This chapter discusses selected texts from contemporary Native American/First Nations, Black, Latinx, Asian American, Jewish American, and Arab American literature to show how they diversify hegemonic representations of financial capital and money as a medium. As they address issues such as settler colonialism, the afterlife of slavery, the concept of “alien capital,” deceptive promises of wealth, the social meanings of money, and the value of their groups’ respective cultural capital, they feature a range of stylistic innovations that illuminate the entanglements of literary and financial discourses in the past as well as the present.

This chapter examines what happens when we decolonize the materiality of the nineteenth-century Hispano-American anthology, when we move away from the anthology as a book form with colonial publishers, titles, sections, bylines, and expand it to centralize the (formerly) colonized and their ephemera, that is, Hispano-American editors, readers, and writers as well the Spanish-language newspapers they edited, read, and wrote for. What do these perspectives teach us about the emergence of what we now call a Latinx people and literary tradition? Mirroring the instability of the region following the US–Mexico War and the ontological uncertainty of its readers, newspapers like the Los Angeles-based El Clamor Público represent the formation of a pre-Latinx literary tradition. The newspaper’s editor and proprietor, Francisco P. Ramírez gave expression to what I call a Hispano-American borderlands anthology of poetry before there was a formalized creation of a Latinx poetic tradition in the United States.

The antebellum money supply was notoriously confusing, geographically variable, and entirely unstandardized, leading to routine problems in money’s use and exchange. During these same decades, despite proslavery advocates’ efforts to define racial identity unambiguously, the concept of race was also unstable and fluid. This chapter embeds the confusion over money’s identifying qualities within the disquiet over establishing racial identity that concurrently surfaced in the figure of the so-called white slave – extremely fair-skinned enslaved persons. I focus primarily on William Wells Brown’s literary output, especially his 1853 novel Clotel, along with court cases in which fair-skinned enslaved persons claiming a white identity sued for their freedom. Beyond highlighting shared tropes and metaphors, this literary and legal archive demonstrates that commentators used the language of money to shape how people comprehended racial identity and, equally, how the language of race impacted the concept of money itself. In the recurring slippage between what counted as real and what counted as fake in notions of money and of race, Brown and others seized upon money’s own inconsistencies to undermine slavery’s usual equation of Blackness with only monetary value.

The Framers at the Constitutional Convention were initially uncertain regarding how the President should be elected. For most of the convention, they favored appointment by Congress, but fears that the President would become too dependent on Congress persuaded them to entrust his selection to an independent body of electors – the Electoral College. In the Framers’ expectation, however, the Electoral College would just identify and nominate potential candidates; the House of Representatives would do the actual electing, selecting the winner from among the top candidates nominated by the College. Moreover, the Framers envisioned that the choice of President would be made on meritocratic, not partisan, grounds. After the Washington administration, however, national political parties emerged, transforming the Presidential election into a partisan contest. In this newly partisan environment, each party assumed the responsibility for selecting its nominee, and they initially did so through informal discussions among prominent party leaders.

This chapter reposits the dominant narrative of the United States to shift away from a monolithic identification whereby American means English speaking and Christian, to one that embraces plurality and difference in its origins, and specifically includes the Sephardim as a group that was part of this foundational effort. The Sephardic Diaspora in New England was connected through trade to the early modern Atlantic world (1640–1830). Within the boundaries of the present-day United States, Charleston, South Carolina, New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island were key nodes in these commercial and slave networks. These merchants who fled from religious persecution in the Iberian Peninsula and sought religious freedoms in New England, also became slave traders who made huge profits on trafficking the freedom of others. Although often espousing endogamous ideals for unions, the lived reality of those members of the Sephardic Diaspora demonstrates how race became a contested site of identity for practitioners of the Jewish faith living in widely disparate places.

The 1970s and 1980s proved to be transitional years. At first, it appeared that individualism had taken hold in the Senate, undermining the influence of both leaders and standing committees, but, as Chapter 9 shows, partisan conflict intensified during the 1980s and senators began demanding more effective party organizations and leadership. The Democratic leader, Robert Byrd, (D, W.Va.), was challenged for Democratic floor leader in 1986 and, two years later, gave up his post because he was not meeting his colleagues’ expectations as a team leader and party spokesman. By the mid-1990s, party leaders not only served as their parties’ chief strategists on floor procedure but increasingly guided the tandem tasks of writing important legislation and fashioning media strategies. Procedural maneuvering intensified on the Senate floor, which placed floor leaders in the middle of every legislative battle. By the 2020s, Senate policymaking was remarkably centralized in the two floor leaders, Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer. The Senate reached 2024 with stronger central party leaders and more elaborate organizations than ever before.

In this chapter, I investigate the aura of criminality that lingers around capitalism in feminist discourses of the long 1970s. Navigating landmark works of feminist economics, I establish how polemical publications by Gayle Rubin, Silvia Federici, and Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa instrumentalize the logics and rhetorics of theft in order to evoke the exploitation of women in capitalism, and I examine how these logics and rhetorics are likewise deployed to structure specific figurations of stealing in literary works by Marilyn French, Alix Kates Shulman, Marge Piercy, Rita Mae Brown, and Audre Lorde. My focus here falls primarily on those protagonists who remain trapped within the strictures of the realist feminist novel. What strategies do these women develop for resisting or mitigating the institutionalized terms of their financial oppression? Through an analysis of the ways in which stealing operates within a wider matrix of crimes against the kindred systems of capitalism and patriarchy, I investigate how theft figures in feminist writing as a viable compensatory opportunity for women. Regardless of its criminality, to what extent does the feminist novel present the case that stealing – in its various guises – is sometimes the only pragmatic response to the immediate problem of women’s oppression?

Following the end of Reconstruction, southern states began adopting legal restrictions to prevent African-Americans from voting. Although the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state laws that expressly banned African-Americans from voting, the Court allowed states to use other, ostensibly race-neutral means to disenfranchise African-Americans, such as the poll tax and onerous registration requirements. Following the Second World War, the two national parties struggled with how to address the fact that their southern parties were excluding African-Americans from the nomination process and sending all-white delegations to the national convention. The Democratic Party regularly seated all-white delegations from its southern wing. Only in 1964 did it warn its southern parties that they could no longer exclude African-Americans from party affairs. Meanwhile, in the Republican Party, “lily-white” party organizations gradually took over the southern Republican parties and similarly excluded or marginalized African-Americans in party affairs. As a result, even into the 1960s, African-Americans in the south were regularly excluded from the presidential nomination process in both parties.

This chapter traces the development of an economic sublime associated with modern neoclassical economics. A precursor to Fredric Jameson’s postmodern “hysterical sublime,” the sublimity of neoclassical economics derived from the thrilling sense that, through math, economics could access vast and terrifying universal forces, and connect individuals directly to them. However, the most popular expression of the economic sublime was not mathematical but literary, and consisted primarily of naturalist novels that chronicled human encounters with economic laws allegedly so regular, universal, and inexorable that they amounted to a new branch of physics. Through readings of novels by Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and Frank Norris, this chapter shows how literature helped train readers to understand neoclassical economics not just as natural, but also as an indispensable source of romantic pleasure.