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This introduction sets the historical context for examining religious pluralism in America. The “first diversity” consisted primarily of various Protestants gathered in regional denominational configurations, with a few localities essaying radical experiments allowing different degrees of religious freedom. The American Revolutionary Settlement of Religion set up a constitutional framework that affirmed the value of religious liberty, facilitating the multiplication of different churches, but this development coincided with the flourishing of a Protestant nationalism that cast the United States as a “Christian” state whose liberties depended on minimizing the presence of non-Protestant faiths. The twentieth century's dramatic rise in the proportion of Americans adhering to non-Christian faiths (or none at all) played out amid this ongoing tension between the value placed on freedom of worship, which encouraged religious diversity, and ideologically driven concerns about maintaining the nation's historic Protestant identity.

In reference to religion, the term “pluralism” intends something more than “diversity,” which refers to the simple fact that differences exist. Pluralism, rather, involves understanding the diverse religious groups in society for what they are, appreciating them and respecting them; it is a strategy for managing diversity. Over the course of centuries, religious diversity in America has increased, as has interaction between different religious groups—first among different kinds of Protestants, then with Catholics and ultimately members of non-Christian traditions as well. Concurrently, a rising number of religious groups, even non-Christian ones, have come to be tolerated and accepted as belonging to the religious mainstream. Increasing pluralism may, however, be creating less certitude among believers about the distinctiveness of their own traditions, a condition that, if true, may paradoxically be reducing the diversity for which pluralism purports to be the solution.

This essay is a history of video games in the United States of America, and it contains a description of the American video game industry and how it has grown. The focus is mainly on how American history and culture shaped the video game as it was invented and as the industry grew, and what the character of American video games might be.

The introduction sets up the differing perspectives and world views of feminist and conservative women in the last half of the twentieth century and situates their politics in the American Midwestern state of Indiana. Key terms and definitions for feminist, conservative, and conspiracy are provided, along with a general understanding of conspiracism and the history of conspiracy in the United States.

This chapter focuses on William Dodd's reaction to Woodrow Wilson's victory in the presidential election held on November 5, 1912. It first considers Dodd's bid to become a spokesman for Virginia's liberals and his disappointment over his exclusion from the Wilson circle. It then looks at Dodd's paper on “Profitable Fields of Investigation in American History, 1815–1865,” in which he urged a course of study that would first “treat of actual forces, social, economic, and political,” and second “devote more space and more intelligent and more sympathetic attention to the needs and conditions of...the West and the South.” It also discusses Dodd's return to Chicago, his decision to concentrate on writing and editing a New American history survey, and the completion of a first draft of his book Riverside History of the United States. The chapter concludes by assessing Dodd's continuing concern with a “militarist” or “reactionary” threat to democracy in the United States.

Martin Luther King's tortuous odyssey from civil rights activist to antiwar spokesman is explored in detail in chapters 5 and 6. Chapter 5 describes how LBJ's powerful and eloquent speech on the Voting Rights Act moved King and set the stage for his anguished response to the war. The narrative traces King's long-standing commitment to peace and his belief that the civil rights struggle was a global fight against colonialism and imperialism. The intent is to debunk the idea of King as a convenient hero. King was always a radical. A few weeks after the Watts riots, King spoke against the carnage in Vietnam and called for a cease-fire and China's acceptance into the United Nations. This provoked a fusillade of criticism from the liberal establishment. Reeling from these attacks, King confessed to his aides that he didn't have the stamina to be both a civil rights leader and an antiwar activist. Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was wiretapping King's conversations, which only fed LBJ's paranoia that King was indeed a communist. For the next few years, King muted his opposition but continued to anguish over the war.

The religious diversity surrounding Catholics in twentieth-century America prompted them to justify their place in that society by retrieving examples of tolerance and accommodation from a previously suppressed past. As Catholics increasingly interacted with members of other faiths, long-held attitudes that valorized a sense of Catholicism's absolute superiority to other religions and legitimated Catholics holding themselves aloof corroded. These developments were amplified by the pronouncements of Vatican II, which provided Catholic theological foundations for religious freedom and the endorsement of religious pluralism. On the level of official practice and rhetoric, the post-conciliar American Church adopted a wide range of internal reforms manifesting an ecumenical spirit, and established a series of unprecedented programs of collaboration with non-Catholics. Nevertheless, the experience of internal pluralism—theological diversity within the American Church—has inspired conflict, notably accusations that pluralism fosters “indifferentism,” the notion that no religion is better than another.

Chapter 3 focuses on the simultaneity of the Johnson administration's escalation of the war in Vietnam and passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act, marking the end of de jure segregation. While the African American public and the mainstream civil rights movement were delighted with the end of segregation, the war in Vietnam gripped SNCC and other militants from the beginning. They were struck by the administration's hypocrisy: it was willing to send troops to faraway Vietnam but reluctant to send federal marshals to protect civil rights workers in the Deep South. For a brief moment in early 1965, the civil rights and antiwar movements overlapped at the SDS march on Washington. By the end of the year, the passions unleashed by the Vietnam War were displacing civil rights as the nation's most pressing problem. As Johnson militarized the war, the riots in Watts erupted, antiwar dissent grew, and SNCC debated whether to formally take a stand against the war. The war in Vietnam diverted attention from the civil rights movement, and dissent and debate over the war aggravated preexisting generational and ideological schisms in the movement. It was a harbinger of future strife.

The introduction begins by exploring the culture of ‘agricultural giants,’ enormous, precisely-measured animals and plants. These giants were products of a massive, transatlantic culture of knowledge-making: “agricultural improvement.” The introduction traces improvement’s origins in Great Britain and its adoption by wealthy landholders in the U.S. as well as by colonial officials throughout the British Empire. It asserts the centrality of New York State to U.S. improvement, and outlines New Yorkers’ experience of rapid agricultural change in the decades after the opening of the Erie Canal. It describes improvements’ shift from an instrument of landlords’ developmentalism to a much broader community and set of practices. It points to the role of new commercial networks in this expansion, and shows how improving science increasingly created knowledge about goods. Finally the chapter sketches the features of improving science—its focus on the futures that its adherents hoped to create and saw as natural, its dependence on financially-interested experts, its borrowing of forms of credibility from the broader U.S. economy, and its profound questions about the nature of value. In improvement, science did not provide stability, but rather fueled competing stories of the future and volatile and uncertain systems of value.

William Bergen argues that such a turn-around occurred only once Grant was able to institute his own aggressive brand of warfare with the armies of the James and Potomac – once he finally, and completely, took command. But such was not an easy task. Unlike Lee who had command of a single army – and had led that army for two years by the time of the Overland Campaign – as general in chief, Grant commanded all the Union forces while accompanying an unfamiliar army in an unfamiliar region. He would first need to get to know his various armies and commanders, and equally important, break the culture of caution that had developed in the Union’s largest and most visible army, the Army of the Potomac. Finally freed from political constraints after the presidential election in November 1864, Grant appointed army and corps commanders who matched his style and temperament thus enabling him to shape the Union forces that would succeed in one final campaign.

This essay explores how Philip Sheridan's operations during the Appomattox campaign represented the culmination of an evolutionary process of the Union cavalry arm in the East from 1861 though the spring of 1865. Sheridan's aggressive style of command and gradual maturation proved central to its success. There were other senior cavalry officers in the Army of the Potomac who might have commanded the Cavalry Corps in 1864 including Alfred Pleasonton or David McMurtie Gregg. But Sheridan’s ascendancy and his leadership style ultimately restored a measure of fluidity to military operations in Virginia that had evaporated in the Overland Campaign. With an independent command in the Shenandoah Valley during the fall of 1864, Sheridan had deployed infantry in conjunction with the cavalry units, many of which carried Spencer repeating carbines – a tactic that would prove key as Federal forces pursued Lee’s army the following spring.

The chapter is a comment on Lynn Hunt’s reconsideration, in the same volume, of a crucial moment in the history of human rights when in North America and in France for the first time a ‘self-evidence’ of certain rights of ‘all men’ was claimed in constitutional discourse and documents, and a fundamental shift occurred in the explanation of human rights from a religious framework towards a secular one. The first part of the comment is devoted to the drafting history of the 1776 Declaration of Independence of the United States and to the meaning of the claim to ‘self-evidence’ in the Declaration. In a second part, the author returns to Lynn Hunt’s analysis of the limitations of the actual enjoyment of rights in eighteenth-century North America and France. The third part of the comment deals with the importance, or rather unimportance, of the notion of the self-evidence of human rights in the present age. It is argued that the idea of self-evidence proclaimed in 1776 failed to find general recognition, so that we must search for a new credible foundation of universal human rights.