In his final years, American society finally punished Bieral for his violence, embracing the principle of the rule of law. His dismissal from the customs office and attempted assassination of Port Surveyor Hans Beattie led to imprisonment. The chapter examines his trial, insanity defense, and eventual pardon, contextualizing his downfall within the rise of civil service reform. Bieral’s family tragedies and his son’s criminal career underscored the generational consequences of a violent life, but he remained a popular figure. His death in a veterans’ home and burial in a national cemetery mark a quiet end to a tumultuous life. The chapter reflects on the cultural legacy of Bieral’s persona and the societal ambivalence toward violent masculinity.

Settling in Boston’s North End, Bieral became a “fancy man” in the city’s brothels, embodying the violent masculinity of urban vice culture. His relationship with Mary Anne McAllister, culminating in her suspicious death, reveals the precarious lives of sex workers and the impunity of their male protectors. The chapter examines Boston’s tolerance for nonlethal violence and the legal leniency afforded to men like Bieral. His involvement in extortion, political intimidation, and brothel management illustrates the blurred lines between public service and criminal enterprise. Bieral’s rise in the underworld reflects the societal valorization of aggression and the limited protections for marginalized women.

This chapter examines the mounting unease regarding the project of public education. By the mid-1960s, technocratic, Afrocentric, and Marxist critiques articulated a growing sense of worldwide educational crisis. These critiques presented differently in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, but in both countries popular frustrations were palpable. In response, both states attempted to reform public schooling: by introducing manual training in Ghanaian middle schools and television sets in Ivorian primary schools. Both reforms failed spectacularly, ultimately confirming the state’s abdication of its promise that education would lead to a better future for all. Public education systems crumbled along with public faith in the state, creating space for the privatization of education. The erosion of the anticolonial development ideology helped pave the way for neoliberalism to take root.

China had a long tradition of religiously inspired rebellion, and this chapter explores the ways in which folk religion fed into different forms of resistance in the Mao era. Popular protest in the Mao era was greater than has been assumed, but it was socio-economic and small-scale in characters, which did not prevent participants from believing that their protests had the blessing of the gods. It begins by looking at very low-level forms of resistance such as jokes as a way of lampooning authority; it goes on to explore the efforts of spirit mediums and others to stand up to authority in defence of folk religion, especially following the famine (1959–61) when people blamed disaster on the fact that they had denied the change to make sacrifices to the gods. Planned, organized rebellion was rare and was closely tied to the remnants of the redemptive religious societies. The chapter ends by looking at attempts by ordinary people to make themselves emperors and at millenarian risings, notably the Catholic rebellion in the Taiyuan region in 1965.

This chapter explores Bieral’s ascent in Boston’s sporting world, particularly in boxing and gambling. As a pugilist and promoter, he gained notoriety and respect among working-class men, leveraging his physical prowess and entrepreneurial acumen. The narrative situates prizefighting within a broader culture of honor and individualism, where violence served as both entertainment and social currency. Bieral’s transition from fighter to promoter and casino operator marks his evolution into a figure of influence. The chapter underscores the role of sport in legitimizing urban masculinity and the economic structures that sustained vice industries, revealing how athletic fame often overlapped with criminality.

From the Socialist Education Movement onwards, folk religion specialists – now classed as ‘superstition professionals’ (akin to ‘religious professionals’) -- were targeted for re-education. Spirit mediums were singled out because of their number and their central role in healing. This was the prelude to the Four Olds Campaign inaugurated by the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when religious sites were destroyed and religious specialists came under attack from Red Guards, despite the fact that ‘religion’ was never named as one of the ‘four olds’. Two features of Cultural Revolution politics are explored: the use of iconoclasm – especially in relation to the Confucius Temple in Qufu; and the attempt to ‘revolutionize the environment’, which entailed renaming streets, shops, and consumer items, and painting buildings red. It ends with the fitful Campaign to Criticize Confucius and Lin Biao (1973–6), which engaged the rural and urban populace in a polemical critique of some simple Confucian texts.

This chapter traces the early life of Louis Bieral, born in 1814 in Valparaíso, Chile, amid revolutionary upheaval. It explores his ambiguous racial and familial origins and the violent political culture of post-independence Chile, which shaped his understanding of masculinity and authority. Bieral’s exposure to maritime life and urban vice in Valparaíso foreshadowed his later immersion in New York’s underworld. His alleged kidnapping by a whaling captain and subsequent servitude in Brooklyn illustrate the porous boundaries between freedom and coercion in antebellum America. The chapter situates Bieral’s formative years within broader themes of race, labor, and violence, emphasizing the social structures that normalized physical domination and racial ambiguity.

Moving to California during the Gold Rush, Bieral found himself in a frontier society defined by lawlessness, racial tension, and economic ambition. The chapter examines his possible involvement in violent incidents and his association with notorious figures in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. Bieral’s return to Boston and legal name change reflected his desire for reinvention and racial reclassification amid rising nativism and the Fugitive Slave Act. His story illustrates the fluidity of identity and the strategic use of whiteness in navigating legal and social hierarchies. California’s chaotic environment provides an extreme example of a society run by bullies in antebellum America.