Today we take for granted that when a candidate for President wins the election he will run for reelection in four years. If they win reelection, a new president will be sworn in at the end of the current President’s second term. However, for most of American history, until the ratification of the Twenty Second Amendment in 1951, this cycle of presidents serving for at most two terms was governed by tradition and norms, rather than law. In this section we explore the historical debate on presidential term limits, the long-standing tradition of two-term presidents, the passage of the Twenty Second Amendment, and ongoing attempts to repeal or modify the Amendment.

Who were the women of Meerut, said to have turned a nonviolent military mutiny – a refusal to load and fire a weapon – into a violent revolt that nearly toppled the British Raj? Were they prostitutes, or were they wives? There is much in the book to suggest the latter, but (ironically) that same evidence also suggests the simultaneous possibility of the former. This paradoxical formulation requires a more nuanced understanding of the nature of north Indian marriage in mid-century. A more fundamental question is: Did the women of Meerut exist? Or were they the product of overheated imaginations casting about for exculpation – on both sides of the racial divide? This necessitates a further examination of the two sources for the story of the Meerut women, or rather the question of their independent narrative origin. While the evidence militates in favor of their historicity, gender humiliation was already in the air: Even if they did not exist, they would be invented. They matter not simply because they enable us to add women to the mix of history (and stir, as the saying goes), but because they allow us to perceive something fundamental about the nature of history itself.

The introduction sets up the book’s exploration of the complex relationship between contemporary North American fiction and self-help culture over the past 25 years, arguing that recent writers stage encounters between diverse self-help practices to interrogate changing conceptions of authorship, selfhood, and society. Specifically, I position literary engagements with self-help as a way for writers to negotiate anxieties around individual, social, and writerly agency in a moment when traditional sovereign accounts of selfhood are under pressure from poststructuralist critiques of subjecthood and the shaping forces of systemic power, new technologies, and planetary crisis. I begin with an analysis of Deb Olin Unferth’s graphic novel, I, Parrot, then provide context on self-help in America, from long-standing advice, conduct, and wisdom traditions to today’s diversified, commercialized landscape of guidance literature and practices across the three central themes of the book: authority and public address, time management and productivity, and body and brain improvement. I argue that fiction writers can capture the nuanced sociopolitical paradoxes and multiplicities within self-help culture by bringing critical and creative energies to bear on deconstructing and reimaging its tropes and practices.

Chapter 4 explores the central role of Huguenot ministers in maintaining and nurturing this confessional network as part of an international collaboration with the Calvinist church, noble leaders, scholars and other agents. Considers the refugee experience and establishment of stranger churches abroad, the navigation of theological differences and the part played by cooperation and conflict, especially in the French church in London. Focuses on connections to cardinal Châtillon and Regnard/Changy as well as other ministers involved in, and identified through, the correspondence, such as Pierre Loiseleur de Villiers. In particular, establishes the pragmatic day-to-day challenges that Huguenot ministers faced in serving their communities at home and abroad alongside bonds of faith and amity and the handling of disagreements. The varied experience and careers of the ministers are also compared and contrasted, as are the roles of other agents, particularly scholars and diplomats. Diplomacy and the negotiation of alliances were vital to the upholding of the Protestant and Catholic causes as was the identification of plotting by the other side.

As is well known, the 1857 mutiny of Indian soldiers in the Company Army – collectively known as sepoys – was prompted by the proposed introduction of a new weapon for general use, a rifled musket known as the Pattern 1853 Enfield. This weapon required a new kind of greased cartridge, the loading of which entailed a new “firing” drill. Controversies over this new cartridge and drill prompted discontent among the “native” soldiery, which ultimately led to the collective decision to refuse to touch the offending cartridge and, naturally, load the weapon – a refusal that constituted the “mutiny” phase of 1857. This chapter begins with a reexamination of this drill and the circuitous, controversial decision to order eighty-five elite “skirmishers” of the Bengal 3rd Light Cavalry to perform it in late April. Their refusal to obey that order led to their court-martial for mutiny and imprisonment. The violent revolt began two weeks later, but not in the cantonment proper. Rather, it began in a hybrid space of commerce, leisure, and recreation on the edge of the cantonment known as the “sadr” (main) bazaar. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to a description of the sadr bazaar and its denizens.

There are different types of investigations of the President: congressional investigations, federal criminal investigations, state criminal investigations, civil suits in state courts, and if the United States were to submit to jurisdiction, potentially even proceedings before international tribunals. The discussion in the preceding chapters focused on impeachment and criminal prosecution. But first must come an investigation. Some investigations have neither impeachment nor prosecution in mind, at least at the outset. Yet investigations of all types can be an effective check on presidential power.

Chapter 6 examines another group of ‘returnees’ in Heyang: young entrepreneurs with various backgrounds of urban socialization. They represent a generation of youth caught in the crosshairs of institutionalized competition, an achievement-complex, mounting youth unemployment, and a pervasive experience of ‘involution.’ Through the social category of fanxiangqingnian, “return youth,” this chapter examines how xiangchou becomes a mobilizing discourse that can encourage return from the standpoint of individual choice and desire, and how it helps reshape the overall discourse surrounding the countryside as both a place and ‘lifestyle’ considered as desirable to return to. Xiangchou becomes a language of ‘escape’ and a materialized reality where one can seemingly ‘escape to’. However, the experience of the young entrepreneurs in Heyang also underscore the complexities of this ‘return’ in the forms of the limitations, challenges, and dilemmas that they encounter in the village.

Organ transplantation offers patients greater longevity and quality of life. The allocation of scarce deceased-donor organs involves high stakes for patients, transplant centers, and Medicare. The US Congress delegated authority for the development of allocation rules to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN), which engages stakeholders in the process. In 2018, the OPTN committed to replacing categorical allocation rules with continuous distribution, a new framework that sought to eliminate inefficiencies and inequities at categorical boundaries. The transparency of the OPTN provides an opportunity to observe this attempt to implement a consequential planned organizational change. The process reveals the extent to which the stakeholder rulemaking of the OPTN, an example of constructed collaboration, can implement radical as well as incremental change. More generally, it offers insight into the roles of expertise and values in high-stakes and complex organizational decision-making.

Throughout this book we note frequent references to the “Executive Branch.” However, from the text of Article II of the Constitution, which outlines the powers of the Executive Branch, it is unclear who composes the branch. Within Article II, there are two clearly enumerated members of the Executive Branch: the President and the Vice President. Article II, Section 2 references the existence of principal officers who lead executive departments, but it does not define what executive departments should exist.