This essay explores the Inquisition’s persistent interest in converts, and descendants of converts, from Judaism to Catholicism. Spanish inquisitors believed those converts, called conversos, were prone to the heresy of Judaizing, which was continuing to follow Mosaic Law despite Christian baptism. The essay addresses the ambiguity of defining who exactly was a converso, and examines the kinds of accusations made against Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants in the first four decades of the Spanish Inquisition’s activity, from approximately 1484 to 1525. It considers the gendered nature of those accusations as well as the potential motivations of accusers. After weighing the veracity of inquisition records about Judaizing, the essay moves to a comparison of trials from earlier and later periods of inquisition history, from the mid sixteenth century onward. These trials demonstrate the complicated, ongoing interactions among Jews, New Christians, and so-called “Old Christians” throughout the Spanish empire and around the world.

This chapter considers Christian converts from Islam who were converted forcibly in the early sixteenth century and known as moriscos. Once Catholic, the moriscos came under the jurisdiction of the Spanish Inquisition. For more than a century, Spanish authorities worried about Moriscos adhering to their former religion and being Christian in name only; Spanish inquisitors investigated and prosecuted them for practicing Islam. The number of trials reached a high point in the second half of the sixteenth century, and only dropped when the monarchy expelled the Moriscos from the Spanish kingdoms between 1609 and 1614. This essay examines how the Spanish Inquisition constructed a model of Islamic heresy that encompassed Morisco cultural traditions. It surveys the rise in inquisitorial prosecution of this population across multiple Spanish regions. It also considers Morisco responses to the Inquisition, including strategies of petitioning and financial negotiation. This chapter assesses what Inquisition records can reveal about Morisco histories, as well as methods for reading beyond inquisitorial perspectives.

Using the case of the New Right movement in South Korea beginning in the early 2000s, Chapter 4 analyzes how far-right intellectuals – academics, journalists, writers, and political analysts – constructed reactionary historical narratives and discourses in the post-authoritarian period. Analyzing disputes over historiography in the last decade relating to Japanese colonialism (1910–45), the founding of the Republic of Korea (1948), and the Park Chung Hee regime (1961–79), New Right intellectuals contributed to generating historical knowledge and narratives to construct positive images of the past. I argue that, to solidify their influence, New Right intellectuals have proactively adopted the leftist strategy of targeting the cultural sphere, disseminating ideas, and building cultural hegemony. In doing so, they have sought to restore the right’s political legitimacy and symbolic power in a post-authoritarian context.

The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) began as the network administrative organization (NAO) overseeing the voluntary sharing of organs among transplant centers. It subsequently became the administrator of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN), which Congress created to allocate deceased-donor organs when it nationalized them in 1984. The OPTN continuously makes incremental changes to organ allocation rules, raising concerns that the path dependence of allocation rules would hinder more radical change. Under pressure from the federal government, the OPTN gradually reduced the role of geographic boundaries in its allocation rules. However, it also introduced other categories so that allocation rules became increasingly complex. It initially considered continuous distribution (CD), a radical change, as an alternative for eliminating historical geographic boundaries. The OPTN subsequently committed to implementing CD for all solid organs because it offered improvements in efficiency, equity, and transparency, and because its relative simplicity would allow more expeditious incremental changes to allocation rules.

Today we take for granted that when a candidate for President wins the election he will run for reelection in four years. If they win reelection, a new president will be sworn in at the end of the current President’s second term. However, for most of American history, until the ratification of the Twenty Second Amendment in 1951, this cycle of presidents serving for at most two terms was governed by tradition and norms, rather than law. In this section we explore the historical debate on presidential term limits, the long-standing tradition of two-term presidents, the passage of the Twenty Second Amendment, and ongoing attempts to repeal or modify the Amendment.

Who were the women of Meerut, said to have turned a nonviolent military mutiny – a refusal to load and fire a weapon – into a violent revolt that nearly toppled the British Raj? Were they prostitutes, or were they wives? There is much in the book to suggest the latter, but (ironically) that same evidence also suggests the simultaneous possibility of the former. This paradoxical formulation requires a more nuanced understanding of the nature of north Indian marriage in mid-century. A more fundamental question is: Did the women of Meerut exist? Or were they the product of overheated imaginations casting about for exculpation – on both sides of the racial divide? This necessitates a further examination of the two sources for the story of the Meerut women, or rather the question of their independent narrative origin. While the evidence militates in favor of their historicity, gender humiliation was already in the air: Even if they did not exist, they would be invented. They matter not simply because they enable us to add women to the mix of history (and stir, as the saying goes), but because they allow us to perceive something fundamental about the nature of history itself.

The introduction sets up the book’s exploration of the complex relationship between contemporary North American fiction and self-help culture over the past 25 years, arguing that recent writers stage encounters between diverse self-help practices to interrogate changing conceptions of authorship, selfhood, and society. Specifically, I position literary engagements with self-help as a way for writers to negotiate anxieties around individual, social, and writerly agency in a moment when traditional sovereign accounts of selfhood are under pressure from poststructuralist critiques of subjecthood and the shaping forces of systemic power, new technologies, and planetary crisis. I begin with an analysis of Deb Olin Unferth’s graphic novel, I, Parrot, then provide context on self-help in America, from long-standing advice, conduct, and wisdom traditions to today’s diversified, commercialized landscape of guidance literature and practices across the three central themes of the book: authority and public address, time management and productivity, and body and brain improvement. I argue that fiction writers can capture the nuanced sociopolitical paradoxes and multiplicities within self-help culture by bringing critical and creative energies to bear on deconstructing and reimaging its tropes and practices.

Chapter 4 explores the central role of Huguenot ministers in maintaining and nurturing this confessional network as part of an international collaboration with the Calvinist church, noble leaders, scholars and other agents. Considers the refugee experience and establishment of stranger churches abroad, the navigation of theological differences and the part played by cooperation and conflict, especially in the French church in London. Focuses on connections to cardinal Châtillon and Regnard/Changy as well as other ministers involved in, and identified through, the correspondence, such as Pierre Loiseleur de Villiers. In particular, establishes the pragmatic day-to-day challenges that Huguenot ministers faced in serving their communities at home and abroad alongside bonds of faith and amity and the handling of disagreements. The varied experience and careers of the ministers are also compared and contrasted, as are the roles of other agents, particularly scholars and diplomats. Diplomacy and the negotiation of alliances were vital to the upholding of the Protestant and Catholic causes as was the identification of plotting by the other side.

As is well known, the 1857 mutiny of Indian soldiers in the Company Army – collectively known as sepoys – was prompted by the proposed introduction of a new weapon for general use, a rifled musket known as the Pattern 1853 Enfield. This weapon required a new kind of greased cartridge, the loading of which entailed a new “firing” drill. Controversies over this new cartridge and drill prompted discontent among the “native” soldiery, which ultimately led to the collective decision to refuse to touch the offending cartridge and, naturally, load the weapon – a refusal that constituted the “mutiny” phase of 1857. This chapter begins with a reexamination of this drill and the circuitous, controversial decision to order eighty-five elite “skirmishers” of the Bengal 3rd Light Cavalry to perform it in late April. Their refusal to obey that order led to their court-martial for mutiny and imprisonment. The violent revolt began two weeks later, but not in the cantonment proper. Rather, it began in a hybrid space of commerce, leisure, and recreation on the edge of the cantonment known as the “sadr” (main) bazaar. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to a description of the sadr bazaar and its denizens.

There are different types of investigations of the President: congressional investigations, federal criminal investigations, state criminal investigations, civil suits in state courts, and if the United States were to submit to jurisdiction, potentially even proceedings before international tribunals. The discussion in the preceding chapters focused on impeachment and criminal prosecution. But first must come an investigation. Some investigations have neither impeachment nor prosecution in mind, at least at the outset. Yet investigations of all types can be an effective check on presidential power.