Judge Frank Easterbrook once argued that rather than establish narrowly defined areas of legal research, scholars should stick to the study of general rules, which can be applied to any number of subject areas. The specific target in Judge Easterbrook’s crosshairs was cyberlaw, which was ascendant in the 1990s. His argument, and the metaphor within, is worth quoting at length: Lots of cases deal with sales of horses; others deal with people kicked by horses; still more deal with the licensing and racing of horses, or with the care veterinarians give to horses, or with prizes at horse shows. Any effort to collect these strands into a course on “The Law of the Horse” is doomed to be shallow and to miss unifying principles. Teaching 100 percent of the cases on people kicked by horses will not convey the law of torts very well. Far better for most students – better, even, for those who plan to go into the horse trade – to take courses in property, torts, commercial transactions, and the like, adding to the diet of horse cases a smattering of transactions in cucumbers, cats, coal, and cribs. Only by putting the law of the horse in the context of broader rules about commercial endeavors could one really understand the law about horses.

The eighth chapter of Invisible Fatherland concludes the book with an analysis of the anthology German Unity, German Freedom, published by the Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst (RfH) in July 1929. Conceived as a school prize for Constitution Day, this richly illustrated and carefully bound “memorial book” (Gedenkbuch) weaves the histories of diverse and often antagonistic subcultures into a shared memory. The strength of this “anthological museum” (Barbara M. Benedict) lies in its inclusive approach. Framing this inclusivity as a strength, the volume’s editor described its multivocality as a history “rich in contradictions.” Yet, by aiming for the broadest measure of representation, the anthology also destabilized the political boundaries of Weimar democracy. This chapter thus underscores that securing liberal democracy’s greatest strength – its inclusivity and openness – depends on sustained collective commitment to the democratic project.

American presidents have actively participated in the process that transformed the Declaration of Independence into a fully constitutive document. Many presidential citations are either ceremonial or express shared values. All presidents, however, claim the Declaration supports at least some of their favored policies on civil rights, governmental powers, the culture wars, and immigration. Liberal and conservative presidents dispute whether the Declaration supports regulation in the public interest or limited government. Presidents in the culture wars engage in parallel play, with more progressive presidents citing the Declaration when supporting the rights of LGBTQ persons, gun control, and liberal immigration policies, and conservative presidents citing the Declaration for bans on abortion, a greater place for religion in the public sphere, and crime control measures.

The period 1966–1976 saw the rise and fall of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, China witnessed its third wave of decentralized industrialization and the fiercest protests of temporary workers of the Mao era. This chapter starts by providing an overview of the political, economic, and international circumstances of this decade. It then looks at how workers in different positions in the urban exclusion system, particularly precarious workers, protested to improve their conditions, and how these protests were quashed by the government. This is followed by an examination of how gains won from temporary workers’ protests – most importantly, the largest-scale regularization in the Mao era – were carried out in 1971 and 1972, and why temporary employment rebounded thereafter.

This chapter explores the rapid expansion of long-form narrative verse in medieval Italy, from a literary horizon dominated by lyric in the 1200s to the presence of a substantial and innovative corpus of vernacular narrative poetry by the start of the 1400s. It reviews formal and metrical innovations that supported the development of medieval Italian narrative verse, as well as analysing the themes and the conceptions of authorship that the poets articulate. The forms reviewed begin with couplet and sonnet as vehicles for narrative poetry in the later Duecento, and move on through Dante’s invention of terza rima, to Trecento terza rima and ottava rima production by poets from Boccaccio and Petrarch to Fazio degli Uberti, Frezzi and Nadal. The chapter explores the adventures in and with narrative that established long-form poetry’s important place within the emerging Italian poetic tradition across the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

This chapter explores the relationship between voter migration and the political landscape in Zimbabwe. The chapter shows that the profiles of migrants often match the profiles of opposition voters: urban, educated, and younger. Upon exiting, these migrants forfeit their voting rights, as Zimbabwe does not permit voting from abroad, and the costs associated with returning home to vote can be prohibitive. Despite this disenfranchisement, migrants continue to engage with the politics of their homeland by raising awareness, writing for media outlets, and supporting local activists, thereby maintaining a form of political participation. ZANU-PF benefits from a migration exit premium of up to ten percent in elections between 2000 and 2010. This chapter also draws from examples of countries where diaspora votes directly impacted the election outcome to contrast the challenges in Zimbabwe.

The fifth chapter of Invisible Fatherland examines the relationship between the Weimar Republic’s symbolic legitimacy and far-right political violence. It focuses on the assassination of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau by nationalist fanatics in June 1922. The chapter explores how the republican government rallied public support and reinforced the republic’s authority. Rathenau’s state funeral and pro-democratic mass rallies united Germans across class and faith in mourning and defiance. The republic’s response framed the murder as part of a broader pattern of far-right violence, implicating even the more respectable factions of the far right in extremist crimes. This framing allowed Weimar democrats to discredit their political opponents and strengthen democratic alliances. The chapter argues that Rathenau’s funeral marked a pivotal moment when a democratic symbolism of sacrifice and solidarity emerged. This moment shows how symbolic acts can fortify democratic ideals during periods of political crisis.

This chapter re-examines slavery and abolition in the writing and reception of the Declaration of Independence. Far from being marginal parts of the nation’s founding document, as previous generations of scholars asserted, both slavery and abolition proved to be essential to the making and meaning of the Declaration. Indeed, during and after the American Revolution, the Declaration testified to the nation’s high abolitionist ideals and the enduring problem of slavery in American statecraft. By examining not only Jefferson’s ideas about black freedom in the Revolutionary era but a wide range of reformers who meditated on it as well – including African American writers and reformers like Benjamin Banneker – this essay argues that the Declaration itself remains a testament to the conflicted nature of emancipation in the American mind.

The image in Plate 13 is now housed in the City Museum of Münster. The museum dates it to 1491. On the back, their website informs us, is the name of an otherwise unknown painter, Seewald. The museum lists it as “Faces without Eyes,” in which the eyes of all but Christ and two others have been “carefully removed such that one can often see the wood beneath.” The online description glosses the removal of the paint designating eyes as “destructions,” evoking “the immediate association” of “iconoclasts of the Reformation period.” As the Museum’s website suggests, there is a long tradition of using the word “iconoclasm” to name a part of what happened in the sixteenth century and a rich and dense body of scholarship on “the destruction of art.” But, as the painting materializes, the word has never fit as a name for what Evangelicals did.

The chapter presents a novel perspective on exit, expanding it beyond physical migration from one country to another. It introduces the idea of death as a permanent form of exit, emphasizing its substantial influence on political dynamics. The text posits that voter exit is a critical factor in the survival of regimes, complementing various strategies employed by ruling parties to maintain their grip on power. This chapter also discusses the literature on dominant parties and different regime types. This chapter lays the groundwork for the rest of the book, exploring these themes in greater depth and detail. Exit, through migration and mortality, is a pivotal element for understanding the complexities of political stability and regime longevity.