Here we examine the rise of Senate party caucuses. As we show, senators met in caucus only infrequently in the first half-century of the chamber’s history. The most notable use of early caucuses was by Republicans in the two chambers, who gathered on a quadrennial basis to nominate their presidential candidate. But, in 1841–45, led by the Whigs, the modern Senate party caucuses were born. In that brief period of time, senators began utilizing caucuses on a regular basis, both to conduct legislative business and to organize the membership of the Senate’s standing committees. In later years, first in 1856–62, then in the 1870s, Republicans and Democrats gave new structure and permanence to their caucuses. They created formal positions in the caucus, such as a regular caucus chairman, and caucus committees, including committees on committees, campaign committees, and ad hoc committees on the order of business. The emergence of the Senate caucus in 1841–45 coincided with the rise of a competitive two-party system, both in the electorate and in the Senate.

With the establishment of the national party convention, the process used to select the delegates to the national convention became of paramount importance. State and local party conventions selected the national convention delegates, but those conventions were often conducted in deeply undemocratic ways, excluding many party voters or using parliamentary rules such as winner-take-all and/or the unit rule to marginalize political minorities in the state. Nevertheless, the Democratic Party expressly endorsed the use of winner-take-all and unit-rule voting in the nomination process, which allowed party bosses to control the composition (and therefore candidate preference) of their state delegation. The Republicans were initially more hostile to boss control, forbidding the unit rule, but they, too, ultimately endorsed winner-take-all delegate selections in 1916. Moreover, both parties routinely seated delegates from states in which the convention process had been run in an undemocratic fashion. Thus, for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the party convention process was run by a small coterie of party bosses, who ultimately chose the party’s nominee.

Set during the Muslim slave uprising of 1835 in Bahia, Brazil, this chapter tells part of the story of the Muslim Atlantic. It offers a close reading of two talismans that Bahian authorities confiscated from the bodies of the slain rebels and the homes of the arrested rebels. This chapter approaches these talismans, which were composed in Arabic by Muslim clerics in Bahia, as Arabic documents and posits that they signify the endurance of Muslim letters in the New World and the Muslim Atlantic. More than offering protection for the wearers, these talismans also provide insights into the spiritual, political, and even existential wonderings of those involved in the rebellion. More broadly, these talismans both elucidate the African Muslims’ faith and disrupt our understanding of what constitutes a text in general, and specifically as part of Luso-Brazilian literature. In doing so, this chapter disrupts the Catholic hegemony of the Latinx religious imaginary by expanding the religious and racial connotations of “Latinidad” to include Islam and African Muslims.

This chapter discusses selected texts from contemporary Native American/First Nations, Black, Latinx, Asian American, Jewish American, and Arab American literature to show how they diversify hegemonic representations of financial capital and money as a medium. As they address issues such as settler colonialism, the afterlife of slavery, the concept of “alien capital,” deceptive promises of wealth, the social meanings of money, and the value of their groups’ respective cultural capital, they feature a range of stylistic innovations that illuminate the entanglements of literary and financial discourses in the past as well as the present.

This chapter examines what happens when we decolonize the materiality of the nineteenth-century Hispano-American anthology, when we move away from the anthology as a book form with colonial publishers, titles, sections, bylines, and expand it to centralize the (formerly) colonized and their ephemera, that is, Hispano-American editors, readers, and writers as well the Spanish-language newspapers they edited, read, and wrote for. What do these perspectives teach us about the emergence of what we now call a Latinx people and literary tradition? Mirroring the instability of the region following the US–Mexico War and the ontological uncertainty of its readers, newspapers like the Los Angeles-based El Clamor Público represent the formation of a pre-Latinx literary tradition. The newspaper’s editor and proprietor, Francisco P. Ramírez gave expression to what I call a Hispano-American borderlands anthology of poetry before there was a formalized creation of a Latinx poetic tradition in the United States.

The antebellum money supply was notoriously confusing, geographically variable, and entirely unstandardized, leading to routine problems in money’s use and exchange. During these same decades, despite proslavery advocates’ efforts to define racial identity unambiguously, the concept of race was also unstable and fluid. This chapter embeds the confusion over money’s identifying qualities within the disquiet over establishing racial identity that concurrently surfaced in the figure of the so-called white slave – extremely fair-skinned enslaved persons. I focus primarily on William Wells Brown’s literary output, especially his 1853 novel Clotel, along with court cases in which fair-skinned enslaved persons claiming a white identity sued for their freedom. Beyond highlighting shared tropes and metaphors, this literary and legal archive demonstrates that commentators used the language of money to shape how people comprehended racial identity and, equally, how the language of race impacted the concept of money itself. In the recurring slippage between what counted as real and what counted as fake in notions of money and of race, Brown and others seized upon money’s own inconsistencies to undermine slavery’s usual equation of Blackness with only monetary value.

The Framers at the Constitutional Convention were initially uncertain regarding how the President should be elected. For most of the convention, they favored appointment by Congress, but fears that the President would become too dependent on Congress persuaded them to entrust his selection to an independent body of electors – the Electoral College. In the Framers’ expectation, however, the Electoral College would just identify and nominate potential candidates; the House of Representatives would do the actual electing, selecting the winner from among the top candidates nominated by the College. Moreover, the Framers envisioned that the choice of President would be made on meritocratic, not partisan, grounds. After the Washington administration, however, national political parties emerged, transforming the Presidential election into a partisan contest. In this newly partisan environment, each party assumed the responsibility for selecting its nominee, and they initially did so through informal discussions among prominent party leaders.

This chapter reposits the dominant narrative of the United States to shift away from a monolithic identification whereby American means English speaking and Christian, to one that embraces plurality and difference in its origins, and specifically includes the Sephardim as a group that was part of this foundational effort. The Sephardic Diaspora in New England was connected through trade to the early modern Atlantic world (1640–1830). Within the boundaries of the present-day United States, Charleston, South Carolina, New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island were key nodes in these commercial and slave networks. These merchants who fled from religious persecution in the Iberian Peninsula and sought religious freedoms in New England, also became slave traders who made huge profits on trafficking the freedom of others. Although often espousing endogamous ideals for unions, the lived reality of those members of the Sephardic Diaspora demonstrates how race became a contested site of identity for practitioners of the Jewish faith living in widely disparate places.

The 1970s and 1980s proved to be transitional years. At first, it appeared that individualism had taken hold in the Senate, undermining the influence of both leaders and standing committees, but, as Chapter 9 shows, partisan conflict intensified during the 1980s and senators began demanding more effective party organizations and leadership. The Democratic leader, Robert Byrd, (D, W.Va.), was challenged for Democratic floor leader in 1986 and, two years later, gave up his post because he was not meeting his colleagues’ expectations as a team leader and party spokesman. By the mid-1990s, party leaders not only served as their parties’ chief strategists on floor procedure but increasingly guided the tandem tasks of writing important legislation and fashioning media strategies. Procedural maneuvering intensified on the Senate floor, which placed floor leaders in the middle of every legislative battle. By the 2020s, Senate policymaking was remarkably centralized in the two floor leaders, Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer. The Senate reached 2024 with stronger central party leaders and more elaborate organizations than ever before.

In this chapter, I investigate the aura of criminality that lingers around capitalism in feminist discourses of the long 1970s. Navigating landmark works of feminist economics, I establish how polemical publications by Gayle Rubin, Silvia Federici, and Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa instrumentalize the logics and rhetorics of theft in order to evoke the exploitation of women in capitalism, and I examine how these logics and rhetorics are likewise deployed to structure specific figurations of stealing in literary works by Marilyn French, Alix Kates Shulman, Marge Piercy, Rita Mae Brown, and Audre Lorde. My focus here falls primarily on those protagonists who remain trapped within the strictures of the realist feminist novel. What strategies do these women develop for resisting or mitigating the institutionalized terms of their financial oppression? Through an analysis of the ways in which stealing operates within a wider matrix of crimes against the kindred systems of capitalism and patriarchy, I investigate how theft figures in feminist writing as a viable compensatory opportunity for women. Regardless of its criminality, to what extent does the feminist novel present the case that stealing – in its various guises – is sometimes the only pragmatic response to the immediate problem of women’s oppression?