Describes the facts of Donald Trump’s effort to extort Ukraine into announcing investigations of his presidential rival Joseph Biden and how exposure of that effort led to a renewed effort to impeach him.

This chapter considers the material and violent circumstances that surrounded Black performers such as Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Fredi Washington, and Fats Waller, as they produced some of the most memorable work of the Harlem Renaissance. To survive, these artists employed strategies of gender fugitivity to navigate a world of labor, poverty, and policing, while claiming spaces of survival and creativity. The first of three sections explores fugitive gender, arguing that the purposeful instability caused through the relationship between gender and Blackness created the conditions of possibility in everyday life for Black folks. The second section excavates the meanings of Duke Ellington’s cosmopolitan dandyism as seen in the 1929 film Black and Tan.The final section considers the fugitive sociality of rent parties, informal musical venues born of necessity and delight, which served the community of Harlem by providing shelter, food, entertainment, and sexual pleasure.

Knowledge Brokers: Unlike modern biblical studies, Gospel Thrillers allow readers to dwell on the personal stakes and motives involved in reimagining Christian origins. They do this through the characters of key knowledge brokers: ambitious academics, native informants, secretive priests, and humble monks confuse any quest for truth in the quest for Christian origins.

Catalogues the most common category of federal impeachments, that of federal judges. Describes all judicial impeachments and discusses the arguably different standard of impeachable conduct for judges.

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.

Explains the scope and conclusions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian election interference, Trump campaign coordination with the Russians, and allegations of presidential obstruction of the Mueller investigation. Also explains why Mueller’s report did not lead to impeachment of Donald Trump.

Margaret Bonds’s Credo sets the nine articles of W. E. B. Du Bois’s iconic manifesto for global equality – first penned in 1904, revised in 1920, and modeled on the sacred symbol of the arch – as a symmetrical set of seven movements for soloists, chorus, and piano (1965) or orchestra (1965–67). This chapter offers a close reading of Du Bois’s anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, pacifist text and examines the means by which Bonds translated it into a musical structure all her own that reflects diverse influences ranging from gospel song through the cantatas of J. S. Bach (whom she called “the father of all good music”), also emphasizing womanist themes that are at best minimally present in Du Bois’s text.

Since the 1920s, American writers have evinced a fascination with and investment in fictional representations of jazz music and jazz musicians. As this essay demonstrates, part of jazz’s appeal for fiction writers is that it offers the opportunity to explore various kinds of border crossing. This essay surveys several jazz fictions to explicate how these fictions portray jazz as a local event, often focusing on musicians who may not be known beyond their own communities, but who live to play the music. Using Nathaniel Mackey’s concept of artistic othering, this essay investigates how writers portray the jazz musician’s search for a space to belong, where artistic forms of risk-taking are affirmed and the contingencies jazz musicians face, whether it be in the form of substance abuse, underemployment, self-doubt, or social injustice can be managed through instances where self-repair, improvisation, and community constitute the foundations of the musician’s lifeworld. Jazz fiction, in other words, is deeply concerned with the contradictions of American life and how playing jazz music involves the act of containing contradictions.

Describes the life, political career, and impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, with particular emphasis on the post-Civil War context of the case and the constitutional issues in the case.

A second interlude introducing the 25th Amendment mechanism for removing a president who is incapable of performing his duties, and explaining unsuccessful initiatives to apply the 25th Amendment to Donald Trump.

Describes the Senate trial of Donald Trump’s first impeachment, with detailed analysis of the procedural maneuvers by Trump’s defenders and accusers, the role of the Chief Justice in the trial, and the arguments of the House Managers and Trump’s counsel.

The American Songbook has been a fruitful source of improvisation for jazz musicians, either through artists interpreting those songs themselves, or crafting new songs from their chord changes as bebop musicians did prolifically in the 1940s. This chapter investigates this influence, beginning with the debt that jazz improvisers owe to Tin Pan Alley composers, before turning that relationship around to consider how the success of those same songwriters depended on an ongoing attempt to identify what made jazz appealing to American listeners and distil aspects of that enigmatic essence into the commercially viable object of popular song. In examples like Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather,” Irving Berlin’s “Putting on the Ritz,” or any number of Cole Porter compositions, we see the workmanlike creators of Tin Pan Alley incorporating not just musical elements associated with jazz, but also a more general “sensibility,” intended to recreate the music’s blues-informed world-weariness or performative impertinence.