In 1945, actions which have been understood as strikes against wartime inflation occurred across colonized Africa: this essay identifies a deeper motivation in the events which happened in the Uganda Protectorate in early 1945. An understanding that people had a moral responsibility to act, and leaders had a moral responsibility to see them, to listen, and to respond led from a mobilization of workers on town streets, to efforts to see wrongful deaths acknowledged, to gatherings in the courtyard of the Buganda king in which he was almost overthrown. In each of the three stages of the protest, Ugandans of different ethnicities asserted an ethic of mutual obligation which acknowledged no boundary between the political and the economic, spoke to authority with an expectation that they would be heard, and drew on enduring knowledge of politics as well as a range of new ideas to solve the problems they confronted.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, fans assembled at stadiums and arenas across the country to witness a recurring spectacular event. They headed toward the local ballpark or arena, not to watch their favorite teams and entertainers perform inside, but rather to witness the implosion of the facilities themselves. As the United States was in the midst of its latest stadium construction boom, a new community ritual took shape: the ceremonial demolition of stadiums that were built in the 1960s and 1970s. Facilities that were once celebrated for their modern designs and conveniences were deemed ugly and obsolete seemingly overnight. Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, Market Square Arena in Indianapolis, among dozens of other professional stadiums, were demolished in this spectacular fashion (Figure 1). Explosives were strategically placed throughout the abandoned facilities, and fans gathered yards away to watch the buildings burst into gigantic clouds of dust and smoke, the environmental consequences of sending pollutants into the air notwithstanding. Television networks covered the detonations while fans donned team colors, cheered, and shed tears as their beloved community gathering places were blown into oblivion.

On a winter's night in 1968, in a yellow sedan barreling down a dark New Hampshire highway, Richard M. Nixon talked football with Hunter S. Thompson. Nixon would soon win the state's Republican primary—an important kickoff for his deliberate, disciplined campaign. Thompson was an unlikely choice for an intimate audience with the buttoned-down candidate. The outlaw writer in shabby jeans, a chronicler of hippies and Hell's Angels, cast Nixon as a “foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad.”1

First, I want to thank Modern American History co-editors Sarah Snyder and Darren Dochuk for selecting my book for this roundtable and assembling such an incredible group of scholars to read and comment on it. I drew heavily on these readers’ previous works when writing The Black Tax and held up their books as models of the kind of engaging and impactful historical scholarship that I aspired to achieve. Which makes their positive reactions to my book all the more gratifying, even as it makes my job here a bit harder. I have no complaints to respond to, no arguments to defend, no decisions or only a few omissions to justify or explain.

Memorial Day 2023 was a significant moment in twenty-first-century U.S. military history. Although U.S. service members remained deployed around the world and Operation Inherent Resolve continues to target the Islamic State (in April 2023, the U.S. military and its partners executed thirty-five missions against ISIS in Iraq and Syria alone), this year's celebrations came six weeks after the U.S. Senate repealed the two-decade-old Authorization for the Use of Military Force that had made possible the 2003 invasion of Iraq.1 It was also only the second Memorial Day since U.S. troops left Afghanistan, abruptly and somewhat disastrously, in August 2021. As a result, the holiday was arguably the first in which the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could be understood as having transitioned from “current events” to events whose legacies Americans were beginning to imagine and define.

It is an honor and pleasure to have my essay discussed by such accomplished and thoughtful colleagues, from whom I continue to learn so much. In setting out to respond to their reflections, I would like to begin by stressing my original essay's tremendous debt to the work of scholars, intellectuals, and political actors who have approached histories of U.S. power in the world from a critical stance, as the piece's long footnotes—about which I have received much good-natured ribbing—were crafted to highlight. Despite occasional efforts to deny or minimize this rich, complicated intellectual history, there is a vibrant, long-standing conversation here—a conversation that is, in fact, my essay's main subject and theme, and without which it simply could not exist.

This article considers the role of national spaces in the creation of interwar-era internationalism. Specifically, it explores how the future editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, the mouthpiece of what would become the American Foreign Relations Establishment, found his way to internationalism not in the corridors of Versailles at the Paris Peace Conference, but rather through treading through the corners of the newly made Yugoslavia. During the 1920s and 1930s, internationally minded thinkers from across the political spectrum shared at least one commonality: they rooted their dreams for an international world in particular, and expressly national, spaces. This article explores how and why international thinkers became invested in foreign national movements during the interwar, suggesting that to some, these new states both represented and contributed to an idealized vision of an international world that could promote unity while protecting particularities.

In contexts of institutional crisis, conflicts arise in which different pressure groups try to maximize their influence, seeking to adjust a political reality in line with their own interest. This article analyzes the changes in the attitudes of economic elites regarding the process of drafting of a new Constitution in Chile. Based on the literature on the political culture of entrepreneurs, the research hypothesis posed in this study suggests the existence of a widespread conservative attitude within this social group regarding a change in institutional rules. This mainly relates to the perception that a new Constitution in Chile could threaten its predominant place in the distribution of economic and political power. The results obtained after analyzing in-depth interviews with presidents or vice presidents of the main business organizations in the country show changing positions throughout the different stages of the constituent process. Even though some attitudinal changes towards an adaptation become visible, what ultimately prevails is an unmitigated rejection of the constituent process. These findings clearly suggest a return to the initial stances of most entrepreneurs, something that also happened in the elite examined as well as in the rest of Chilean society. Thus, one can speak about a sort of “boomerang effect”: the attitudes of rejection have once again dominated the space of discursive expression where the pressure exerted by public opinion seemed to pave the way for a certain reformism or a transforming reaction. This evidence confirms a disconnection found in the literature which reveals the dynamic nature of short-term attitudes linked to each specific situation, albeit with more stable values and positions specific to the political culture which exist on a more persistent basis.

Many studies have been conducted on the link between Confucianism and democratic values in East Asia, but they have failed to account for the complex character of Confucianism and the possible impact of political systems. This study re-measures Confucian values into four dimensions—authoritarianism, familialism, collectivism, and harmoniousness—based on data from the fourth wave of the Asian Barometer survey. It then uses a multi-layer linear regression model to examine the relationship between the Confucian cultural values and the democratic values held by people in six East Asian societies at both the macro and micro levels. The findings demonstrate an asymmetrical pattern in the relationship between the various dimensions of Confucian cultural values and the democratic values of East Asia, collectivist values do not affect democratic values, while familial and authoritarian values have a significant and negative correlation with democratic values. Harmonious values have a significant and positive correlation with democratic values. In addition, there is a significant positive correlation between democratic institutions and the democratic values, and the relationship between the values of harmoniousness and collectivism and democratic values varies across countries with different political systems. This offers insightful material for reflection as we reconsider the connection between Confucianism and democracy in East Asia.

The year 2023 marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It—a bestselling book that captured the imagination of many of Hofstadter's fellow Americans in the early postwar period and, at the same time, defined the terms of argument for much of academic history for the next generation.1 It was also the book my high school teacher, Mr. Backfish, assigned in eleventh-grade Advanced Placement (AP) American History that helped transform me into a historian. So different was it from the dry, conventional textbook in both its riveting, sometimes acerbic prose and its unsentimental view of venerated figures in the American past. I still have my original copy (Figure 1).

The article aims to sketch out the main features of the political culture of the Radical Party (PR). This political culture is paradigmatic of a much broader phenomenon that has affected the politics of Western democracies since the 1970s: the critique of traditional parties in the name of a party model formed by spontaneous groupings of society; the extreme emphasis placed on individual choices in political action, and the programmatic tracing of the latter back to the former; and the call for a less ‘mediated’ relationship between citizens and institutions. Yet, this culture contained certain ingredients that would distance it from the populist forms of the twenty-first century. After grafting anti-authoritarianism onto its liberal matrix the PR identified the promotion of civil rights as the goal and battle for the transformation of the relationship between politics and the citizen. This transformation emphasised the sphere of individual freedom and the liberty to participate in community decisions, and thus implied a transformation of the ways and means of doing politics. In the late 1970s, the PR deepened its critique of parties and partitocracy and, at the same time, emphasised a supranational view of politics, eventually becoming a ‘transnational transparty’ party in 1989.

If the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, what are we to make of the recent flurry of popular histories about foreign correspondents? In 2021, with You Don't Belong Here, Elizabeth Becker told us “How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War” in Vietnam, and Judith Mackrell gave us the stories of “Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II” in The Correspondents.1 The year before, Nancy Cott, the pioneering scholar of U.S. gender history, explored the intertwined biographies of interwar journalists Dorothy Thompson, Vincent Sheean, Rayna Raphaelson, and John Gunther in Fighting Words.2 And then, in 2022, Deborah Cohen, an acclaimed historian of British and European cultural politics, subbed the relatively obscure Raphaelson out of Cott's quartet and added in H. R. Knickerbocker, the Pulitzer Prize–winning European correspondent in Last Call at the Hotel Imperial.3 (Cohen also elevates the role of Frances Gunther, John's wife, who suffered from crippling writer's block but was perhaps the most interesting thinker of the bunch.) When two leading, accomplished historians at the height of their games write essentially the same book, you know that something is in the air. So what era's eclipse are these works marking?

This article traces the spread of a norm of confidentiality within elite political culture during the Warring States, Qin, and Western Han periods. Instead of an emphasis on secrecy within military and administrative contexts, it explores discussions of “leaking” (xie 泄/洩 or lou 漏) and characterizations of “confidentiality” (zhou 周 and mi 密) in idealized representations of political action. While Warring States texts drew upon a medical language of qi circulation to fashion a model of a perfectly leakproof ruler, by Western Han attention had shifted from rulers to officials. This valorization of official confidentiality was connected to institutional developments, especially proscriptions against leaking from privileged spaces at the imperial court, visible in sources from the late Western Han. In this final period there arose a celebrated norm of circumspection, shared by rulers and officials alike, that in theory would allow all parties to evade disaster.

Histories of school prayer have typically concluded in the late 1980s, when court rulings and stalled legislation conclusively barred the door on the return of state-sponsored prayer to public schools. Through an analysis of See You at the Pole, a nationwide initiative formed in 1990 that mobilized millions of American students to gather annually to pray at their school flagpoles, this article argues that the 1990s witnessed not the waning of religion in public schools, but rather its revival in “student-initiated” forms. By tracing the pivot from debates over state sponsorship of religion to debates over students’ rights of free expression, this article establishes the 1990s as a major turning point in legal, political, and religious histories of school prayer. Further, this study of See You at the Pole illuminates how bipartisan, pluralist legitimating logics that crystallized in the 1990s underlie the phenomenon that scholars have recently termed “Christian nationalism.”