During the era of détente, Soviet and US leaders pursued common interests in controlling the spread of nuclear weapons, limiting the cost of the arms race, and expanding trade. Summit meetings brought agreements on nuclear non-proliferation, arms limitation, and space exploration. Yet, after a high point of friendly negotiation in the early 1970s, friction and competition overshadowed cooperation. While the unraveling of détente has often been blamed on Soviet adventurism in the “Third World,” this chapter presents a more balanced explanation. It notes that the United States too intervened around the world, argues that geopolitical competition was not the sole cause of tension, and highlights how domestic political dynamics disrupted relations between the superpowers. After the divisive and destructive US war in Vietnam, many Americans yearned to recover faith in their moral superiority. Denunciations of Soviet human rights violations, including restrictions on Jewish emigration and repression of dissidents, contributed to a revival of confidence in American virtues while irritating Soviet leaders. Long before the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, acrimony eclipsed partnership.

Chapter 9 calls the direct sales wars in Tesla’s favor. It has sold over 2 million cars without using a dealer, established a national footprint, and obtained a loyal customer following that vouches for its direct sales approach. This chapter pulls together the fifty-state story of the direct sales wars, showing where each state stands on the issue and how Tesla used creative tactics like locating on Native American lands to circumvent remaining restrictions in holdout states.

Chapter 1 traces the history of the franchise dealer model of car distribution, from the early wild west days of the internal combustion automobile to the political confrontations between Detroit’s Big Three and the “mom and pop” car dealers during the mid-twentieth century. The chapter examines the thinking of legendary management figures such as Henry Ford and Alfred P. Sloan, explains the dealer protection rationale behind state franchise dealer laws, and shows how the legacy car companies largely acquiesced in those laws until Tesla’s entry onto the scene.

The chapter explores US–Russia relations in the years before Russia entered her second revolution in February 1917 and America joined the First World War in April 1917. This period was complicated by discrimination against Jews and other ethnic minorities in Russia, by ideological differences between American democracy and Russian autocracy, and by geopolitical disagreements. Yet these elements of conflict did not hamper the two states’ rapprochement, which began at the end of 1914 and at times resembled the euphoria of a honeymoon. This chapter emphasizes that the surprising thaw in US–Russia relations cannot be explained only by the convergence of the two governments’ interests: namely, that the Russian Empire desperately needed to buy American supplies for its armed forces, while Americans were eager to sell their surplus products. Interactions between Imperial Russia and the United States call for more comprehensive consideration, with a particular focus on the changes in mutual representations and the intensified process of Russians and Americans studying each other. This is precisely what this chapter sets out to provide.

In the first years of the twenty-first century, Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush sought to develop a strategic and economic partnership. Yet by 2007 US–Russian relations were marked by friction, and after 2012 they deteriorated into bitter enmity. This chapter argues that blaming the degeneration of relations on the KGB background, paranoia, and imperial ambitions of Putin is too simple and one-sided. It shows that the United States also spurred the decline by supporting “color revolutions” in countries around Russia, promoting NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, pushing regime change in countries such as Syria, Libya, and Venezuela, and placing missile defense systems in Eastern Europe. Although Russia and the United States cooperated on a strategic arms reduction treaty, Russian entry into the World Trade Organization, and restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, conflict increasingly overshadowed such collaboration. That outcome was not inevitable. Instead, unwise policy choices led to clashes, dishonest statements eroded trust, needlessly provocative rhetoric exacerbated tensions, and media sensationalism inflamed antipathies between Americans and Russians.

In Chapter 4, I consider the third and most controversial and canonical novel in the Pittsburgh Courier’s anti-lynching trilogy, Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint (1924). Rather than presenting white transformation, the novel ends with the bitterness of a failed cooperative initiative and the lynching of both of its New Negro protagonists. When the New Negro physician’s culminating gesture of selfless professionalism is misconstrued by the town’s Klansmen, a white mob – another such mob had already murdered his more radical New Negro brother – ambushes and kills him. Loosely based on White’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lynching investigations of the 1919 Elaine massacre, the novel is the only work of fiction I examine that generated a published letter to the editor criticizing it. Considered within the montaged paratextual elements that surrounded it, women’s voices gain significantly more agency. In particular, the advertisements for guns around the serial installments emphasize the “ghostly” presence of Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching militance. In addition, just one month before the serialization of White’s novel appeared in January of 1926, the Courier began publishing a column by anti-lynching activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson.

The legacy Detroit manufacturers were between a rock and a hard place. Having just emerged from near-death experiences during the 2008–09 financial crisis, they now had to face the onslaught not only of EV technology that they had long resisted but also of a company that refused to play by the settled rules on how cars are sold and serviced. Led by General Motors (GM), the legacies decided that their best tactic was to stand with their dealers and argue that Tesla should be denied direct sales, which would not only prevent Tesla from getting ahead but could keep Tesla far behind. This “raising rivals’ costs” strategy ultimately backfired, as Tesla got the right to sell direct in most states, and the legacies missed the chance to get their own right to compete with Tesla on a level playing field.

In Chapter 3, I examine Joshua Henry Jones, Jr.’s By Sanction of Law, serialized in the Pittsburgh Courier and Baltimore Afro-American. By including a white man, a pregnant Black woman, and a New Negro character as among the lynching victims, describing the lynchings in the novel’s real time, crafting his lynching scenes as “liminal crucibles” propelling dramatic white racial reckonings, and depicting what appears as an interracial romance, Jones offers a more radical antilynching vision than does Rogers. In direct opposition to the dictates of white supremacist eugenicists, Jones evokes Israel Zangwill’s melting pot as the remedy to America’s lynch logic. Although the novel does not directly mention twenties-era racial-purity campaigns or the nativism and interracial marriage bans they generated, within the context of the newspapers, it deeply engages these movements. Like Rogers, Jones emphasized both the essential performative nature of American identity, epitomized by the New Negro’s education, demeanor, and work ethic, but unlike Rogers, Jones raised the nativist specter of radical immigrant agitators.

The Harlem Renaissance Weekly asks that we consider the largely overlooked newspaper serial fiction of the 1920s in relation to, and sometimes in direct response to, events of daily interest to Black people, and especially Black women, who likely constituted its primary readers. By recentering Black newspapers and by reading them as part of a reader-generated weekly montage, I show how this broad-based popular form helped readers renegotiate the cultural work of New Negroes, refiguring civil rights protest as they navigated the pleasures and dangers of the Jazz Age. At the same time, I demonstrate how the twenties New Negro Woman featured in the Pittsburgh Courier increasingly dominated racial representation and contested patriarchal Black leadership. If the New Negro Man led the race on the editorial page, the New Negro Woman represented the race on the front page. It was not Alain Locke’s implicitly male New Negro who defined the Harlem Renaissance week to week, but rather the New Negro Woman, who, almost invariably in the context of a heterosexual love plot, propelled narratives, spurred sales, and defined a distinctly modern Black sociopolitical consciousness.

This chapter explores the dynamic interplay between the United States and Russia during the American Civil War and its aftermath, highlighting how mutual reforms and geopolitical interests shaped their relationship. As Russia aligned with the Union, both nations undertook significant transformations: the emancipation of serfs in Russia (1861) and the abolition of slavery in the United States (1865). These parallel reforms fostered camaraderie, leading to diplomatic engagement, including the sale of Alaska in 1867, personal travels, and cultural exchanges, such as Grand Duke Alexis’ visit and Russian participation in the 1876 Centennial Exhibition. Key figures in both countries nurtured these ties, while military cooperation during the Russo-Turkish War further solidified their friendship. However, emerging contradictions in perceptions, particularly regarding race and social justice, highlighted the complexities of their relationship. By reconciling narratives of self-interest and solidarity, this chapter elucidates how state interests and identity discourses influenced interpretations of Russian and American actions, shaping their evolving bilateral relations.

The dealers’ self-serving pivot to a consumer protection rationale is a nonstarter. It has been debunked by consumer protection groups like the Consumer Federation of America, federal agencies that protect consumers like the Federal Trade Commission, and Nobel laureate economists. Chapter 4 scrutinizes the dealers’ arguments and shows why direct sales is ultimately a question of consumer choice and freedom to buy.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the field of diplomatic history took a cultural turn – or rather, a series of turns. Inspired by a host of factors internal and external to the discipline as a whole, a number of foreign relations historians came to feel that there were forces other than strategy, economics, politics, or national interest narrowly defined, at play in the shaping of American policy. The symbolic anthropologist Clifford Geertz had already had enormous influence on social and cultural history, emphasizing what he called -borrowing from Max Weber – the “webs of significance” that shaped the everyday experience of human beings. Borrowing from Geertz, and from scholars of cultural and subaltern studies, historians explored the impact on US relations with others of ritual, gesture, body language, identity (e.g., race, gender, and religion), language, emotion, and the senses. The cultural turn, significantly, led to a greater interest in imperialism and colonialism, and, with that, to greater appreciation for the participation of all sides in international encounters. The study of culture invites self-reflection, allowing historians who deploy it to think hard about the assumptions, stereotypes, prejudices, and emotions that they bring to their work.