This chapter demonstrates that the period between the Russo-Japanese War and the outbreak of the First World War displayed in equal measure a trend toward conflict and a trend toward cooperation. The governments of both the Russian Empire and the United States manifested a desire for more harmonious relations. Even in 1911, at the height of a conflict over Russia’s refusal to accept the passports of American Jews, the two states collaborated on the protection of fur seals and the tsarist government gave a most friendly welcome to a squadron of American battleships. This trend was also bolstered by mutual interest in expanding the export of American goods, capital, and technologies to the Russian Empire, as well as by cultural exchanges. Nonetheless, in the Far East, US “dollar diplomacy” clashed with a Russian “sphere of influence.” Within the United States, two large-scale public campaigns – against extraditing Russian revolutionaries who had fled to the United States and in favor of abrogating the 1832 commercial treaty in order to protest Russia’s anti-Semitic policies – testified that many Americans valued ideals more highly than trade and pragmatic cooperation.

What other issue has brought together environmentalists, consumer protection advocates, free marketeers, labor unions, antitrust organizations, and civil rights groups? Chapter 7 explains how that all came about in the direct sales movement. But while this “strange bedfellows” public interest group coalition should have appealed to both political parties, translating it into tangible political support has been much harder. Nothing has been more central to this challenge than the eccentric and increasingly divisive person of Elon Musk, whose budding bromance with Donald Trump may again shift the political story of direct sales in unpredictable ways in coming years.

Chapter 1 focuses on the career of Harlem writer Aubrey Bowser, who began his career editing the uplift literary journal The Rainbow, the official organ of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen’s Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, and who then re-edited some of that material, which, in turn, appeared in the New York Amsterdam News, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the Baltimore Afro-American. The printscape of Bowser’s work reveals the pressures that Jazz Age Black journalism placed on writers committed to racial uplift, as well as how Black newspapers bridged tensions between religious, dry, daytime tenets and wet, nighttime indulgence. As the Black press advertised, reported on, and editorialized “uplift” events concurrently with Harlem nightlife, it encouraged readers to mitigate at least some of the ideological divisions by offering a cosmopolitan vision of the New Negro. Within this context, the cultural work of Bowser’s fiction, especially after 1925 when most Black newspapers shifted their stance and saw Prohibition as a failure, assuaged readers that “knowing” wet Harlem did not mean abandoning the church and that attending church did not mean condemning the cabaret.

In Chapter 5, I examine how four Pittsburgh Courier writers – Julia Bumry Jones, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Blanche Taylor Dickinson, and Zora Neale Hurston – code the cabaret flapper’s “sexual spending” within both the ideology of “race motherhood” and what Erin Chapman describes as the “sex-race marketplace.” The Courier’s typical cabaret flapper indulges – in fashion, alcohol, and sexual conquests – even as she must “sell” herself to sustain her rate of consumption. These writers present the Black flapper as threatening the New Negro Man, and by extension the race due to her “wasteful” excesses and dysgenic spending, and affirm the flapper’s foil: a reconceived version of the “race mother” – modern, urban, resilient but pragmatically more conservative versions of the New Negro Woman. With help from Old Negro maternal figures, these New Negro Women fix their flawed relationships or marriages and develop more companionate unions. Refusing to indulge in the shaming of the Black light-skinned elite respectable New Negro Woman, these Old Negro mammy or auntie figures do not represent the race as “progressive and race conscious” modern New Negro mothers, but, rather, they nurture and console the Black female protagonist suffering some form of trauma associated with the Great Migration.

Instead of ushering in an era of enduring peace and partnership, the end of the Cold War was followed by a decade of turmoil, with wars in the Persian Gulf, the Balkans, and Chechnya, political violence in Moscow, and controversy over the eastward expansion of NATO. The disappointments and turbulence stemmed in part from the personalities and political choices of top leaders, including the erratic and increasingly autocratic Boris Yeltsin, the skeptical and stingy responses of George H. W. Bush to the reform and collapse of the Soviet Union, and the way Bill Clinton unreservedly embraced Yeltsin while also antagonizing him by deciding to enlarge NATO and wage war against Serbia. As this chapter shows, though, American–Russian relations in the 1990s were also roiled by widely shared popular attitudes, including American triumphalist mythology about how the Cold War ended, unrealistic Russian expectations of massive US aid and respect despite Russian corruption, mismanagement, and weakness. The bright promise of the end of the Cold War was marred both by arrogant American unilateralism and by a Russian slide into depression and authoritarianism.

This chapter analyzes why high hopes in 1933 for expanded trade and strategic cooperation were not fulfilled in the following years. It argues that the failures did not stem solely from Joseph Stalin’s evil actions. Presenting a more complex story, the chapter highlights how conservative Americans exaggerated threats of Soviet-instigated communist revolution, how Ambassador William Bullitt’s intemperate diplomacy hampered relations, and how the US Navy obstructed President Roosevelt’s plans for building warships for the USSR. Despite those problems, the descent of the Soviet Union into the Great Terror, and the signing of the Nazi–Soviet pact in 1939, the United States did not break relations with the USSR. As a result, Roosevelt kept open the possibility of a military partnership as war erupted in Europe. Going beyond the strategic and economic dimensions, the chapter highlights how harsh Soviet anti-American propaganda sought to buttress belief in the superiority of socialism over capitalism while Hollywood films ridiculed ascetic, doctrinaire Soviet communists and suggested that they were susceptible to seduction by the consumer pleasures of capitalist countries.

Since 2013, Elon Musk has been at war with car dealers in the United States. Battles have played out in legislative backrooms, courtrooms, governors’ offices, and news media outlets across the country. As of now, Musk has won the war. Tesla has established a foothold across the country, sold over two million cars without using a dealer, established a loyal customer base, and overcome most states’ franchise dealer laws. Direct Hit tells the story of this fight, taking readers into courtrooms and legislative halls where the dealers tried in vain to derail Tesla’s advances. The book shares key insights into the strategic choices made by dealers, legacy car companies, and electric-vehicle start-ups. With a combination of historical narrative, blow-by-blow accounts of the Tesla wars, and a consideration of America’s longstanding romance with the personal automobile, Direct Hit shares a uniquely American drama over cars and the people who sell them.

As Tesla matured as a company and largely won its battles with the dealers, a whole new crop of EV startups tried to follow in its wake. While Tesla’s legal and political victories had made their job easier in some states, they had made it harder in other states where special legislative carve-outs for Tesla closed the door to other companies. Chapter 8 introduces the other companies fighting to sell their cars direct to consumers, and their unique angles on the importance of direct sales.

After thousands of Poles revolted against Russian rule in January 1863 – a critical moment during the American Civil War – many in the Union faced a moral and ideological dilemma. Should they be faithful to the traditional American sympathy for brave rebels against Old World monarchies? Or should they side with Imperial Russia, which many had long seen as the only friendly power in Europe? The debate in northern newspapers centered less on factual information than on questions of identity. Was autocratic Russia, as it brutally suppressed the Polish Insurrection, a barbaric empire unlike republican America? Or was Russia, like the United States, a Christian power, whose Tsar Alexander II emancipated its serfs shortly before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and who suppressed secession much as the North fought the South? Southern editors’ commentary also often revolved around issues of positioning, with sneering parallels drawn between “Alexander II and Abraham I” and analogies made between the struggles of Poland and the Confederacy – thus giving the same comparisons opposite meanings.

This chapter examines the shift from almost total estrangement in the early 1920s to broad enmeshment in cultural, economic, and finally diplomatic exchanges in the early 1930s. While acknowledging the importance of converging economic and strategic interests, the chapter argues that images and ideas were also significant, particularly in defining the identities and trajectories of the two countries. It illuminates the divergence between American anticommunists who loathed the atheist Soviet dictatorship and the growing number of intellectuals, journalists, African Americans, and others who became fascinated by the Soviet experiment in social and economic transformation. It also analyzes the ambivalence of Soviet writers, cartoonists, and political leaders about the United States, which they harshly criticized for its imperialism, racism, and economic exploitation, but also admired for its energy, productivity, and advanced technology. The chapter closes with a discussion of how President Franklin Roosevelt disregarded a terrible famine in Ukraine and protests by Ukrainian Americans as he negotiated for the establishment of diplomatic relations.

Each state has its own direct sales story, but none is richer than the one that played out in Michigan between 2014 and the present. Michigan pitted the power of the Detroit car companies, the United Auto Workers, and the politically active car dealers’ lobby against a California upstart supported by environmentalists, consumer rights organizations, and free market groups. The dealers got the upper hand in 2014 through legislative chicanery involving a single pronoun – “its” – but soon found that word games can backfire. Chapter 6 provides an inside account of the Tesla wars in the author’s own backyard.

This chapter examines the evolution of US–Russian relations from the establishment of diplomatic ties during the Napoleonic Wars through the 1840s, highlighting the complexities shaped by both international and domestic factors. Amid conflicts with France and Britain, American leaders navigated perceptions of the Russian Empire, using Russia as a lens to critique domestic political agendas. The chapter discusses how the early nineteenth-century uprisings, including the Decembrist and Polish rebellions, prompted both nations to evaluate their political ideologies and roles on the global stage, often reflecting mutual fears of foreign intervention. Despite initial goodwill and diplomatic engagement, notably through the 1832 Commercial Treaty and the appointment of Russian minister Bodisco, relations became strained due to the changing political landscape and US concerns over Russian expansionism. Ultimately, the chapter argues that the interplay of shared interests and political ambitions laid the groundwork for a nuanced relationship, illustrating how the two powers sought to navigate their identities and aspirations amid broader international shifts.