The Conclusion summarizes the book’s arguments and contextualizes them within broader patterns of public discourse in which Jamaica was conceptualized as especially revealing about race, and in which biblical slogans were used to encode universal claims about race. The conclusion analyzes a speech given by English lawyer and politician Charles Savile Roundell, who had served as secretary to the Royal Commission of Inquiry appointed to investigate Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Addressing the Tenth Annual Meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, held in Manchester, England, Roundell proposed taking Jamaica as a crucial instance, a term taken from Francis Bacon’s program for a new scientific method. And he cited the Bible as he made claims about how the races could and should relate to one another.

The Introduction frames the book’s argument by analyzing coverage of Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in the American Missionary (New York), published by the American Missionary Association. The editors invoked Ecclesiastes 7:7, “Surely oppression maketh a wise man mad,” to blame Jamaica’s largely White plantocracy for pushing Black laborers to breaking point. They drew out the implications of this lesson on race for the United States – White Americans who had participated in the system of slavery should not be entrusted with safeguarding the rights of free Black citizens. This book shows how Jamaicans, Britons, and Americans understood Jamaica as a prime example, a test case that shed light on great questions about race and race relations occupying the Atlantic world at the end of the American Civil War. It argues that they used biblical slogans to encode a wide variety of claims about race and race relations. This Introduction relates the book’s argument to work by historians on Jamaica, the British Empire, and abolitionism, on the one hand, and work by biblical and religious studies scholars on the Bible and race, on the other.

This chapter recounts women’s reactions to the siege and subsequent fall of Fort Sumter and their short-lived hope that it would be the sole conflict that resulted from secession. Their cathartic moment of joy quickly evaporated when soldiers departed for Virginia, leaving them once again in a tormented state of lonely anticipation. Until the events of First Bull Run, men’s letters home expressed a jovial mood. This atmosphere changed drastically when loved ones began to die in combat. Thus, while Fort Sumter may be considered the first shot of the Civil War, it took First Bull Run for South Carolinians to realize the urgency of the conflict and finally, completely, enter the Civil War. The conclusion traces the lives of the elite white women profiled through the Civil War and its aftermath. Many of them earnestly subscribed to the Lost Cause myth after the war, writing rosy memoirs of antebellum days or joining Confederate memorial organizations. That their prewar predictions of doom and destruction do not line up with their postwar remembrances further proves that the Lost Cause mythology is divorced from the reality of the South after the Civil War.

Political possibilities closed down as the war ended in 2005. With the negotiation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the death of the SPLA’s leader John Garang – which sparked riots and racialised murder across Khartoum – many people’s connections and trust in inclusive intellectual and political projects were broken. This chapter briefly surveys the aftermath of the riots and peace process, which saw a massive movement of well over a million Khartoum residents to the south, where they reconstructed a very different set of neighbourhoods that in the late 2000s were often known as New Khartoums. The secession of South Sudan in 2011 was not a panacea or end goal of the long conflicts for many of these returned Khartoum residents. Reflecting discussions with returning residents over 2012 and 2013, the chapter examines the lost possibilities of the projects they undertook in Khartoum, and the closing space for political projects and democratic communities that they discussed and worked for during the war.

This chapter asks the question: Where did Black individuals' desire for community commitment come from? The answer this, I draw on numerous primary and secondary sources starting in the Reconstruction era to show where Black voters' expectations of those representing them came from and how they shifted over time. The latter part of the chapter focuses on the Civil Rights Movement out of which many Black voters received the right to engage in politics. I contend that these new rights and those who helped acquire them for the Black community created the lens through which most Black people see effective leadership today, and solidified the desire for representatives willing to put their lives on the line for the sake of the racial group's progress.

The eighth chapter pursues the urge among artists to imaginatively reconstruct the original structures that became ruins, and not just of individual buildings but of the whole ancient city. Reconstructions are to be seen in two-dimensional ‘flat’ art (paintings, drawings, watercolours, engravings, panoramas) and in three-dimensional architectural models. These occasionally inspired the erection of modern buildings which realised the reconstructed image. Modern reconstructions employ digital and computer-generated imagery. In the twentieth century three-dimensional models of ancient Rome were constructed, and imaginative visions of Rome were devised for cinema and television.

The ultimate cause of the American Civil War was White supremacy, not simply slavery. That prejudice brought on war and also affected the treatment of prisoners of war and the consequences of Southern surrender. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the incorporation of Blacks into the Union army infuriated the Confederates and doomed the traditional practices of the cartels. When Black troops were recruited, Confederates refused to exchange captured Black soldiers, deeming them to be escaped slaves. The North responded by ending exchange and parole altogether. Now prisoners on both sides endured long-term confinement in prisoner of war camps, a practice that became the rule in Western warfare. The surrender of the Confederacy came through the surrender of its individual armies because the state was inoperative. But, although the conventional war ended in 1865, the fighting did not cease. Surrender transformed the conventional conflict into White supremacist terrorism and insurgency during Reconstruction, 1865–77. Ultimately, the will of the federal government and the Northern population tired of trying to establish racial equality in the South, and the occupation of the South ended. In an important sense, the South ultimately won by preserving White supremacy in its government, society, and culture.

Nazism and war had devastated Berlin. The city was divided into different zones under Allied administration, but cooperation soon broke down. While the Soviets retained control over the central and eastern districts, the western sectors were administered by the Americans, British, and French. Following the Berlin blockade and airlift of 1948–49, the division of Berlin was effected with the foundation of the Federal Republic (FRG) in the west and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the east. The two halves of the city began to diverge, with rebuilding under different ideological auspices in the 1950s. Growing discontent with an economically constrained and politically repressive system under communism meant that many East Germans were using crossing points that were still open within Berlin in order to escape via West Berlin to West Germany. The erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 sealed both the division of the city and the division between West and East Germany.

One trend in recent nineteenth-century American studies has been the rising critical status of poetry, which has gone from being widely neglected by C19 scholars to being a vibrant and diverse field of scholarship. Yet, while this scholarship has recovered major authors and recuperated long-derided aspects of nineteenth-century poetics, it has also maintained an old narrative about C19 poetry, namely that the status of poetry declined during the postbellum period. The career of William Cullen Bryant is emblematic of these trends: while there has been some fascinating recent work on his poetry, it has been informed exclusively by his early poetry of the 1810s and 1820s. This essay argues that Bryant’s career looks different when viewed from the end, rather than the beginning. In so doing, it revises recent critical accounts of Bryant, and C19 American poetry more broadly, by examining his translation of the Iliad, which he published in 1870. Bryant’s Iliad was one of the most celebrated poems of the postbellum era and was considered his masterpiece by contemporary readers. This essay examines the translation and discuss some of the ways in which it engages the politics and poetics of the Reconstruction period

This chapter examines the nature of slavery, and particularly chattel slavery, in the trans-Atlantic region in the modern period in order to structure the analysis of freedom to follow in subsequent chapters.

This chapter argues that building strong institutions and a productive economy in the aftermath of conflict is not enough and that rebuilding lost social capital and trust is of paramount importance. Intergroup trust matters deeply, as the same formal institutions can have divergent effects in different social structures and for different levels of social capital. Starting from the so-called contact hypothesis that fostering positive intergroup interaction builds trust, it is argued that reconciliation and the rebuilding of social trust are also part of the promising blend of propeace policies. A variety of empirical studies are discussed, ranging from reconciliation efforts in Rwanda and Sierra Leone to programs fostering intergroup contacts in Spain, Nigeria, India and Iraq. While we find that more intense group contacts deploy typically desirable effects, trying to achieve reconciliation by altering beliefs through media campaigns is a double-edged sword that involves a series of dangers. We conclude this chapter by stressing the key role of stepping up critical thinking.

The 18th Australian Infantry Brigade returned from the Buna and Sanananda campaigns a victorious but physically broken force. It had suffered more than 96 per cent casualties owing to a combination of weather, terrain, disease and the enemy, and would have to reconstruct the foundations of the brigade, built around a core of experienced veterans and the assimilation of motorised troops and replacement soldiers.1 The 18th Brigade would have to start building basic soldiering skills, the integration of jungle warfare lessons learnt, and the introduction of formal brigade leadership schools. This is also the period when the brigade undergoes a dramatic reorganisation under 7th Division’s establishment as a jungle division, which was outlined in chapter 1.

Chapter 5 interrogates the multiple meanings of dismembered hands in the 1880s as the changes made by Reconstruction were steadily clawed back. Given the centrality and materiality of touch, the representation of hands is not only verbal but also visual – the author interrogates how hands are not just imagined in text but also imaged in drawings and cartoons. At the core of the chapter are some of the drawings Thomas Nast made about the politics around Reconstruction. Then the chapter moves from images of interacting hands to actual shaking hands during the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, which brought together veterans of both the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia in 1888. The chapter ends with A Hazard of New Fortunes, by William Dean Howells. Hazard is especially interesting because of a secondary character, Berthold Landau, a German 1848-er who lost his hand in the Civil War. Overlaid by a North-South romance, Hazard’s ambivalence toward Landau and Howells’s decision to kill him off are another sign of the abandonment of white commitment to Black freedom.

Chapter 4 focuses on the importance of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Using Albion Tourgée’s 1883 novel Bricks without Straw, Oliver Otis Howard’s account of his time as director of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and archival records of the Bureau itself, the novel is read as a fictional reenactment of the work of Reconstruction. Bricks without Straw features two male protagonists, one Black, one white. The emancipated Nimbus lives in Red Wing, a self-sustaining Black-owned Southern community. Hesden Le Moyne, the scion of the leading family in town, is a Union sympathizer but is pressured to join the Confederate Army and loses his left arm in battle. Hesden returns from the war both a pacifist and an abolitionist. In the novel, amputation forces readers to focus on the present and move beyond the past, in recognition that the past of the intact body is irrecoverable. The past of a South organized around the enslavement and exploitation of Black Americans is buried, like Hesden’s lost arm, discarded in favor of a future that puts Black self-determination at its core. Moreover, Black and white characters work together to create a postwar nation organized around racial equality and justice.

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.