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King seldom spoke publicly about the Sustainers and Reformers who preceded him or the powerful mentors who shaped him as a preacher. He understood perhaps that American culture wants utter authenticity of its leaders or feared that if he connected his debt to the black tradition, he would lose his integrity with white audiences. The sole on-the-record statement King made with regard to his own preaching happened in Atlanta one week after JFK's assassination. King was bedridden with flu but nevertheless permitted a long interview to a young student named Donald H. Smith.

This chapter examines the popular histories, memoirs, and biographies written in the five or so years after the assassination, and then turns to the later revisionist attacks on those elegiac accounts of the life and death of JFK. It also explores how the assassination has been dealt with by professional historians, including debates about the role of the death in shaping our sense of the meaning of the 1960s (is November 1963 when it all began to go horribly wrong?), and the role of counterfactual speculations about the significance of the assassination for the story of the Vietnam War (had he lived, would Kennedy have withdrawn US troops?).

Postwar American novelists Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, and James Ellroy have all been haunted by the Kennedy assassination and each has found in the event an emblematic story for the nation. This chapter begins with a brief overview of other assassination fictional writings. It then looks at the way that DeLillo, Mailer, and Ellroy have grappled with the death of JFK.

This chapter traces the evolution of Stone’s political consciousness and his articulation of America’s twentieth century outlook by revisiting JFK, the film that placed Stone centre-stage in this assault on establishment doctrine and routine. It then considers how that critique was honed in his subsequent feature films – W. - documentary work and in particular Comandante (2003) and South of the Border (2010). The chapter also revisits the debate about drama as history as well as locating Stone’s documentary work within that genre’s tradition and trends over recent years including the increasing presence of feature film aesthetics and entertainment values.

This chapter discusses how and why civil rights was a priority for President Johnson during his first two years in the White House. Within days of becoming president, after the shocking assassination of John F. Kennedy in Johnson's home state of Texas, LBJ signalled his overwhelming commitment to the civil rights cause. He met regularly with civil rights leaders to discuss legislative developments, the appointment of African Americans to key political positions, and the Great Society programs that benefited the African American community. The high point of his association with the civil rights movement came with the passage of two pieces of landmark legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Chapter 4 discusses the part played by the Selma to Montgomery marches in Johnson's legislative plans and examines the high political cost of his commitment to civil rights after his overwhelming victory in the 1964 presidential election

This chapter examines the film JFK in terms of the tension between the film’s formal innovations and its explicit aim to articulate a narrative of national cohesion. It argues that the film’s profusion of stylistic modes and idioms expresses the rupture of a once-unified national text. The film, thus, recuperates its radically discontinuous style by linking it to the absence of a unified national narrative, which it suggests as the foundation of community and the ground for all other narratives of human connection. JFK recalls the idea that modernist, antinarrative techniques, characterized by fragmentation, the explosion of the conventions of the traditional tale, and the dissociation or splitting of narrative functions, may be the most appropriate techniques for representing the historical reality of the contemporary period.

US assistance programs under the 1954 Agricultural Trade and Assistance Act (Public Law 480) put excess currency toward archaeology. “Winning hearts and minds” included the preservation and rehabilitation of historical monuments in-situ. These open-air museums represented a US commitment to research and tourism infrastructure. Yet, the branding and prestige of Egypt’s Abu Simbel broke the bank and led to a major shift in US policy that cut future funding for archaeological fieldwork. This chapter analyzes the correspondence of Lucius Battle at the US Department of State and US representative to UNESCO, as well as archaeologists Dr. George Hanfmann of Harvard University and director at Sardis and Dr. A. Henry Detweiler of Cornell University and president of the ASOR. I demonstrate the catastrophic consequences of the US Congressional decision for the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis and their vision to realize one of the largest restoration programs in Turkey at the time: the reconstruction of the Bath Gymnasium and Marble Court.