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Through the contextualized biography of a previously unknown African American immigrant to Africa, this book illuminates slavery and freedom in multiple parts of the nineteenth century Atlantic world. A decade before the American Civil War, James Churchwill Vaughan (1828-93) set out to fulfill his formerly enslaved father’s dying wish: that he should leave his home in South Carolina for a new life in Africa. Over the next forty years, Vaughan was taken captive, fought in African wars, built and rebuilt a livelihood, and led a revolt against white racism, finally becoming a successful merchant and founder of a wealthy, educated, and politically active family in Lagos, Nigeria. Tracing Vaughan’s journey from South Carolina to Liberia to several parts of Yorubaland (present-day southwestern Nigeria), the book documents this “free” man’s struggle to find economic and political autonomy in an era when freedom was not clear and unhindered anywhere for people of African descent. By following Vaughan’s transatlantic journeys and comparing his experiences to those of his parents, contemporaries, and descendants in Nigeria and South Carolina, the book reveals the expansive reach of slavery, the ambiguities of freedom, and the surprising ways that Africa, rather than America, offered new opportunities for people of the African diaspora.

Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838) was a mathematician, astronomer, navigator, seafarer, and business executive whose Enlightenment-inspired perspectives shaped nineteenth-century capitalism while transforming American life more broadly. His scientific publications and best-selling New American Practical Navigator earned him praise from Thomas Jefferson as a “meteor in the hemisphere,” but it was his broader mathematical vision that inspired his creation of that cornerstone of capitalism, that touchstone of modern life, the impersonal bureaucracy. Enthralled with the precision of numbers and the regularity of the solar system, Bowditch operated and represented antebellum New England's most powerful financial institution as a clockwork mechanism. Elite Bostonians criticized Bowditch as a parvenu when he reformed Boston’s cultural and educational institutions, most notably Harvard University, along the same lines, but ultimately they embraced his approach for its political, ideological, and psychological advantages, and Bowditch himself as a valued cultural ornament. Though ostensibly operating with the impartiality guaranteed by impersonality, in reality these institutions functioned in the context of elite social networks, magnifying patrician power. The book argues for the transformative power of the quantitative sciences on capitalist development and the modern experience, while illuminating how powerful capitalists consolidated their power and confronted the paradox of a republican aristocracy. Bowditch’s life at sea, in science, and among urban elites also illuminates the provincial’s encounter with the exotic, the American’s challenge of gaining entry into the international Republic of Letters, and the patrician’s turn from vertical ties of patronage to horizontal ties of privilege.

Sin City North examines the history of illicit economies in the Detroit-Windsor borderland during the post-World War II period. Karibo uncovers a thriving illegal border culture in the bars, brothels, dance halls, and jazz clubs that emerged around the busiest crossing point between the United States and Canada. Prostitution and illegal drug economies gained renewed importance at a time when suburbanization, industrial decline, and racial segregation were re-shaping the region. For many residents, vice industries provided much-needed income in the fledgling labor market. Yet, the increasing visibility of illicit economies on city streets—and the growing number of African American and French Canadian women working in illegal trades—provoked strong reactions from moral reformers. Framing their efforts within the context of the Cold War, these interest groups worked together across the border in order to eliminate so-called immoral outsiders from their communities. This critical study demonstrates that struggles over the meaning of vice evolved into much more than defining the legal status of particular activities; they were also crucial avenues through which men and women attempted to define productive citizenship and community in the postwar urban borderland.

Thomas Nast (1840–1902), the founding father of American political cartooning, is perhaps best known for his cartoons portraying political parties as the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant. Nast's legacy also includes a trove of other political cartoons, his successful attack on the machine politics of Tammany Hall in 1871, and his wildly popular illustrations of Santa Claus for Harper's Weekly magazine. Throughout his career, his drawings provided a pointed critique that forced readers to confront the contradictions around them. This biography focuses not just on Nast's political cartoons for Harper's but also on his place within the complexities of Gilded Age politics and highlights the many contradictions in his own life: he was an immigrant who attacked immigrant communities, a supporter of civil rights who portrayed black men as foolish children in need of guidance, and an enemy of corruption and hypocrisy who idolized Ulysses S. Grant. He was a man with powerful friends, including Mark Twain, and powerful enemies, including William M. “Boss” Tweed. The author interprets Nast's work, explores his motivations and ideals, and illuminates Nast's lasting legacy on American political culture.

From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Immigration Act of 1924 to Japanese American internment during World War II, the United States has a long history of anti-Asian policies. But Lon Kurashige demonstrates that despite widespread racism, Asian exclusion was not the product of an on-going national consensus; it was a subject of fierce debate. This book complicates the exclusion story by examining the organized and well-funded opposition to discrimination that involved some of the most powerful public figures in American politics, business, religion, and academia. In recovering this opposition, Kurashige explains the rise and fall of exclusionist policies through an unstable and protracted political rivalry that began in the 1850s with the coming of Asian immigrants, extended to the age of exclusion from the 1880s until the 1960s, and since then shaped the memory of past discrimination. In this first book-length analysis of both sides of the debate, exclusion-era policies are more than just enactments of racism; they are also catalysts for U.S.-Asian cooperation and the basis for the 21^st century’s tightly integrated Pacific world.