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.

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.