One endearing image of the Thai-American Cold War diplomacy features an image of two ‘kings’ – Bhumibol Adulyadej, the king of Thailand, and Elvis Presley, the king of rock and roll, on the set of the movie musical G.I. Blues. The meeting took place during King Bhumibol’s state visit to the United States in 1960. His stopover in California was often described as an extended family holiday, therefore being denied its significance as an ingenious diplomatic spectacle. It was this image of the two kings inside the soundstage of Paramount Studios that helped to secure Thailand’s diplomatic allegiance and the future of its monarchy. This chapter traces historical accounts and different perspectives presented in the visual documents of the royal tour of the United States. It focuses on an image captured by a Hollywood photographer, Nat Dallinger, to illustrate how the Thai-US post-war diplomatic event relied on the Hollywood’s ‘dream machine’ to establish itself as an epicentre of goodwill, prosperity, and power. The chapter also proposes that the 1960 diplomatic event, despite its internationalist outlook, was meant for the Thai audience, and its image of diplomacy formulated a ‘mirror stage’ of the Thailand’s post–Second World War identity.

The major European adversaries who fought World War I began by following offensive plans designed to win victory quickly, but all these failed. The war became one of grinding attrition, and by 1918, the European adversaries were exhausted. That year, the desperate Germans launched one last offensive to win the war on the Western Front, but it stalled. After the Allies drove the Germans back, fighting ended with the Armistice of November 11. This armistice was a German surrender in all but name. It disarmed German forces, demanded immediate withdrawal from all conquered territory, and imposed an Allied occupation of Germany west of the Rhine. The Treaty of Versailles elaborated the details, imposing staggering war reparations and German acceptance of guilt for the war itself. Much of the German population believed that German forces had not been defeated in battle, instead blaming German liberal politicians and Jews for undermining the war effort. This misconception contributed to the onset of World War II. World War I was the first war in which belligerents adhered to the Hague Conventions concerning the treatment of prisoners of war. There were abuses, but nothing like those that occurred in World War II.

The third chapter builds on an increase in Arabic manuscript circulation from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries in the Deccan to demonstrate how Arabic philology became a significant intellectual pursuit for a growing learned community. My research on manuscript notes traces textual practices and how they changed over time, and how this contributed to a localisation of Arabic learning across the multilingual landscape of the subcontinent. It zooms in on scholar-scribes, copyist-scribes, and owners of manuscripts. It highlights ‘definitive texts’ in the fields of Arabic grammar, rhetoric, and lexicography and what we know about their circulation across the Deccan and beyond based on two manuscript collections from Hyderabad, and the Bijapur collection. Book exchanges and the emergence of ‘commonplace notebooks’ as a multi-layered intertextual product of intellectual engagements with a scholarly text make plain the social and cultural dynamisms of this field of learning. The formation of cultural tastes in Arabic philology, new studying enactments of manuscripts, and a socially more diverse community shaped the significances of reading and writing Arabic in South Asia.

When remembering America’s first ladies, there is a general assumption that these women were the wives of the presidents. This is not surprising since, with the exception of James Buchanan, all the presidents have been married men. However, several presidents were widowers or husbands of women who could not assume their duties. These men had to rely on women who were neither their wives nor their companions as stand-in first ladies with the primary duty of entertaining visitors to the White House. They included daughters Martha “Patsy” Jefferson Randolph, Martha Johnson Patterson, and Margaret Woodrow Wilson; nieces Emily Tennessee Donelson and Harriet Lane Johnston; daughters-in-law Angelica Singleton Van Buren and Priscilla Cooper Tyler; and sisters Mary Arthur McElroy and Rose Cleveland. They were real persons who each brought a unique experience to their work, which, unlike the service of their more famous married counterparts, has long been forgotten.

Diplomatic images are not mere visual archives of past encounters; they are complicit in how the past is framed, memorialized, and reproduced in the service of contemporary raison d’état. This chapter is about one such instance of complicity. It tracks the afterlife of an image of five ministers from Cold War Southeast Asia – all male, in Western business suits, and bespectacled – signing the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) into existence in Bangkok in 1967. More than any other, this image has been reproduced and disseminated to symbolize ASEAN: from book covers and commemorative stamps to television reports and even a commissioned painting. This image gives contemporary ASEAN a satisfying origin myth – of five ‘founding fathers’ forging diplomatic reconciliation in the aftermath of militarized inter-state conflict in a region marked as exceptionally diverse along racial, religious, cultural, and linguistic registers. But the image – and the props and performance it captures – contains within it the seeds of an alternative reading that puts this origin myth to lie. The chapter argues that far from embodying such exceptional and heroic diversity, the image tells us what was profoundly (and problematically) similar among these diplomatic performers than what the contemporary discourse on ASEAN reveals.

“Trendsetter” first ladies show new ways of modeling femininity in a given era, often through attention to the visual. Because women in public long have been expected to be seen and not heard, fashion and image historically have provided a way of communicating nonverbally. Thus, first ladies who were considered trendsetters typically circulated new “looks” or images to a given public, drawing from the culture in which they operated to influence norms around femininity, beauty, and celebrity. This chapter assesses seven first ladies for their visual influence. Dolley Madison (1809-1817), Julia Tyler (1844-1845), and Frances Cleveland (1886-89, 1893-97) were the most notable of the nineteenth-century first ladies who found themselves positioned as style icons. Following in their footsteps were Mamie Eisenhower (1952-1960), Jacqueline Kennedy (1960-1963), Nancy Reagan (1980-1988), and Michelle Obama (2008-2016), who each leveraged the trendsetter role during their time in the White House.

Despite being unelected and unappointed, first ladies of the United States have served as notable political assets and liabilities before, during, and after their time in the White House. This chapter uses a variety of examples to illustrate the positive and negative impacts of first ladies as they have exerted their influence domestically and internationally, sometimes in alignment with and other times in opposition to their husband’s public agenda. These pages delineate the ways these women have been strategically deployed as emissaries for their husbands and as advocates for party policies, initiatives, and candidates up and down the ballot, as well as how they have instigated and mitigated scandals. The amorphous and often contradictory criteria for being an effective first lady expose every presidential spouse to criticism that is not always reasonable given the nebulous nature of the position.

The fourth chapter is a micro-study that explores in depth the life story of one scholar on the move from Egypt to the Deccan. Through the fifteenth-century transoceanic pursuits of the Egyptian scholar Muhammad al-Damāmīnī, it argues that migrating scholars employed their textual productions to become professionally mobile, link patronage networks, and communicate with changing audiences. Al-Damāmīnī’s grammar commentaries provide a textual trail that documents how he negotiated his move from Cairo, via Mecca, Zabid (Yemen), Cambay and Nahrwala (Gujarat) to Gulbarga (Deccan), and how he interacted with sultans, scholars, and readers along the way. He employed different narrative strategies to engage with changing learned audiences. Such learned encounters were crucial for processes of transmission, but also highlight cases of knowledge formation which catered to a new readership.

This chapter discusses the role of Imelda Marcos in the diplomatic practice and foreign policy of the government of Ferdinand Marcos. At the outset, Imelda is cast not only as a First Lady but as a vital colleague and co-operator in running the affairs of the Philippine state from the 1960s through the 1980s, the other half of the so-called conjugal dictatorship. At one point in time, she was simultaneously governor of Metro Manila, Minister of Human Settlements, member of the Interim Parliament, and Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinary. This being said, her status as First Lady and Patroness of the Arts is not dismissed as mere tangent or appendage; it was as First Lady that Imelda became a compelling presence in the political theatre. The combination of her beauty and her charisma formed a particular aesthetic that inevitably evolved into a policy of culture and democracy so central in the formation of a post-independence nation-state in Southeast Asia.

In 235 years, only about two dozen women have experienced the role of “mourner in chief” as current or former first ladies grieving a presidential husband. This chapter examines the performances of six of these women in different historical contexts and under very different circumstances: Martha Washington, Mary Lincoln, Lucretia Garfield, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Nancy Reagan. This analysis considers first ladies’ performances of mourning during presidents’ illness or assassination; funerals and memorial services; and the expanse of time for which they survived their husbands. Through these case studies, the authors consider how a first lady’s mourning can shape her husband’s legacy, and what it can teach us about how Americans grieve.