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Centering Black grief in the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination

On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth carried out the first presidential assassination in United States history. The euphoria resulting from General Lee’s surrender evaporated at the news of Abraham Lincoln’s murder. The nation—excepting many white Southerners—found itself consumed with grief, and no group mourned Lincoln more deeply than people of color. African Americans did not speak with a monolithic voice on social or political issues, but even Lincoln’s Black contemporaries who may not have approved of him while he was alive mourned his death, understanding its implications for their future.

Beginning with the assassination itself and chronicling Lincoln’s three-week-long national funeral, historian Leonne M. Hudson captures the profound sadness of Black Americans as they mourned the crafter of the Emancipation Proclamation and the man they thought of as their earthly Moses, father, friend, and benefactor. Hudson continues the narrative by detailing the postwar efforts of African Americans to gain citizenship and voting rights.

Black Americans in Mourning includes the tributes of prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, and Elizabeth Keckley, who raised their voices to honor Lincoln, as well as formal expressions of grief by institutions and organizations such as the United States Colored Troops. In a triumph of research, Hudson also features the voices of lesser-known Black people who mourned Lincoln across the country, showing that the outpouring of individual and collective grief helped set the stage for his enduring glorification.

Anderson leads readers through the tumultuous years just after World War II when the Roman Catholic Church in the American South struggled to reconcile its commitment to social justice with the legal and social heritage of Jim Crow society. Though these early efforts at reform, by and large, failed, they did serve to galvanize Catholic supporters and opponents of the Civil Rights Movement and provided a model for more successful efforts at desegregation in the '60s.

As a Jesuit himself, Anderson has access to archives that remain off-limits to other scholars. His deep knowledge of the history of the Catholic Church also allows him to draw connections between this historical period and the present. In the resistance to desegregation, Anderson finds expression of a distinctly American form of Catholicism, in which lay people expect Church authorities to ratify their ideas and beliefs in an almost democratic fashion. The conflict he describes is as much between popular and hierarchical models of the Church as between segregation and integration.

From food products to fashions and cosmetics to children’s toys, a wide range of commodities today are being marketed as “halal” (permitted, lawful) or “Islamic” to Muslim consumers both in the West and in Muslim-majority nations. However, many of these products are not authentically Islamic or halal, and their producers have not necessarily created them to honor religious practice or sentiment. Instead, most “halal” commodities are profit-driven, and they exploit the rise of a new Islamic economic paradigm, “Brand Islam,” as a clever marketing tool.

Brand Islam investigates the rise of this highly lucrative marketing strategy and the resulting growth in consumer loyalty to goods and services identified as Islamic. Faegheh Shirazi explores the reasons why consumers buy Islam-branded products, including conspicuous piety or a longing to identify with a larger Muslim community, especially for those Muslims who live in Western countries, and how this phenomenon is affecting the religious, cultural, and economic lives of Muslim consumers. She demonstrates that Brand Islam has actually enabled a new type of global networking, joining product and service sectors together in a huge conglomerate that some are referring to as the Interland. A timely and original contribution to Muslim cultural studies, Brand Islam reveals how and why the growth of consumerism, global communications, and the Westernization of many Islamic countries are all driving the commercialization of Islam.

Between 1918 and 1961, Brazil and the USSR maintained formal diplomatic ties for only thirty-one months, at the end of World War II. Yet, despite the official distance, the USSR is the only external actor whose behavior, real or imagined, influenced the structure of the Brazilian state in the twentieth century. In Brazil and the Soviet Challenge, 1917–1947, Stanley Hilton provides the first analysis in any language of Brazilian policy toward the Soviet Union during this period.

Drawing on American, British, and German diplomatic archives and unprecedented access to official and private Brazilian records, Hilton elucidates the connection between the Brazilian elite’s perception of a communist threat and the creation of the authoritarian Estado Novo (1937–1945), the forerunner of the post-1964 national security state. He shows how the 1935 communist revolt, prepared by Comintern agents, was a pivotal event in Brazilian history, making prophets of conservative alarmists and generating irresistible pressure for an authoritarian government to contain the Soviet threat. He details the Brazilian government’s secret cooperation with the Gestapo during the 1930s and its concomitant efforts to forge an anti-Soviet front in the Southern Cone. And he uncovers an unexplored aspect of Brazil’s national security policy, namely, the attempt to build counterintelligence capabilities not only within Brazil but also in neighboring countries.

While the history of the Brazilian communist movement has been extensively studied, this is the first work to explore how images of the Soviet Union and its policies influenced the Brazilian foreign policy elite. It will be important reading for all students of twentieth-century political history.