As the situation in South Vietnam deteriorates, American Catholics wrestle with the morality of American intervention in Vietnam in light of Vatican II. A triangular relationship develops among those who support US intervention, those who oppose it, and those who are critical of the methods employed by the US and its South Vietnamese ally.

The fifth and final chapter analyses how people of African (and indigenous) descent practiced Catholicism in the 1770s to 1790s. It puts villages in the interior Caribbean and haciendas in Antioquia in conversation with the mines of the Pacific, revealing both how there were longstanding rural autonomies and possibilities and how they could be swiftly destroyed by the arrival of conquering missionaries or visiting judges. The chapter illustrates how Catholicism was at once a mode of colonial governance and transcultural, local, and interstitial. The first section examines the reducciones of arrochelados by the conquering friar Joseph Palacios de La Vega and is followed by a discussion of trials for illicit relations in Antioquia as part of a violent Enlightenment drive to reorder colonial (and especially black) life. It concludes with an analysis of baptismal and confirmation records from the mines of Nóvita, which reveal the extent to which people of African descent and the worlds of the mines of the Pacific transformed Catholicism.

The introduction outlines the geographies of slavery and black freedom in eighteenth-century Colombia, the significance of region and race in Colombian history, and the importance of the mobilities of black people, their labour, and their culture in traversing and connecting New Granada’s Caribbean and Pacific worlds. Fisk argues for the centrality of geography, in particular place and mobilities, for shaping black religious knowledge and practice in a period (1690–1790) rarely studied by historians of African diasporic cultural history. After a historiographical and theoretical examination of how African diasporic religious formation has been studied, Fisk explores the variety of regimes of slavery and sites in which people of African descent resided in colonial Colombia – from cities, haciendas, and mines to maroon communities. She argues that place fundamentally shaped how people of African descent engaged with Catholicism. She conceptualises black Catholic practice in eighteenth-century New Granada as an “interstitial religion,” born of the physical and metaphorical interstices in a colonial society governed through slavery and introduces a methodology of religious geographies for the study of black religious knowledge where there is no written canon.

The Introduction begins with a description of the final days in the life of Sofia’s main thermal bath that in 1913 stood in the city’s historic center as the last representative of the Ottoman approach to place-making. I show how the decision to demolish one of the structures most characteristic of Sofia’s Ottoman experience cleared the path for the formulation of the national narrative of Sofia’s history. The narrative that still dominates both the scholarly and popular ideas of Sofia’s urbanistic identity is based on an ideologically biased interpretation of the Ottoman understanding of urban space, natural resource management, and public works. In the Introduction, I argue that Sofia’s key position within the Ottoman political and institutional landscapes as well as its role as a hub of cultural and technological exchange make the study of its history a good vantage point for overcoming the artificial spatial boundaries that still divide the research of the European, Asian, and African provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The Introduction shows how the environmental characteristics of Sofia and the Sofia plain make water the most natural and effective thematic pivot for the study of the construction and historical evolution of space and place.

The federal courts ultimately came to the nation’s rescue. In 1794, the Supreme Court abruptly reversed course and decided that federal judges could adjudicate cases arising from captures made by French privateers operating from the United States. British officials were initially skeptical about vindicating their sovereign’s rights through the courts, but they came to embrace litigation as a useful weapon in their global struggle with revolutionary France. French diplomats resented judicial interference with privateering, and they demanded that executive branch officers intervene in proceedings to defend France’s prerogatives under treaty and international law. But the Washington administration refused. The courts, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, were “liable neither to controul nor opposition from any other branch of the Government.” Judges continued to have doubts about their role in resolving international legal disputes, but they came to accept responsibility for establishing American sovereignty. This tale of judicial ascendancy might seem at odds with our usual understanding of the courts as the “least dangerous branch” of the early federal government, but the truth is that American policymakers deliberately sought to make the courts supreme, at least at sea.