict in his Bellum Catilinae and his Histories. Sallust emerges as an author deeply concerned by conceptual loss, trying to preserve traditional means of moral evaluation as the Roman Republic collapsed. The chapter starts by exploring Sallust’s understanding of moral language; it then dissects the analysis of transvaluation in Cato’s speech, before showing how Sallust himself sets out to preserve moral language through his own work. The chapter finishes with a discussion of Lepidus’ and Macer’s speeches in Sallust’s Histories.

The introduction sets out the key questions which the book addresses. First: what happens to language in times of civil conflict? Second: can the historian speak of timeless moral values? It then introduces the reader to the ancient texts the book addresses, and the figure of paradiastole, through which they address these questions. It goes on to contrast their reflections with Skinner’s and Nietzsche’s understanding of transvaluation. It finishes with some reflections on method.

Agitation in England’s prisons came to a head in unison with midcentury political tensions. By 1641, prisoners for debt had begun to connect their suffering at the hands of a supposedly corrupt and unjust legal system with developing national concerns about tyranny and arbitrary rule under Charles I. Indeed, the anti-carceral sentiments explored in Chapter 5 had not died out in the 1620s, but formed a tradition of prison politics that simmered under the surface of Caroline rule and increasingly intersected with concerns about political uses of incarceration. Chapter 7 thus explores the civil war legacy of prison activism and abolitionist arguments first developed in the 1620s, following them into a wider political realm. It reconstructs a new period of turmoil within the King’s Bench between 1640 and 1649. On the eve of civil war, prisoners republished abolitionist arguments developed in the 1620s, now placing particular emphasis on legal and political oppression. This agitation also provided the basis for new collaboration between prisoners and London’s radicals, facilitating exchanges of ideas that impacted upon prison activists, radical movements and contemporary political debates alike. Thus, prisons had become crucibles of radical thought and organisation as disaffection with state and legal authority fed into political conspiracy.

Camp Ford’s Civil War’s introduction is driven by narrative couched in concise arguments and general historiographical context so that readers know precisely what to expect and how what they will read fits into the ongoing scholarly conversations regarding war, nature, and captivity in Texas, the Trans-Mississippi, and the South during the Civil War.

This chapter introduces the core research questions. How does a state’s relational web of support in the form of security assistance (amity) influence its relationships of threat (enmity)? How does a state’s relational web of enmity influence its relationships of amity? These questions pertain to many salient conflicts of our time. The chapter considers the ubiquity of proxy wars, recognizing that most conflicts are embedded in broader networks of support and threat relationships. It also explores the case of security assistance from the US and ponders the challenges for the US in maintaining a big-tent order. Key theoretical concepts are defined, and the chapter briefly summarizes the book’s arguments and findings. Finally, the chapter introduces the major cases used to illustrate and probe the limits of the arguments throughout the book: proxy wars in late–Cold War Southern Africa and Central America as well as contemporary dynamics in the Indo-Pacific.

This chapter explores further the mixed blessings of security assistance from the standpoint of conflict management in civil wars. In some cases, the constellation of pressures from external supporters nudges states toward negotiation, especially mediation; in other cases, the external pressure nudges states away from negotiation. The results reveal an inverted U-shaped relationship between the congruence within a state's support group and the propensity for mediation. Moreover, strong states appear less responsive to the characteristics of their support groups and also generally less interested in mediation. States facing more security threats also appear less responsive but also more interested in negotiation across the board. The key cases at the end of the Cold War, especially the Southern Africa case, further reveal the importance for peacemakers to account for the embedded nature of a given conflict in wider webs of enmity and amity.

This chapter examines the arguments regarding variation in the outcomes pertaining to interstate threat and intrastate conflict. The results show that states with strong but incongruent support groups are more prone to experience interstate threat and the escalation of civil war, as rivals attempt wedge strategies and supporters attempt control strategies. Additional analyses find that states which are caught in the midst of stark intergroup rivalries are more likely to experience aggressive wedge strategies before they further tighten their support relationships. The twilight of the Cold War, and especially the evolution of the Central American case, further demonstrates the roles that security assistance can play in igniting and sustaining proxy wars.

This impassioned address in early 1976 is a call to Lebanon’s intellectuals, academics and moral leaders to awaken and act in response to the country’s worsening crisis at the beginning of the long civil war. It criticizes the inaction and withdrawal of Lebanon’s thinkers and visionaries as the nation suffers under deep political, economic and social distress. Musa Sadr urges these leaders to rise from complacency, stop their retreat into private or foreign safe havens and fulfill their responsibilities to the homeland.

Lebanon is portrayed as a unique, divinely endowed nation, rich in history and human potential, yet torn by division, corruption and despair. The text warns against sectarianism, political factionalism and superficial reforms, which only deepen fear and dysfunction. It calls instead for a radical, unified vision to rebuild Lebanon on principles of equality, justice and shared citizenship.

A new Lebanon must emerge – one that embraces diversity, champions the Palestinian cause, utilizes its natural and human resources wisely and reclaims its role as a center for interfaith dialogue and civilizational harmony. The address ends by urging the nation’s moral and intellectual stewards to develop and implement a comprehensive plan to heal divisions, bring in the marginalized and restore dignity, hope and purpose to all Lebanese.