The historical context of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s antislavery speeches between 1844 and 1855 indicates that he gave them reluctantly after yielding to entreaties and that they are confused, contradictory, and without direction. Stunningly, between 1851 and 1854, years of monumental events in the time of abolitionism, there is no evidence that Emerson ever uttered a single word about slavery publicly. Although hating slavery with a passion, he disliked abolitionists almost as much and shied away from taking a public stand until 1856.

The historical context of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s antislavery speeches between 1844 and 1855 indicates that he gave them reluctantly after yielding to entreaties and that they are confused, contradictory, and without direction. Stunningly, between 1851 and 1854, years of monumental events in the time of abolitionism, there is no evidence that Emerson ever uttered a single word about slavery publicly. Although hating slavery with a passion, he disliked abolitionists almost as much and shied away from taking a public stand until 1856.

Chapter 7 is a brief overview of the Mexican–American War reparations (1848–1881), Cretan War reparations (from 1897), and Chinese reparations following the Sino-Japanese War (1895–1901) and the Boxer Rebellion (1901 and 1939). The chapter is a tale of how reparations can be so small as to be meaningless for the economy (in the American case) or long, painful, and enforced by political and military power (Greek and Chinese cases).

The exceptionalism of New Orleans from the perspective of the United States is reversed when considered from the perspective of major cities along the southern rim of the Gulf of Mexico, cities that, as New Orleans once did, formed part of the Spanish empire. Though this legacy has not been foregrounded in recent decades the way the city’s ties to France have been, major literary activity in Spanish has been associated with New Orleans since the career of Eusebio Gómez in the 1840s, perhaps reaching a peak in the first decades of the twentieth century with the rise of the New Orleans–based magazine, El Mercurio, which served as an important incubator of Modernism in the Spanish-speaking world.

The first time Walt Whitman ever left the New York area and experienced the wide-open countryside of the United States in the late 1840s, he did so with the objective of arriving in New Orleans, where he lived and worked for three months for a newspaper. The rumor that Whitman had a child out of wedlock in New Orleans first took hold and held sway among the poet’s readers as the earliest iterations of the legend of his life took shape. Even more importantly, Whitman experienced in New Orleans such an extraordinary diversity of peoples mingling on the streets that he began to devise a new aesthetic of urban democracy, of strangers from radically different worlds mingling if only for a moment on crowded streets, a vision that would shape his poetry ever after and become a towering monument in American poetry in general.