With the Depression, the rise of fascism, and ongoing, even more dire civil rights struggles, patriarchal power seemed more than ever a race-work imperative. “Bad girls” offered diversions while Black female civil rights leaders garnered acclaim, but the New Negro hero who led the race forward, was, in the Pittsburgh Courier’s pages, more emphatically and presumptively male.

Musk announced Tesla’s decision to go direct to consumers after looking at the history of the legacy car companies with their increasingly onerous dealer networks and the failure of recent EV startups such as Fisker that had tried to sell through dealers. Chapter 2 examines Tesla’s direct sales decision both in Tesla’s own words and with supporting evidence on why selling EVs through franchised dealers is an unworkable business strategy, as demonstrated by the fact that almost every other EV startup has chosen a direct sales approach as well.

As a new US President took office in 2021, US–Russian relations veered between cooperation and confrontation. In February, Washington and Moscow agreed to extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (which had been signed in 2010) for another five years. But in March, Joseph R. Biden called Vladimir Putin “a killer,” souring relations between Russia and the United States and leading to a reduction in the number of staff members in both diplomatic missions. Just a month later, however, Biden proposed holding a bilateral summit, which finally took place in Geneva on June 16, 2021. This event planted the seeds of hope for an improvement in bilateral relations – albeit more among Russian observers than among their American counterparts. Biden’s critics in the United States in fact saw this meeting as “appeasing” Putin, whom many American politicians, experts, and journalists had by that time represented as the epitome of evil.

This chapter illustrates that an emerging geopolitical clash of interests in the Far East and competition on the world grain and oil markets during the last two decades of the nineteenth century were softened by the active development of trade, economic, and technological collaboration, as well as by the alluring prospect of Americans gaining access to Russia’s Asian market. On the one hand, the American reaction to anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire, repressions against fighters for Russian freedom there, and mass emigration of ethnic and religious minorities to the United States turned Russia into an object of America’s mission to liberalize the world and stimulated the erosion of the Russia–US “historical friendship.” On the other, America’s philanthropic movement during the Russian famine of 1891–1892 and Russian participation in the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 manifested this friendship. While focusing on Russians and Americans discovering each other on a large scale, this chapter emphasizes that contradictions in their mutual perceptions stemmed from domestic developments in each country, leading to their becoming mutual constitutive Others.

Chapter 10 looks ahead to where the direct sales wars may go in the immediate and longer-term future. It makes the case that the dealers have bigger fish to fry – such as ride sharing, artificial intelligence (AI), and autonomous vehicles – than companies that try to sell their own cars. The book ends with a call for sober thinking among all stakeholders about how automobiles will be sold, serviced, owned, shared, and used after the next technological revolution.

This chapter examines the drastic deterioration of US–Soviet relations from 1945 to Stalin’s death in 1953. It argues that the “cold war” was neither inevitable nor an objective reality. Instead, the shift from negotiation to confrontation was spurred by misconceptions, and the intense mutual enmity stemmed from subjective constructions as much as divergent fundamental interests. US leaders’ expectations that America’s unrivalled economic strength and monopoly on nuclear weapons would lead the USSR to go along with US plans for the postwar world collided with Soviet leaders’ determination not to be intimidated or to relinquish their domination of Eastern Europe. Journalists and propagandists on both sides worked to reshape public images of their former allies, stoking fears and inflaming ideological differences that had been set aside earlier. Key US officials, particularly George F. Kennan, exaggerated the US ability to shake the Communist system’s hold on the peoples of the USSR. through propaganda and covert action. Meanwhile, Soviet propagandists misleadingly depicted American media demonization of their country as part of US preparation for war against the USSR.