This chapter charts the nature of political power from the earliest Merovingian kings to the unification of the kingdoms under Chlothar II in 613. The period witnessed conquest and civil war, as competition for power between kings, queens, and their families transformed late Roman political structures into more fluid and responsive modes of government. It covers the key reigns of Childeric I and Clovis for establishing the power of the Merovingian dynasty through a mixture of war, legend-building, and performance. It also examines how competition between kings in subsequent generations affected how the family was defined, especially under the influence of queens Brunhild and Fredegund.

This chapter covers Haitian periodical culture in early nineteenth-century Haiti (1804–1843) and the spirited, fraught process of national literary formation under Henry Christophe, Alexandre Pétion, and Jean-Pierre Boyer. It considers early periodicals and their engagement in political combat and partisan confrontation, within Haiti and in the broader Atlantic world. Early Haitian writers refuted European racial pseudoscience that sustained slavery and engaged in internal polemics on the nature of Haiti’s independence; the best form of governance for the nation’s survival; and the meaning of freedom, civilization, and literature. The chapter argues that these aspects of early periodical culture were central to the development of Haitian literature. It traces the development of an idea of Haitian national literature in that culture. Whereas earlier newspapers presented ‘literature’ as the inclusion of occasional verse and creative poetic production in their pages, newspapers, magazines and eventually specialized journals began to theorize the existence of a national Haitian literature national literary culture—an idea that would become fully realized by the late 1830s.

The sixth chapter covers the origins of Roman historiography. As usual, they are in Greece, and as usual the Romans do something rather different with their model. From its origins in Cato down to what many considered its perfect form in Livy, the Romans were deeply interested in their own pasts. But history-writing was not as it is in the modern world: the ancient historian did little of what we would consider research. Here again, therefore, literary elements were to the fore: choosing the right kind of story to tell and telling it in the right way were the important things. Discussions of Ennius, Cato, Caesar, Sallust, Asinius Pollio, and Livy.

The eighth chapter begins with the question of why monumental epic came to be written again after a period of neglect; it suggests that the epyllion provided a way forward. After a history of republican epics after Ennius, Vergil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses form the primary subjects of this chapter. Coverage focuses on what was innovative about them, language, plot, historical contexts, and style, and compares them to one another.

The ninth chapter finishes what was started in the fourth, covering personal poetry of the Augustan period. It begins with Vergil’s Eclogues, first explaining why.The majority of the chapter focuses on the varied works of Horace, his long career, and his relationship with power. It ends with Ovid’s exile poetry, which is the last literature of the republic.

Starting in 1990, the lethal combination of three factors led to genocide: political transition, civil war and bipolar ethnicity. In the second half of 1990, the start of the democratisation process coincided with an attack by the RPF, the political–military organisation of the Tutsi refugees. Despite the signing of a peace accord in 1993, the civil war resumed in 1994 and led to the RPF's victory. From April to July, the Tutsi were the victims of a genocide orchestrated by Hutu hardliners.

Central America was a “hot spot” in the Cold War, constituting a strategic zone for US campaigns against communism from the 1960s to the 1980s. During the same period, the region was also a “hot spot” due to the critical nutritional situation of its poorest populations. Informed by the idea of a “protein gap,” international organizations and scientific institutions carried out field investigations and nutritional surveys to identify dietary deficiencies, their causes, and possible solutions. This chapter explores the role that bean varietal improvement played in this situation of war and nutritional crisis, and the political and social conditions under which bean research took shape. It describes the research programs that the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) promoted in Latin America through the 1980s and Central American countries’ participation in these. It reviews the bean program established by CIAT in Latin America and Africa and a regional program created specifically for Central America and the Caribbean. It then interprets the evolution of these programs in the context of civil war and economic crisis in Central America between 1970 and 1990.

What are the politics of choosing specific frames? This chapter is anchored on this question and finds a marked difference between frames employed at the field level and those by subfields in each country. It finds, for example, that the Kenyan national subfield’s favored frame resembled those selected by fields in the Global North. Concomitantly, it finds an ambivalence in using the genocide frame to talk about the atrocities in Darfur, arguing that this ambivalence is due to perceptions of how the frame would affect peace negotiations and the posture taken by transnational organizations such as the ICC, UN, and AU.

Chapter One examines Rogers’ youth in the Cherokee Territory of Oklahoma. It stresses his upbringing as the scion of a prominent Cherokee family and the ongoing tension with his father over the boy’s dislike of schooling and reluctance to pursue a traditional career as a rancher/businessman. Young Rogers cherished the free life of the cowboy riding the range. The chapter also explores Rogers’ "double consciousness" as an American Indian outsider who expressed pride in his lineage and culture, sought to succeed in white America, but betrayed a subtle resentment about the need to do so.

The Introduction lays out the theoretical and political stakes of the book. It shows how abolitionist white radicals saw enslavement as a diseased part of the national body that had to be lopped off. Through an exploration of political speeches, cartoons, song-sheets, sermons, fiction, and poetry, the author shows how the amputated bodies of Civil War veterans represented the possibility of a new kind of nation that had Black citizenship at its core.

Chapter 2 explores accounts by Civil War nurses and surgeons – first-person nonfiction, lightly fictionalized narrative, sensationalized memoir, and fiction. The central texts in this chapter are Walt Whitman’s Memoranda after the War, Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, John Brinton’s Personal Memoirs, Susie King Taylor’s Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, and S. Weir Mitchell’s “The Case of George Dedlow.” These narrators represent amputation in different ways, especially the scene of amputation itself, the image of a basket or trough of dismembered limbs, and amputee reflections on the relationship between their remaining bodies and their absent limbs. However, for all the narrators in these texts, amputation is part of a meditation on the meanings of intact and amputated bodies, and their role in making sense of the Civil War. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Army Medical Museum, in which amputated limbs were catalogued, stored, and displayed as examples of the damage done by gunshots and shells. This dovetails with a reading of George Dedlow, in which the protagonist’s legs, stored in alcohol at the Museum, return to him briefly during a séance, absurdly marrying hopes for bodily resurrection with spiritualism’s belief in a humanized heaven.

After Sierra Leone’s civil war, President Kabbah oversaw creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission despite his government’s previously strong preference for amnesty, seen as a precondition to rebels’ non-relapse into violence, just before the intervention of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. An unexpected candidate for concealing – one would expect it to recruit, as it normally does – the country successfully concealed a de facto, targeted amnesty for most combatants. Confusion and rumours surrounding the TRC and its relationship to the SCSL limited the amount of truth that would be told, thereby also limiting the information available to the SCSL, leaving it less able to indict. The British, who set the tone for other European donors, had strong incentives to overlook whatever evidence of this amnesty did rise to the surface. If they challenged the Kabbah government on this point, the result could be state collapse and the British might be called upon to intervene in addition to gaining a reputation as a global bully. Because Sierra Leone’s dissembling and its success in doing so both derive from the country’s extreme fragility, the case draws particular attention to the problems of framing its “invitation” of the SCSL as truly consensual.

The Conclusion first summarizes the study’s findings. It then presents the study’s policy implications that might help inform local actors’ decisions on interventions related to police–citizen cooperation in communities with criminal groups. Additional research questions are also proposed. In particular, how the study’s findings might relate to contexts experiencing political violence such as civil war or insurgency remains an avenue for future research. The final section highlights that populations are projected to grow fastest in countries with strong criminal groups and weak state institutions for fighting those groups. This trend increases the urgency to understand vacuums of justice and how they might be filled.

In 1830, a group of forty officers and men from the recently deposed Federalist government of the province of Mendoza, in the Argentine Confederation, were massacred by their erstwhile Indigenous allies. The Federalists had sought asylum with Creole Loyalists to the Spanish Crown – exiled from southern Chile – who had facilitated the Federalist alliance with Indigenous groups. The massacre occurred at Chacay, in the south of present-day Mendoza, in what was then an Indigenous frontier zone. Though a relatively unimportant battle, it nonetheless highlights certain key dynamics of the complex political situation of post-independence South America. As the wars of independence spilled over into civil wars in Chile and the Río de la Plata, fluctuating alliances of émigrés and Indigenous groups continued to pose a cross-border threat to the newly independent political authorities. This chapter argues that exile played an important role in the process of border formation and the establishment of republican sovereignty in the region.

Andrew Jackson rejected a strong national government as well as national investments such as in roadways as he sought to bring power to the people. This message was popular among the relatively prosperous farmers, small merchants, and others, who did recognize the role of government in creating this relative equality. Despite his anti-government sentiments, Jackson and his successors continued existing and started new government programs to expand the economy. Abraham Lincoln, elected by anti-slavery voters, is best known for fighting the Civil War and eliminating slavery, but he also returned the federal government to more visible efforts to promote economic development and in the process committed the country to building a middle class. It was Lincoln’s idea that all Americans should have a fair chance in life. A key part of this program was the expansion of public education.