The introduction sets out the approaches, sources, and scope of the book. It acquaints the reader with the main features of classical education and places the book within the modern historiography.

Chapter 2 analyzes two works related to the Juan Manuel de Rosas era, one actually produced during this time and the other from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. In both, Afro-Porteños are present in large numbers, and their representation conflicts with literary discourses. While the writings are filled with defamatory adjectives that seek to create a chaotic and barbaric image of Afro-Porteños, the paintings present a pleasing and orderly image. After Rosas’s defeat in 1852, his opponents worked tirelessly to associate the group with Rosas and his barbaric era. This conception of Afro-Argentines has become a stereotype. They are thus confined to an abominable past that must not be repeated. This strategy constitutes one more way of rendering invisible a population whose extinction was prophesied as inevitable since the mid-nineteenth century. These ideas persist to this day, despite the actual presence of Afro-descendants in our territory, and they, in turn, clearly influence the racial classifications that operate in Argentine society.

This chapter explores how the Declaration of Independence was drafted and ratified. Congress created and assigned the task of drafting a declaration of independence to a committee of lawyers. When the draft went to the Congress, lawyers like Edward Rutledge had their chance to weigh in. The draft document and the final version was a legal document designed to place rebellion on a legal foundation. Jefferson later recalled that his draft of the Declaration of Independence merely recombined ideas that had long been discussed, and terminology long adopted, by Congress. The Declaration assumed independence, otherwise it would have had no foundation. Following this logic, as the members did, surely Jefferson among them, the Declaration was simply stating the reasons – a justification like the Declaratory Act of 1766, by which Parliament explained its authority over the colonies – for an event already transpired. The ringing elaboration of the rights of mankind, various borrowings from John Locke, echoes of natural law, and the language of prior resolves and declarations were not really pertinent to a declaration for the independence of a continent, but make sense in the more limited framework of Virginia constitutional change.

This chapter situates the Declaration of Independence in relation to another founding document of the United States, the federal Constitution. It assesses the Declaration’s role in debates over the Constitution, first during the latter’s framing in 1787, then in the struggle for ratification, and then later as political actors sought to interpret each document in light of the other. From the outset, debate over the Constitution highlighted the Declaration’s multivalence as well as its rhetorical power. Both defenders and opponents of the Constitution have sought to show how their cause best aligned with the ideals and aspirations expressed in the Declaration. Anti-federalists and their successors constructed a powerful narrative which juxtaposed the Declaration’s call to liberty with the Constitution’s blueprint for authority. Yet there was from the beginning an equally strong tradition that saw the Constitution as a consummation of the Declaration’s promise. Either way, this chapter argues, the Declaration continues to help shape the meaning of the Constitution – and to have its own meaning remolded in turn.

This chapter elucidates the relationship between the Bahá’í movement, the English people who were attracted to it and the British Empire, focusing on the early twentieth century and especially the First World War period. As British troops expanded into the Ottoman Middle East during that conflict, all three intersected in ways that would prove pivotal for Bahá’í history, marking the beginning of that persecuted movement’s establishment as a major world religion. This chapter explains how individual historical actors, from the movement’s leadership in the Haifa–Acre area, to the Bahá’ís in England, to (although to a lesser extent) the British officers and administrators in Palestine, were able to sift through a variety of principles, beliefs and representations culturally available to them in order to create systems of meaning that made new Bahá’í–British relationships possible. Areas of common ground included certain shared liberal, democratic ideals; a global perspective that included people from many different ethnic, racial, religious and national backgrounds; and a willingness to cross familiar boundaries between “East” and “West,” even as those concepts were created and recreated in the process.