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Why is government distrust rampant, especially in the rural United States? This book offers a simple explanation: corporations and the government together dispossess rural people of their prosperity, and even their property. Based on four years of fieldwork, this eye-opening assessment plays out in a mixed-race Georgia community that hosted the first nuclear power reactors sanctioned by the government in three decades. This work serves as an explanatory mirror of prominent trends in current American politics. Churches become havens for redemption, poaching a means of retribution, guns a tool of self-defense, and nuclear power a faltering solution to global warming as governance strays from democratic principles. In the absence of hope or trust in rulers, rural racial tensions fester and divide. The book tells of the rebellion that unfolds as the rights of corporations supersede the rights of humans.

This book examines the devastating impact of Japan's invasion and occupation of the lower Yangzi on China's emerging modern-business community. Arguing that the war gravely weakened Chinese capitalists, the author demonstrates that in occupied areas the activities of businessmen were closer to collaboration than to heroic resistance. He shows how the war left an important imprint on the structure and culture of Chinese business enterprise by encouraging those traits that had allowed it to survive in uncertain and dangerous times. Although historical memory emphasizes the entrepreneurs who followed the Nationalist armies to the interior, most Chinese businessmen remained in the lower Yangzi area. If they wished to retain any ownership of their enterprises, they were forced to collaborate with the Japanese and the Wang Jingwei regime in Nanjing. Characteristics of business in the decades prior to the war, including a preference for family firms and reluctance to become public corporations, distrust of government, opaqueness of business practices, and reliance on personal connections (guanxi) were critical to the survival of enterprises during the war and were reinforced by the war experience. Through consideration of the broader implications of the many responses to this complex era, the book contributes to larger discussions of the dynamics of World War II and of Chinese business culture.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, Americans imagined the death penalty in ways that reflected and reinforced broader shifts in the nation's cultural and political landscape. As the core constituency of an insurgent New Right, white, middle class Americans became increasingly disenchanted with the welfare state and embraced more libertarian understandings of freedom, one in which the state refused to engage in social engineering and instead returned to its first duty: to maintain order. The death penalty was symptomatic of a state that was returning to fundamentals. The left, however, was also implicated in this new political culture. Civil libertarians grew increasingly critical of a rehabilitation-centered criminal justice system.They looked askance at the discretion it vested in those state actors charged with rehabilitating offenders, arguing that they exercised power over inmates in a biased, tyrannical, and personality-altering way. In this ideological context, retributive approaches to punishment, including the death penalty, gained renewed respectability. To its supporters and even, at times, its detractors, capital punishment was imagined as a form of punishment that would showcase the power of individuals to exert control over their world. These claims are illustrated through in-depth analyses of how the state that killed and those it executed were represented in the legal, political, and fictional imagination. While a rhetoric of freedom initially endowed capital punishment with regenerative properties, its implementation gradually became mired in the very legalism and bureaucracy it was supposed to transcend.