Centring the lived experiences of enslaved and free people of colour, Black Catholic Worlds illustrates how geographies and mobilities – between continents, oceans, and region – were at the heart of the formation and circulation of religious cultures by people of African descent in the face of racialisation and slavery. This book examines black Catholicism in different sites – towns, mines, haciendas, rochelas, and maroon communities – across New Granada and frames African-descended religions in the region as “interstitial religions.” People of African descent engaged in religious practice and knowledge production in the interstices, in liminal places and spaces that were physical sites but also figurative openings, in a society shaped by slavery. Bringing together fleeting moments from colonial archives, Fisk traces black religious knowledge production and sacramental practice just as gold, mined by enslaved people, again began to flow from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic world.

The history of how the federal judiciary shaped American sovereignty has long been hidden, obscured by two often-told stories about the courts and the nation. One tells us that judges historically have ceded authority to the president in foreign affairs, and therefore have had little influence on the United States’ international relations. The other asserts that the Marshall Court’s constitutional rulings laid the foundation for federal sovereignty under the Constitution. Both of these accounts have elements of truth, but only because of developments a century later. The claim that Marshall’s constitutional decisions shaped the nation projects backward into the past an importance those rulings did not have when they were made. And the notion that the courts have historically had little to do with foreign affairs ignores that early judges were central participants in a cooperative effort among the three branches of government to secure the United States’ place in the world. It is that legacy of judicial nation-building, rather than the stories we have inherited, that can help us think about the courts’ role today.

The War of 1812’s end heralded a new era for the courts, and for the nation. Political leaders emboldened by having fought Great Britain to a standstill were eager to lay the groundwork for a new American empire. But adventurous Americans had their own priorities, and privateering on behalf of South American revolutionary governments offered new opportunities for wartime profit. Like the British in the 1790s, Spanish and Portuguese officials demanded that the federal government suppress such freelancing. To preserve relations, the Madison and Monroe administrations dusted off a tool for suppressing maritime violence that previous administrations had largely eschewed – criminal prosecutions for piracy. But a patchwork statutory regime and popular support for South American rebels made convictions difficult to secure. At a deeper level, privateering cases raised thorny questions about the sovereign status of former colonies seeking autonomy. As Congress and the executive branch struggled to adapt to the rapidly shifting political context in the Americas, federal judges expressed renewed doubts about extending their authority onto the high seas. The renaissance of privateering threatened to derail the American imperial project just as it was getting started.

This chapter explores the career of Wu Kezhong from 1418, the year he succeeded his father’s investiture as Marquis of Gongshun, to 1449, the year he fell in combat. Like his father, Wu Kezhong served the Ming throne as a Mongolian specialist and military commander. Batu-Temür had offered his loyalty to the Ming throne at the head of some 5,000 supporters, and Wu Kezhong too acted as a patron and protector for the Mongolian community. Despite such similarities, both the dynasty and the place of Mongols in the polity were changing. Wu Kezhong was among the first generation of his family to live through imperial successions as first the Yongle and then Xuande emperor died, leaving the throne to new sovereigns who actively sought the support of proven commanders such as Wu Kezhong. The new sovereigns, especially the man for whom Wu Kezhong and his brother died, differed importantly from their forefathers not only in their styles of rulership but also in their policies. That mattered because, even more than his father, Wu Kezhong pursued patronage through imperial institutions, which required knowledge of salary structures, commutation rates, and the shifting balance of power at court.

In a familiar pattern, federal judges ultimately embraced their role as the architects of American sovereignty on the water. As the Monroe administration redoubled its prosecutions of South American privateers, Congress left it to judges to define the legitimate boundaries of maritime violence. The Supreme Court responded by casting doubt on the claims to sovereignty advanced by revolutionary polities, and declaring that privateers were merely pirates, and therefore subject to punishment by all – including the United States. This judicial assertion of legal authority to police the waters of the revolutionary Atlantic was transformative. It helped secure approval of a treaty with Spain that paved the way for decades of territorial expansion in North America, and it presaged increasingly expansive American claims to hemispherical preeminence. Even when federal judges denied their own power to discipline a different category of “pirates” – those who engaged in the slave trade – they did so to uphold sovereign rights that Americans had been asserting since independence. If a nineteenth century American empire was ultimately realized on land, some of its first stirrings were at sea.

After President Lydon Johnson announces a massive increase in US troop levels in South Vietnam, American Catholics become more deeply engaged in debating the war, particularly in terms of morality. The radical Baltimore protest attracts attention to the Catholic antiwar movement.

This chapter explores the making of Sofia as an Ottoman city. The central thread in the narrative is the functioning of the system of pious foundations, which played the most decisive role in the expansion and transformation of the built fabric and the provisioning of public services. The main theme is the city’s relationship with the natural environment and the construction, functioning, and maintenance of its water supply system. The chapter specifically aims at bringing attention to the fact that the upsurge of building activity and the Ottomanization of the built environment that were experienced since the mid-fifteenth century, and especially in the sixteenth century, were accompanied by the establishment of a water infrastructure. Yahya Pasha’s water supply system was established at the turn of the sixteenth century, the beginning of a period that witnessed the biggest advances of the Ottomans both in the construction of water facilities and in the institutionalization of water management. Chronologically, the narrative encompasses the entire early modern period in Sofia’s history, shedding light on Ottoman water supply both in terms of its technical aspects and in terms of the role that it played in the construction of the local eco-community.

The United States responds to events in Vietnam as the French War comes to an end and the Geneva Conference brings a flood of regugees to the noncommunist south of Vietnam. The US plays a signficant role in the refugee movement, making a national hero and celebrity of Catholic navy doctor Tom Dooley. The Diem regime is established in South Vietnam and survives a series of crises, leading to a deepened commitment by Washington to his survival. The Eisenhower administration is now firmly committed to the survival of an anticommunist regime in the south. Meanwhile, the Church suffers increasing persecution in North Vietnam. US Catholics develop a special concern for their coreligionists in Vietnam.

The Epilogue picks up the story that this book begins with, the story of the demolition of the last symbol of Ottoman Sofia’s water culture, the city’s main thermal bath, elaborating on the construction of the modern Bath Square as a showcase of the young Bulgarian nation’s resolve to join the modern world. I argue that the making and imposition of national space in the post-Ottoman period led to the creation of an entirely new place in Sofia’s historic center by the beginning of the 1910s. The modernization of the street network replaced the old naming system that reflected the streets’ natural and social environments with a new one that employed the already large arsenal of national heroes and events. The efforts of urban planners and architects to create Sofia’s image of a capital city of a modern nation-state converged in the project for the construction of Bath Square whose key features would be monumentality and representativeness. The new buildings represented not the environmental characteristics of place but the success of the nation-state and the steadfast pursuit of modernity.

Yet the war was not over, and as Jussi Hanhimӓki notes, “the Americans left behind a situation ripe for further turmoil rather than a tentative peace.” Yet, despite confident predictions by antiwar activists that the Saigon regime would collapse as soon as the final American forces were gone, the war went on for another two years. Saigon finally fell on April 30, 1975. In the end, the Republic of Vietnam “died not from an economic collapse or internal revolution but from military defeat.”

This chapter explores the ways in which the Sofia plain’s hydrothermal wealth influenced the local human communities and their relationship with the natural and built environments. How did the abundance of thermal water impact the daily routine of life on the plain? How did the ubiquitous presence of springs shape the locals’ perceptions of settled and wild space? In a city whose center was designated by a hot spring and occupied by bathing facilities, to what extent did participation in the rituals and practices rooted in the use of thermal water lead to the formation of a sense of place? What was the place of thermal waters and public baths in Ottoman and foreign observers’ perceptions of Sofia’s urban form and space? Taking issue with the confused, stereotyped, and biased popular idea of Ottoman Sofia’s built space, this chapter attempts to localize the bathing facilities in the city’s historic center and at least partially reconstruct the area of the thermal spring. The chapter sheds light on the roles that Sofia’s baths played as pillars of urban culture, key constituent parts of the image of the city, and important anchors for the achievement of a sense of place.