How can institutions be “racist?” What additional challenges are posed when bias is produced and reproduced by everyday institutional practices? This chapter traces the historical evolution of institutional discrimination from Reconstruction to the present, highlighting explicit legal and implicit policy-level discrimination in the Jim Crow era, the New Deal, and historical immigration policy. It also provides more in-depth analysis of the role of race in the present-day housing market, in the criminal justice system, and in election administration.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the United States was a fledgling power, weaker than many European countries in both economic and military terms. The central government had effective control over only a small area of the continent, and disputes between it and the states were already well entrenched. The country had continental aspirations, but only gradually would it begin moving its border westward. The power imbalance between the United States and Latin America was therefore not yet great, but it would rapidly swing in favour of the U.S. in the first decades of the century. This chapter analyzes the challenges in establishing and maintaining relations between governments in the United States and Latin America and concludes with the post–Civil War period, at which time U.S. economic and military power markedly increased.

The USA is born as a site of intense struggle in and out of the musical realm. Escapees from slavery sing of such heroes as the maroon leader Jean St. Malo, songs are sung over “The Rights of Woman,” and the labor movement produces its first store of agit-prop songs. As the Indigenous peoples of the east stare into the face of settler-colonial encroachment, the nascent music industry erupts with sentimental songs about the “Noble Savage” and the “Vanishing Indian.” Partisans of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson fight their battles through song, and the Louisiana Purchase doubles the size of the USA and the territory for musical conflict. The rise of the “Injun Fighter” has its own soundtrack, eliding the continued seizure of Indigenous territory. The War of 1812 gives birth to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” while the songs of conscientious objectors are pushed to the margins. Blackface minstrelsy emerges as one of the greatest cultural challenges to Black American self-definition. Meanwhile, eastern cities are bursting at the seams with the steady influx of European immigrants, and the hawks of Manifest Destiny look westward to Texas, Mexico, and beyond, buttressed by shrill musical calls to “Remember the Alamo!”

Labor’s gloves are off, and the country is rocked by waves of strikes, all backed by militant battle songs. The Pullman Strike brings to the fore Eugene Debs and other champions of labor and socialism, Coxey’s Army marches on Washington (singing), German immigrants fly the red flag of Anarchism (in song), and Jews fleeing from Russian pogroms swell the streets and sweatshops of New York’s Lower East Side, transforming the national soundscape with Yiddish labor anthems and laying the foundations of modern musical theater. The Mexican corrido becomes more prominent amidst white nativist hostility, and in California the Chinese community continues to pit their authentic songs of struggle against the slanders of minstrelsy and the insult of the Chinese Exclusion Act. On the western plains, the Lakota Ghost Dance and its attendant songs drive the US government into a panic born of ignorance, culminating in the massacre at Wounded Knee. With the frontier officially closed and white settler colonialism entrenched from sea to shining sea, the champions of Manifest Destiny look further westward, to the Pacific islands, where a songwriter named Lili’uokalani, the queen of Hawai’i, awaits her overthrow.

In the era of the two world wars, internationally minded American statesmen turned their attention to meeting two objectives. The first was to engage the United States more with the wider world; more particularly to embed the United States within an international system dominated by European states but, with the inclusion of Japan, becoming increasingly pluralistic. The second was to use this new American global consciousness to reform the international system so that it accorded with the standards of civilization and operated along commonly regarded civilized norms. The codification and promotion of international law was one of the key methods of achieving these objectives; not coincidentally, many, if not most, of the key American internationalists of the era were lawyers.

World War I reversed America’s foundational movement of westward settlement. Indeed, some commentators including President Wilson viewed America’s involvement, notwithstanding its eastward orientation, as an extension of Manifest Destiny. Given the Midwest’s democratic associations with pioneers and the Jeffersonian farmer, the notion of the war as a replacement for the frontier was inescapably linked to the region’s unique cultural iconography. This essay considers prose narratives that explore wartime reciprocities running between the Midwest and Europe. The Midwest not only sent hundreds of thousands of men but also increased agricultural production and exportation. Moreover, the region’s democratic heritage was drawn on to bolster support for the war. Conversely, German immigrants experienced xenophobic attacks, bringing the tensions of the war to the home front. Meanwhile, Midwestern soldiers in France were repeatedly struck by the similarity the countryside bore to their native topographies. By registering the topographical familiarity of the New World – and frequently comparing the war with the activities of pioneers – Midwestern writers variously explore, critique, and reject the idea of the war as a replacement for the frontier, or as a fulfillment of the democratic values enshrined in the region’s pioneer and agrarian culture.

The introduction sets forth the central claim of the book - that the United States has a record of ambassadors, ministers, envoys, and other diplomatic agents disobeying orders that no other country can match - and explains why this is: i.e. Americans' singular conception of the role of diplomacy in national life and how that conception has been translated into the organizational apparatus through which statecraft is conducted. I also contend that, for the most part, this perennial insubordination has been good for the United States, that America would be weaker, smaller, and less prosperous today had diplomats like Robert Livingston and Walter Hines Page not defied Washington and decided to chart thier own courses. In addition, I explain why I have chosen to employ a case-study approach to the subject, identifying several U.S. rogue diplomats who failed to make the "final cut" either because their disobedience did not rise to the level of my nine protagonists or because the consequences of that disobedience were not as momentous as, say, the Louisiana Purchase. Finally, I situate the book within the existing historiography, which, I note, has largely ignored America's uniqueness in this vital dimension of geopolitics.

Chapter 3 addresses the most brazen instance of rogue diplomacy in the annals of U.S. statecraft: envoy Nicholas Trist's all but single-handed forging of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo after he had been fired - not once but twice - by President James K. Polk. Trist's epochal act of mutiny obtained all the territory Polk had initially authorized him to demand - California, New Mexico, and Texas as far south as the Rio Grande - and at half the envisioned price: $15 million as opposed to $30 million. It also, I contend, saved the United States from the ordeal of a long, debilitating, and expensive guerrilla war with Mexico that would have poisoned U.S.-Latin American relations for over a century. Although Trist was ultimately arrested for his defiance of the president and spent the rest of his life working dead-end jobs to provide for his children, he did more than any other individual to make Manifest Destiny a reality. Trist's triumph, I argue, was in great part a consequence of his personality, for which the term "rebellious" could have been invented. I dig deep into Trist's life and career(s), establishing a constant pattern of behavior: he could not defer to authority, no matter how essential submission was to worldly success. This character defect, which would seem fatal for a diplomat, ironically facilitated Trist's great work in the winter of 1847-48.

This chapter explains how the Meiji Restoration embodied two profound contradictions. The new government described its actions and policies both as a “revival of ancient kingly rule” (ōsei fukko), but also as a revolution (isshin). These phrases were in nominally in opposition: fukko referred explicitly to the ancient past, while isshin declared on the contrary, that all was being made new. That contrast reveals how Meiji leaders embraced radical reform, but connected it to the renewal of ancient ways. While describing reform as ancient, the government also reconciled a celebration of Japanese uniqueness with the adoption of Western ideas and technologies. Government discourse therefore contained the dual tensions of “new vs. ancient” and “foreign vs. uniquely Japanese.” As this chapter reveals, these tensions are most evident in the iconography of Japanese banknotes, where the government sought to craft a national history that was both distinctly Japanese and analogous to Western models. The banknotes were thus simultaneously an emulation of the West and a celebration of ancient Japanese legends.