With the Depression, the rise of fascism, and ongoing, even more dire civil rights struggles, patriarchal power seemed more than ever a race-work imperative. “Bad girls” offered diversions while Black female civil rights leaders garnered acclaim, but the New Negro hero who led the race forward, was, in the Pittsburgh Courier’s pages, more emphatically and presumptively male.

Musk announced Tesla’s decision to go direct to consumers after looking at the history of the legacy car companies with their increasingly onerous dealer networks and the failure of recent EV startups such as Fisker that had tried to sell through dealers. Chapter 2 examines Tesla’s direct sales decision both in Tesla’s own words and with supporting evidence on why selling EVs through franchised dealers is an unworkable business strategy, as demonstrated by the fact that almost every other EV startup has chosen a direct sales approach as well.

As a new US President took office in 2021, US–Russian relations veered between cooperation and confrontation. In February, Washington and Moscow agreed to extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (which had been signed in 2010) for another five years. But in March, Joseph R. Biden called Vladimir Putin “a killer,” souring relations between Russia and the United States and leading to a reduction in the number of staff members in both diplomatic missions. Just a month later, however, Biden proposed holding a bilateral summit, which finally took place in Geneva on June 16, 2021. This event planted the seeds of hope for an improvement in bilateral relations – albeit more among Russian observers than among their American counterparts. Biden’s critics in the United States in fact saw this meeting as “appeasing” Putin, whom many American politicians, experts, and journalists had by that time represented as the epitome of evil.

This chapter illustrates that an emerging geopolitical clash of interests in the Far East and competition on the world grain and oil markets during the last two decades of the nineteenth century were softened by the active development of trade, economic, and technological collaboration, as well as by the alluring prospect of Americans gaining access to Russia’s Asian market. On the one hand, the American reaction to anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire, repressions against fighters for Russian freedom there, and mass emigration of ethnic and religious minorities to the United States turned Russia into an object of America’s mission to liberalize the world and stimulated the erosion of the Russia–US “historical friendship.” On the other, America’s philanthropic movement during the Russian famine of 1891–1892 and Russian participation in the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 manifested this friendship. While focusing on Russians and Americans discovering each other on a large scale, this chapter emphasizes that contradictions in their mutual perceptions stemmed from domestic developments in each country, leading to their becoming mutual constitutive Others.

Chapter 10 looks ahead to where the direct sales wars may go in the immediate and longer-term future. It makes the case that the dealers have bigger fish to fry – such as ride sharing, artificial intelligence (AI), and autonomous vehicles – than companies that try to sell their own cars. The book ends with a call for sober thinking among all stakeholders about how automobiles will be sold, serviced, owned, shared, and used after the next technological revolution.

This chapter examines the drastic deterioration of US–Soviet relations from 1945 to Stalin’s death in 1953. It argues that the “cold war” was neither inevitable nor an objective reality. Instead, the shift from negotiation to confrontation was spurred by misconceptions, and the intense mutual enmity stemmed from subjective constructions as much as divergent fundamental interests. US leaders’ expectations that America’s unrivalled economic strength and monopoly on nuclear weapons would lead the USSR to go along with US plans for the postwar world collided with Soviet leaders’ determination not to be intimidated or to relinquish their domination of Eastern Europe. Journalists and propagandists on both sides worked to reshape public images of their former allies, stoking fears and inflaming ideological differences that had been set aside earlier. Key US officials, particularly George F. Kennan, exaggerated the US ability to shake the Communist system’s hold on the peoples of the USSR. through propaganda and covert action. Meanwhile, Soviet propagandists misleadingly depicted American media demonization of their country as part of US preparation for war against the USSR.

This chapter demonstrates that the period between the Russo-Japanese War and the outbreak of the First World War displayed in equal measure a trend toward conflict and a trend toward cooperation. The governments of both the Russian Empire and the United States manifested a desire for more harmonious relations. Even in 1911, at the height of a conflict over Russia’s refusal to accept the passports of American Jews, the two states collaborated on the protection of fur seals and the tsarist government gave a most friendly welcome to a squadron of American battleships. This trend was also bolstered by mutual interest in expanding the export of American goods, capital, and technologies to the Russian Empire, as well as by cultural exchanges. Nonetheless, in the Far East, US “dollar diplomacy” clashed with a Russian “sphere of influence.” Within the United States, two large-scale public campaigns – against extraditing Russian revolutionaries who had fled to the United States and in favor of abrogating the 1832 commercial treaty in order to protest Russia’s anti-Semitic policies – testified that many Americans valued ideals more highly than trade and pragmatic cooperation.

What other issue has brought together environmentalists, consumer protection advocates, free marketeers, labor unions, antitrust organizations, and civil rights groups? Chapter 7 explains how that all came about in the direct sales movement. But while this “strange bedfellows” public interest group coalition should have appealed to both political parties, translating it into tangible political support has been much harder. Nothing has been more central to this challenge than the eccentric and increasingly divisive person of Elon Musk, whose budding bromance with Donald Trump may again shift the political story of direct sales in unpredictable ways in coming years.

Chapter 1 focuses on the career of Harlem writer Aubrey Bowser, who began his career editing the uplift literary journal The Rainbow, the official organ of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen’s Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, and who then re-edited some of that material, which, in turn, appeared in the New York Amsterdam News, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the Baltimore Afro-American. The printscape of Bowser’s work reveals the pressures that Jazz Age Black journalism placed on writers committed to racial uplift, as well as how Black newspapers bridged tensions between religious, dry, daytime tenets and wet, nighttime indulgence. As the Black press advertised, reported on, and editorialized “uplift” events concurrently with Harlem nightlife, it encouraged readers to mitigate at least some of the ideological divisions by offering a cosmopolitan vision of the New Negro. Within this context, the cultural work of Bowser’s fiction, especially after 1925 when most Black newspapers shifted their stance and saw Prohibition as a failure, assuaged readers that “knowing” wet Harlem did not mean abandoning the church and that attending church did not mean condemning the cabaret.