Vaughn Rasberry turns to black culture and politics for an alternative history of the totalitarian century. He shows how black writers reimagined the standard antifascist, anticommunist narrative through the lens of racial injustice, with the U.S. as a tyrannical force in the Third World but also an agent of Asian and African independence.

The Spanish Crown had initially hoped to establish an orderly aristocratic society in the New World. Yet from the late 1520s, Spanish and Indigenous people throughout the colonies radically challenged the social order. Surprisingly, they did so not through violence but through the power of paperwork: petitions, complaints, and legal testimony.

Peter Brown explores a revolutionary shift in thinking about the fate of the soul between 250 and 650 CE, showing how personal wealth in the pursuit of redemption led Church doctrine concerning the afterlife to evolve from speculation to firm reality. This new relationship to money set the stage for the Church's domination of medieval society.

Compared to the vast machinery surrounding Congress and the president, the Supreme Court is a tiny institution that can resolve only a small fraction of the constitutional issues that arise in any given year. Andrew Coan shows that this simple yet frequently ignored fact is essential to understanding how the Supreme Court makes constitutional law.

Douglas Baird takes stock of the current state of contract doctrine and in the process reinvigorates the classic framework of Anglo-American contract law, showing that Oliver Wendell Holmes's set of principles, properly understood, continues to provide the best guide to contracts for a new generation of students, practitioners, and judges.

Reinventing Examination and the State traces the ideological evolution of civil service and state-organized educational examinations in the twentieth-century China and Taiwan, showing how modern examination shaped new concepts of individual responsibility and contributed to the resilience of the state.

Brandon Bloch examines the remarkable transformation of German Protestantism after WWII. As avid nationalists and militarists, Protestant leaders had largely backed the Nazi regime. Yet after 1945, they reinvented themselves as champions of constitutional democracy and human rights—while also seeking to whitewash the Church’s past.

Focusing on a quantitative assessment of Brazil’s economic performance 1976–2009, Aldo Musacchio and Sergio Lazzarini analyze the rise of new species of state capitalism in which governments interact with private investors either as majority or minority shareholders in publicly-traded corporations or as financial backers of purely private firms.