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Richard Wright left readers with a trove of fictional and nonfictional works about suffering, abuse, and anger in the United States and around the globe. He composed unforgettable images of institutionalized racism, postwar capitalist culture, Cold War neo-imperialism, gender roles and their violent consequences, and the economic and psychological preconditions for personal freedom. He insisted that humans unflinchingly confront and responsibly reconstruct their worlds. He therefore offered not only honest social criticisms but unromantic explorations of political options. The book is organized in five sections. It opens with a series of broad discussions about the content, style, and impact of Wright’s social criticism. Then the book shifts to particular dimensions of and topics in Wright’s writings, such as his interest in postcolonial politics, his approach to gendered forms of oppression, and his creative use of different literary genres to convey his warnings. The anthology closes with discussions of the different political agendas and courses of action that Wright’s thinking prompts—in particular, how his distinctive understanding of psychological life and death fosters opposition to neoslavery, efforts at social connectivity, and experiments in communal refusal. Most of the book’s chapters are original pieces written for this volume. Other entries are excerpts from influential, earlier published works, including four difficult-to-locate writings by Wright on labor solidarity, a miscarriage of justice, the cultural significance Joe Louis, and the political duties of black authors. The contributors include experts in Africana studies, history, literature, philosophy, political science, and psychoanalysis.

When launching the Alliance for Progress in 1961, John F. Kennedy promised that this new development program would transform Latin America into a community of modern, prosperous, and politically stable allies. Yet, when Richard Nixon ended the program ten years later, there was more evidence of broken promises, political coups, and covert military operations than of transformative cooperation. Sandwiched between Kennedy’s and Nixon’s presidencies, Lyndon Johnson’s marked a transformative era in inter-American relations as Johnson and his chief inter-American aide, Thomas C. Mann, struggled to deliver on their predecessors’ bold promises while grappling with the demands of Cold War national security. In this first in-depth study of Johnson, Mann, and Latin America in the 1960s, Thomas Tunstall Allcock provides a nuanced and balanced assessment of two often maligned yet hugely influential policy makers during this vital period. In demonstrating that Johnson and Mann were New Dealers, keen to operate as good neighbors and support Latin American development and regional integration, Tunstall Allcock illuminates the difficulties faced by US modernization efforts. Ranging from domestic challenges from both right and left to a series of military and political crises including riots in the Panama Canal Zone and the threat of “another Cuba” in the Dominican Republic, these difficulties would be handled with wildly varying degrees of success. In Tunstall Allcock’s account, Johnson and Mann emerge as complex, rounded figures struggling to overcome a host of challenges and their own limitations even as the flaws and shortcomings of US policy are laid bare.

This book describes the remarkable life of Paul Rusch, a Kentuckian who went to Japan after the Great Kanto Earthquake. Rusch embarked on an unlikely journey from a YMCA worker to college instructor, missionary, prisoner of war, and military intelligence officer, ultimately founding Seisen-Ryo lodge and the Kiyosato Educational Experiment Project (KEEP) in Kiyosato, Japan. Through KEEP, Rusch introduced new agricultural methods and technology to highland Japan, endeavoring to help feed an impoverished region in the postwar era. Credited with introducing American-style football to Japan, Rusch was also instrumental in recruiting Japanese Americans (Nisei) for military service during World War II. As an army intelligence officer during the Allied Occupation of Japan, Rusch gathered evidence employed to absolve Emperor Hirohito of responsibility for the Pacific War. Rusch used his vast social network in Japan to acquire evidence of a Communist espionage ring in Japan led by the spymaster Richard Sorge, a development that affected the anti-Communist policies of Occupied Japan and McCarthy-era politics in the United States. Rusch’s dreams of evangelizing Japan did not come to fruition, but, despite some failures, Paul Rusch’s memory has endured into the twenty-first century, inspiring Japanese and Americans to foster cultural exchange, environmental sustainability, and international peace.

Using an extensive body of sources, including more than thirty interviews, this biography details and analyzes the life of human rights activist Gloria Richardson, leader of the Cambridge movement in Maryland during the 1960s. Because her radical and uncompromising positions on black liberation were highly influential on the Black Power wave of the black liberation movement, this book depicts Richardson as a progenitor of Black Power who served in its leadership vanguard. This book also moves the geographic borders of Black Power’s roots south to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, detailing the Cambridge movement’s social justice campaign for more jobs and improvements in housing, health care, and education. Activists in Cambridge used the vote and armed self-defense to achieve their goals, and Black Power activists embraced these same strategies and tactics in the mid-1960s, seeing Richardson as a transitional human rights leader and role model. In addition to examining Richardson’s social, economic, and political philosophies—secular humanism, socioeconomic egalitarianism, and gender egalitarianism—and how they impacted her human rights activism, this book analyzes the gendered interpretation of Richardson’s activism and discusses how she was both similar to and different from other national civil rights leaders. Readers also get an insider’s view of her personal life before and after the 1960s, including her marriages, motherhood, and careers and her assessments of recent social justice movements.

This book presents research on the eastern front of World War I, a subject comparatively eclipsed by scholarly study of the western front. Focusing on the first two years of the war, the volume concentrates primarily on elements of the conflict between the Central Powers (specifically Germany and its ally Austria-Hungary) and pre-revolutionary Russia. The book approaches topics of interest through a tripartite structure, addressing the operational conduct of the war, the combatants’ cultural conceptions of themselves and the enemy, and how the conflict has been understood and commemorated in the years since the end of the war. The volume concludes with a chapter that brings together themes studied throughout the book in a discussion of the potential continuities between the German conduct and perception of war from the First World War to the Second.

Every year, people from all over the world visit American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) sites, from Normandy, France, to Busan, South Korea, to Corozal, Panama. At rest in the twenty-six overseas cemeteries are almost 139,000 dead, and memorialized on “Walls of the Missing” are 60,314 fallen soldiers with no known graves. The ABMC administers, operates, and maintains twenty-six permanent American military cemeteries and twenty-seven federal memorials, monuments, and markers. These graves and memorials are among the most beautiful and meticulously maintained shrines in the world. This book is the first study of the ABMC, from its founding in 1923 to the present. It traces the agency’s history, from its early efforts under the leadership of John J. Pershing to establish permanent American burial grounds in Europe after WWI and through the World War II years, where ABMC personnel weathered the storm of another war whose combatants actually passed back and forth through many of the sites. After the war, top-ranking generals, including George Marshall, Jacob L. Devers, and Mark Clark expanded the scope of the commission. The relationship between the monuments and their local hosts constitutes one of the most compelling and least known aspects of the story. Conner’s work powerfully demonstrates that these monuments are living sites that embody the costs of war and aid in understanding the interconnections between memory and history.

This book analyzes what and to whom North Korea provides arms, how it skirts sanctions, and how its activities can be best contained. For many years, North Korean proliferation to both state and nonstate actors has gone largely unnoticed in both policy and academic circles. The book examines how North Korean proliferation presents an international security dilemma that policy makers in many nations should address—and take efforts to contain. It details that, whether it is in the Middle East, Africa, or even as far away as Cuba, North Korea continues to change its tactics, techniques, and procedures in order to bring in money for the regime and support the elite as well as the military and its programs. In addition to contributing to the evidence chain on how North Korea actually disseminates its weapons systems, it also provides clear, concise, and unambiguous policy recommendations that will appeal to those with an interest in national security policy, international studies, US foreign and defense policy, foreign military studies, and Korean security issues.

The book analyzes the influence of National Review, Human Events, and Commentary on the foreign policy ideas of the Republican Party from 1964–1980. During that eighteen-year period, the publications of conservative opinion provided ideological clarification on important national issues that played a fundamental role in reviving the political fortunes of the American Right, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan. Those who wrote for these publications used their positions to offer suggestions to conservative policy makers that called for a more confrontational approach toward the Soviet Union and the nations that sought to compromise the United States’ interests around the world. In recommending a shift in foreign policy, Human Events, National Review, and Commentary assisted right-wing decision makers by contributing arguments to revive what these publications believed was a weak and indecisive United States that had become uncertain about its role in the world following the defeat in Vietnam. By criticizing policies, such as détente, or the aggressiveness of the Third World within the United Nations, opinion makers on the Right offered conservative political leaders information and analysis that called for the return of American power in the face of an ever more confident Soviet Union.

Literary critics and historians have long studied Frederick Douglass’s impact on American literature and history, yet surprisingly few scholars have analyzed his influence on American political thought. Political theorists have focused on the legacies of W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, but editor Neil Roberts argues that it is impossible to understand their work or Afro-modern and American political thought without understanding Frederick Douglass’s contributions. Douglass was a prolific writer and public speaker, and the contributors to this comprehensive volume examine not only his famous autobiographies but also his novels, essays, and speeches. Douglass had a genius for analyzing and articulating basic American ideals such as independence, liberation, individualism, and freedom in the particular context of American slavery. The contributors explore Douglass’s understanding of the self-made American individual and the way in which Douglass expanded the notion of individual potential, arguing that citizens have a responsibility to improve not only their own situations but also their communities’ well-being. The contributors also consider the idea of agency, investigating Douglass’s passionate insistence that every person in a democracy, even a slave, possesses an innate ability to act. Several of the volume’s essays seek to illuminate Douglass’s complex racial politics, deconstructing what seems at first to be his surprising aversion to racial pride, and others critique concepts of masculinity and gender in his oeuvre. The volume concludes with a discussion of Douglass’s contributions to pre- and post–Civil War jurisprudence.

Drawing on newly translated materials and previously overlooked primary sources, Randolph Paul Runyon explores the life and times of the Mentelles in this intriguing dual biography. He illustrates how the couple's origins and education gave them access to the higher strata of Bluegrass society even as their views on religion, politics, and culture kept them from feeling at home in America. They were intimates of statesman Henry Clay, and one of their daughters married into the Clay family, but like other immigrant families in the region, they struggled to survive. Through the years, they often reinvented themselves out of necessity. Their most famous venture was Mentelle's for Young Ladies, an intellectually rigorous school that attracted students from around the region and greatly influenced its most well-known pupil, Mary Todd Lincoln. Runyon reveals the Mentelles as eloquent chroniclers of crucial moments in Ohio and Kentucky history from the turn of the nineteenth century to the eve of the Civil War. They rankled at the baleful influence of conservative religion on the local college, the influence of whiskey on the local population, and the scandal of slavery in the land of liberty. This study sheds new light on a remarkable pair who not only bore witness to key events in early American history but also had a singular impact on the lives of their friends, their students, and members of their community.