Chapter 2 examines Joel Augustus Rogers’ semi-autobiographical debate novel From “Superman” to Man (1917), which features an erudite Pullman porter methodically debunking the anti-Black racist arguments of a Southern senator traveling on his route. Signifying on the pseudoscientific foundations of Jim Crow bigotry, the New Negro porter turns what Eric Lott calls the “black mirror” back on the senator to reveal, ultimately, the utter abjection of white supremacy. Having already “proved” the Negro’s humanity through his erudition, the porter’s explicit reading of a gruesome lynching becomes a catalyst for the senator’s “liminal crucible” moment, a moral transformation great enough that he offers the porter a job in his film studio now devoted to producing some films that “create a better understanding of the Negro.” By examining the revisions Rogers made to his 1917 novel in his 1923 serialization, I reveal Rogers’ increasing anger over the growing brutality and frequency of white mob violence as well as the race-baiting newspapers that fomented it.

The epilogue discusses new and old challenges for history as an academic discipline that overemphasizes the written archive and fails to deliver on its promise to be transparent about the motivations behind and process of source selection. It highlights the shortcomings of the document-based and state-, male-, and literate-centric history-writing as a violent technology of European and Japanese imperialisms.

The papacy played a key role in establishing the canon of the Bible for the West.

Chapter 3 launches into the Tesla wars with an inside account of the first big battle in New Jersey in 2014. It shows how the dealers tried to pivot from the original dealer protection motivation of the state laws to a consumer protection justification and the tactics the dealers used to advance their position. Drawing on public choice theory, the chapter also answers the question of why the dealers have managed to cling onto their protected position for so long, despite business, technological, and political changes that have entirely undermined the original purposes of the franchise dealer laws.

Chapter 6 analyses how kinship is both a relationship over time creating the next generation, and one that is spatially promiscuous, adapting the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The riverbank villages had become strengthened by their hinterland networks but also by their own internal connections by the mid eighteenth century. The reforms of the Portuguese Crown in the 1750s supported this process with greater resources, control, and scrutiny. Each community, or village, continued to hold its own ethnic profile through the endurance of viable kin units and marriages within and across ethnic identities.

The papacy supported leper houses.

This chapter delineates Eastern, East Central, and Southeastern Europe, highlights its shifting geographies for the study of cities, and argues for the need to see the region ‘between the Baltic and the Adriatic’ as one whole. Whereas the imperial capitals Vienna, St Petersburg and Istanbul tend to be considered either not representative or beyond the delineated borders of the region, the chapter pays closer attention to other cities, especially ‘second capitals’, regional and provincial centres, ports and border towns. In the imperial context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, major urban planning and improvement projects are analysed as the responses to the perceived backwardness of the region as compared to their counterparts in Western and German-speaking Central Europe, where the latter served as useful models. When addressing various attempts at ‘modernisation’, cities emerge as a group that displayed similar urbanisation patterns and chronology, as well as persistent ethnic and religious diversity. Their twentieth-century experiences were also shaped by the ‘long’ First World War and the accompanying revolts and revolutions. Many became sites of nation-building in the inter-war period, they also shared similar pathways during and after the Second World War, when they became sites of urban programmes of state socialism and post-socialist transformation

The Templars, like other international orders, were an irritant to existing ecclesiastical systems; these tensions had the function of enhancing papal authority.

The alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Second World War has often been seen by Americans as at best a temporary necessity to defeat Nazi Germany. In contrast, this chapter emphasizes how much American and Soviet attitudes changed during the war and how many people in both countries came to believe the wartime collaboration would be a foundation for postwar cooperation. While many American politicians, journalists, and historians have downplayed or even forgotten the vital Soviet role in the crushing of German armies, during the war most Americans were keenly aware of the enormous sacrifices made by the Soviet people. By the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in early 1943, mainstream media in the United States lionized not only the Red Army but even Joseph Stalin. The massive US Lend–Lease aid to the USSR was not crucial to the Soviet survival of German offensives in 1941 and 1942, as some have claimed, but it did significantly enhance the Red Army’s mobility and communications, thereby hastening the joint allied victory in Europe by May 1945.