Margaret Bonds’s Credo sets the nine articles of W. E. B. Du Bois’s iconic manifesto for global equality – first penned in 1904, revised in 1920, and modeled on the sacred symbol of the arch – as a symmetrical set of seven movements for soloists, chorus, and piano (1965) or orchestra (1965–67). This chapter offers a close reading of Du Bois’s anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, pacifist text and examines the means by which Bonds translated it into a musical structure all her own that reflects diverse influences ranging from gospel song through the cantatas of J. S. Bach (whom she called “the father of all good music”), also emphasizing womanist themes that are at best minimally present in Du Bois’s text.

Since the 1920s, American writers have evinced a fascination with and investment in fictional representations of jazz music and jazz musicians. As this essay demonstrates, part of jazz’s appeal for fiction writers is that it offers the opportunity to explore various kinds of border crossing. This essay surveys several jazz fictions to explicate how these fictions portray jazz as a local event, often focusing on musicians who may not be known beyond their own communities, but who live to play the music. Using Nathaniel Mackey’s concept of artistic othering, this essay investigates how writers portray the jazz musician’s search for a space to belong, where artistic forms of risk-taking are affirmed and the contingencies jazz musicians face, whether it be in the form of substance abuse, underemployment, self-doubt, or social injustice can be managed through instances where self-repair, improvisation, and community constitute the foundations of the musician’s lifeworld. Jazz fiction, in other words, is deeply concerned with the contradictions of American life and how playing jazz music involves the act of containing contradictions.

Describes the life, political career, and impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, with particular emphasis on the post-Civil War context of the case and the constitutional issues in the case.

A second interlude introducing the 25th Amendment mechanism for removing a president who is incapable of performing his duties, and explaining unsuccessful initiatives to apply the 25th Amendment to Donald Trump.

Describes the Senate trial of Donald Trump’s first impeachment, with detailed analysis of the procedural maneuvers by Trump’s defenders and accusers, the role of the Chief Justice in the trial, and the arguments of the House Managers and Trump’s counsel.

The American Songbook has been a fruitful source of improvisation for jazz musicians, either through artists interpreting those songs themselves, or crafting new songs from their chord changes as bebop musicians did prolifically in the 1940s. This chapter investigates this influence, beginning with the debt that jazz improvisers owe to Tin Pan Alley composers, before turning that relationship around to consider how the success of those same songwriters depended on an ongoing attempt to identify what made jazz appealing to American listeners and distil aspects of that enigmatic essence into the commercially viable object of popular song. In examples like Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather,” Irving Berlin’s “Putting on the Ritz,” or any number of Cole Porter compositions, we see the workmanlike creators of Tin Pan Alley incorporating not just musical elements associated with jazz, but also a more general “sensibility,” intended to recreate the music’s blues-informed world-weariness or performative impertinence.

Shifting Sands: Gospel Thrillers that center on new “Dead Sea Scrolls” amplify but also contain conspiratorial anxieties focused on the ambiguous Westernness of Israel as a site of biblical origins and discovery. The Jewishness of Jesus is also probed in this set of Gospel Thrillers, often embodied in the religious ambiguity of their protagonists.

Outlines the political career of Bill Clinton and his rise to the presidency in the post-Watergate era, as well as the corresponding rise of his wife, Hillary Clinton. Addresses the altered political climate of the period and how the actions of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr elevated President Clinton’s inexcusable moral turpitude into impeachable conduct.

What are “Gospel Thrillers” and what can we learn from them? The introduction provides a clear delineation of the novels this study looks at (thrillers that posit a new gospel has been found) and the themes that emerge from them (the political, theological, and personal stakes of new biblical “discoveries” and conspiracies about Christian origins).

Explains that term “civil officers” impeachable under the constitution was commonly thought to include senators until the Senate decided otherwise in 1798 case of Senator William Blount. Inferior executive branch appointees of the President have always been impeachable, but only one such official, Secretary of War William Belknap, whose case is detailed here, has been. Also addresses impeachment of former officers.

Any author of a second edition owes the reading public some explanation of why, having surveyed a subject once, he proposes to revisit the scene of the crime. In the present case, both my original impetus for writing a book about impeachment and the necessity of producing a second edition can be readily explained.

Scat and vocalese are two approaches to jazz vocality. This essay intervenes into dominant narratives of their history, value, and functions and encourages us to conceptualize a broader, contradictory view of what they have been and done. This view both acknowledges the narrative of Louis Armstrong giving birth to scat in 1926 and that scat was widespread far earlier; it points to how scat has occupied both sides of Lindon Barrett’s binary of the singing/signing voice, variously functioning as institutionalized vocality that claims authority by Othering certain music as nonmusical and marginalized vocality denied legibility by hegemonic musical norms. Alongside these reflections on the cultural politics of jazz voice, the reader is guided through explorations of the scat existing before scat; the less-celebrated recordings of the most-celebrated scat singer, Ella Fitzgerald; and the ways scat’s meanings are reshaped by poetry and by lesser-known singers of the past and present.

The Montgomery Variations and Credo were not just timely musical masterpieces; they were also large-scale compositions dealing with racial justice and global equality that were penned by an African American woman, an individual to whom the doors of the classical music performance and publishing establishments were closed because of race and sex. Both works may thus be understood as compositions tendered from within a double application of the “veil” or “double-consciousness” that Du Bois had seminally discussed in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk – one application is that of race; the other, that of sex. Keenly aware of both of her doubly veiled existence and of the near-total absence of Black folk and women in orchestras, as well as their disproportionately small presence in choruses and audiences, Margaret Bonds undertook a gambit of dual perspective. She used the rhetoric of White Euro-American classical music to valorize contemporary African Americans and others who bravely fought against the system with which most performers and audiences of that music normally identified. The chapter closes with a reflection on the crucial role played by Bonds’s personal and professional affinities with Langston Hughes in inspiring her to this gambit.