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The Japanese American Redress Movement refers to the various efforts of Japanese Americans from the 1940s to the 1980s to obtain restitution for their removal and confinement during World War II. This included judicial and legislative campaigns at local, state, and federal levels for recognition of government wrongdoing and compensation for losses, both material and immaterial. The push for redress originated in the late 1940s as the Cold War opened up opportunities for Japanese Americans to demand concessions from the government. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese Americans began to connect the struggle for redress with anti-racist and anti-imperialist movements of the time. Despite their growing political divisions, Japanese Americans came together to launch several successful campaigns that laid the groundwork for redress. During the early 1980s, the government increased its involvement in redress by forming a congressional commission to conduct an official review of the World War II incarceration. The commission’s recommendations of monetary payments and an official apology paved the way for the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and other redress actions. Beyond its legislative and judicial victories, the redress movement also created a space for collective healing and generated new forms of activism that continue into the present.

On April 17, 1895, the Qing dynasty ceded the province of Taiwan to Japan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki, ending the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895). Thereafter, Taiwan was governed as a colony of imperial Japan through 1945. Armed resistance to the Japanese occupiers flared from 1895 through 1915, and it continued sporadically into the 1930s. Tens of thousands of Taiwanese were killed, wounded, or displaced in the collateral damage that was part and parcel of Japanese state-building on the island. Taiwanese civil protest movements against Taiwan Government-General despotism crested between 1914 and 1934. Concurrently, Japanese politicians in Tokyo, administrators in Taiwan, and civilian settlers implemented various economic development and population management schemes. Deep water harbors, hydroelectric dams, agricultural research institutes, and an island-wide railway system were built, while functioning systems of commercial law, public health, and education were implemented. After the great depression hit in 1929, the Taiwan Government-General severely curtailed the activities of Taiwanese nationalists, communists, and labor organizers. From 1936, Taiwan became a hub for Japanese southward expansion into the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia. Thereafter, increased exploitation, surveillance, and militarization were coupled with intensified assimilation campaigns. After 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army recruited Taiwanese to serve as soldiers in Southeast Asia and Pacific Island campaigns. At least 200,000 Taiwanese were mobilized during World War II, as soldiers, auxiliaries, translators, medics, and laborers for Japan’s armed forces. Over 30,000 perished. Upon Japan’s surrender to the Allied Powers, sovereignty over Taiwan was transferred from the Government-General of Taiwan to the Republic of China, which formally assumed power on October 25, 1945.

Meteorology and military activities in China were closely interrelated during World War II. When the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, the Nationalist government, under ferocious assault by the Japanese military, withdrew deep into the Chinese interior. Meteorological research organizations and the air force also relocated to Sichuan, the latter setting up weather stations in the southwest and the northwest and reorganizing the armed forces’ meteorological intelligence system while the former made use of the resulting meteorological data to research various weather phenomena in western China, thereby shifting the focus of meteorology in China away from the coastal regions. However, by the start of World War II, aviation had already become an important means of waging war, and high-altitude weather data was highly sought after as military intelligence. Consequently, after instigating the war, Japan extended its meteorological stations in northwest China, engaged in high-altitude surveying and observation, and created an information system between the Japanese home territory and colonies. Japanese analysis of the resulting weather data maintained the safety of flight routes and was used for formulating military strategy. The Chinese government, in contrast, having recently relocated and with a weak air force, lacked the power to expand research on aeronautical meteorology during the initial phase of the war. It was not until after becoming allied with the United States in December 1941 that the government was able, with American technical support, to begin expanding meteorological observation posts and conducting high-altitude surveying and observation. Moreover, the inauguration of flights over the aerial supply route known as the Hump resulted in the discovery of the jet stream over the towering mountain ranges of southwestern China. World War II opened up the Chinese interior for meteorological research and, as a result of military applications, brought about greater understanding of high-altitude meteorology.

Most Germans supported Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship between 1933 and 1945. Yet, a small group of officers and politicians who did not support Hitler formed a clandestine anti-Nazi underground. Retrospectively known as the German Resistance Movement, it began its activity in 1938 with a desperate attempt to prevent war in Europe and culminated in the coup d’état and failed assassination attempt on Hitler of July 20, 1944. The resistance was led by General Ludwig Beck, former chief of the general staff, who resigned in 1938 because of significant disagreements with Hitler’s foreign policy. Beck supervised the work of three successive military directors, Colonel Hans Oster, Colonel Henning von Tresckow, and Colonel Claus Schenck von Stauffenberg. All three attempted to overthrow the Nazi regime, with different strategies shaped by the structure of their conspiratorial networks and the pressure of wartime conditions. Oster, a senior officer in the military intelligence service, tried to exploit his connections in the general staff to stage a coup in the name of the entire army. Tresckow led a vanguard underground of loosely connected cliques, designed to assassinate Hitler and then exploit the ensuing chaos to take power. Stauffenberg led a “wheel conspiracy,” a highly centralized underground, thinly spread over large parts of the Nazi empire. Under his leadership, the movement staged the famous coup of July 20, 1944. While the evidence clearly shows that the conspirators acted out of principled opposition to Nazi policies, their precise motives are still controversial. Were they moved by disgust at National Socialist war crimes, or more by the patriotic goal of saving Germany from a doomed war? In fact, the worldview of most conspirators saw the universal and the national as closely intertwined. This particular style of patriotic morality and moralistic patriotism is a key to understanding their motives, as well as to the debate on their complicity in National Socialist war crimes.

Over the past 150 years, the United States and Japan have developed one of the United States’ most significant international relationships, marked by a potent mix of cooperation and rivalry. After a devastating war, these two states built a lasting alliance that stands at the center of US diplomacy, security, and economic policy in the Pacific and beyond. Yet this relationship is not simply the product of economic or strategic calculations. Japan has repeatedly shaped American understandings of empire, hegemony, race, democracy, and globalization, because these two states have often developed in remarkable parallel with one another. From the edges of the international order in the 1850s and 1860s, both entered a period of intense state-building at home and imperial expansion abroad in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These imperial ambitions violently collided in the 1940s in an epic contest to determine the Pacific geopolitical order. After its victory in World War II, the United States embarked on an unprecedented occupation designed to transform Japan into a stable and internationally cooperative democracy. The two countries also forged a diplomatic and security alliance that offered crucial logistical, political, and economic support to the United States’ Cold War quest to prevent the spread of communism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Japan’s rise as the globe’s second-largest economy caused significant tension in this relationship and forced Americans to confront the changing nature of national power and economic growth in a globalizing world. However, in recent decades, rising tensions in the Asia-Pacific have served to focus this alliance on the construction of a stable trans-Pacific economic and geopolitical order.

Also known as the “Rape of Nanjing,” Nanjing Massacre refers to the mass killings of disarmed Chinese soldiers and civilians, as well as other atrocities such as rape and looting, committed by the Japanese troops after they occupied Nanjing in the winter of 1937–1938. It is widely regarded as one of the worst Japanese war crimes in World War II. Shortly after the Imperial Japanese Army entered the Chinese capital of Nanjing (previously written as Nanking) on December 13, 1937, Western newspapers reported horrific conditions in the fallen city including mass execution of Chinese captives. Wartime records, mostly compiled by a few Westerners who stayed in the city and organized a refugee zone, showed widespread Japanese atrocities of rape, random killing, and looting that continued for weeks. After Japan’s defeat in 1945, the Nanjing Massacre became a leading case of Japanese war crime at the military tribunals conducted by the victorious Allies between 1946 and 1948. Citing witness accounts and burial records, these tribunals put the total number of Chinese killed in the Nanjing area variously from 100,000 to over 300,000. In addition, they estimated that there had been around 20,000 cases of rape and that one third of the city had been destroyed by the Japanese troops within six weeks of occupation. Largely overlooked before the early 1970s, the Nanjing Massacre has since become a hotly contested issue in Japan and between Japan and China. In 1985, China opened a large memorial museum in Nanjing, where the number of 300,000 victims is on prominent display. The Chinese government has designated December 13 a day of national commemoration. Documents related to the Nanjing Massacre submitted by China have become part of the UNESCO Memory of the World registry. In recent decades, many important first-hand evidence has emerged and makes it both possible and necessary to reassess this historical event. Wartime Japanese military and personal records confirm that at least several tens of thousands of Chinese had been killed in mass executions that were condoned, if not ordered, by the high command of the Japanese army in China. Moreover, killing disarmed Chinese captives and atrocities against Chinese civilians had already begun well before Japanese troops reached Nanjing; many such atrocities continued long afterward, thus suggesting there was more than a temporary breakdown of Japanese army discipline in Nanjing. Western and Chinese accounts add vivid details of sexual violence, indiscriminate killings, and looting by Japanese soldiers. They also reveal grave errors on the part of the Chinese defense that likely made the situation worse. Despite these points of convergence among historians, however, there is still disagreement over the exact number of victims and causes of the Japanese atrocities in Nanjing.

Racism and xenophobia, but also resilience and community building, characterize the return of thousands of Japanese Americans, or Nikkei, to the West Coast after World War II. Although the specific histories of different regions shaped the resettlement experiences for Japanese Americans, Los Angeles provides an instructive case study. For generations, the City of Angels has been home to one of the nation’s largest and most diverse Nikkei communities and the ways in which Japanese Americans rebuilt their lives and institutions resonate with the resettlement experience elsewhere. Before World War II, greater Los Angeles was home to a vibrant Japanese American population. First generation immigrants, or Issei, and their American-born children, the Nisei, forged dynamic social, economic, cultural, and spiritual institutions out of various racial exclusions. World War II uprooted the community as Japanese Americans left behind their farms, businesses, and homes. In the best instances, they were able to entrust their property to neighbors or other sympathetic individuals. More often, the uncertainty of their future led Japanese Americans to sell off their property, far below the market price. Upon the war’s end, thousands of Japanese Americans returned to Los Angeles, often to financial ruin. Upon their arrival in the Los Angeles area, Japanese Americans continued to face deep-seated prejudice, all the more accentuated by an overall dearth of housing. Without a place to live, they sought refuge in communal hostels set up in pre-war institutions that survived the war such as a variety of Christian and Buddhist churches. Meanwhile, others found housing in temporary trailer camps set up by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), and later administered by the Federal Public Housing Authority (FPHA), in areas such as Burbank, Sun Valley, Hawthorne, Santa Monica, and Long Beach. Although some local religious groups and others welcomed the returnees, white homeowners, who viewed the settlement of Japanese Americans as a threat to their property values, often mobilized to protest the construction of these camps. The last of these camps closed in 1956, demonstrating the hardship some Japanese Americans still faced in integrating back into society. Even when the returnees were able to leave the camps, they still faced racially restrictive housing covenants and, when those practices were ruled unconstitutional, exclusionary lending. Although new suburban enclaves of Japanese Americans eventually developed in areas such as Gardena, West Los Angeles, and Pacoima by the 1960s, the pathway to those destinations was far from easy. Ultimately, the resettlement of Japanese Americans in Los Angeles after their mass incarceration during World War II took place within the intertwined contexts of lingering anti-Japanese racism, Cold War politics, and the suburbanization of Southern California.

For most of the Asian and Asian American writers published in the United States from 1937–1946, “fascism” was the most salient, global state of emergency, not the Japanese American incarceration. H. T. Tsiang, Ayako Ishigaki, and Carlos Bulosan had deep ties to the political left, and they used antifascism—a dominant rubric of the political left at the time—to connect the authoritarian nature of Imperial Japan to the violent nature of the racism they encountered in the United States. By simultaneously accessing the Second Sino-Japanese War, their lived experiences in the United States, and the contradictions of US global power, they labored to overcome the split across Asian American communities produced by US foreign policy and Japanese militarism. By placing the work of Asian and Asian American writers within wider discourses of fascism and empire in the period, one sees the valence of antifascism as a vehicle of solidarity within their transnational politics, as well as the stakes of resituating that rubric into Asian American critique.

During the World War II era, Uruguayan politicians, student groups, and ethnic associations, among others, engaged daily in various circulating dialogues that extended beyond their nation-state. The war mobilized and empowered several actors who were devoted to shaping Uruguayan politics and society, but who were also actively committed to a broader cause. Though often overlooked, transnational nonstate actors helped to mold the era’s social and political movements by seizing on universal pro-Allied and anti-fascist language. Several events in Uruguay, interpreted through the language of democracy by local activists, helped not just to inch along public sentiment concerning the threat of fascism but also to thrust government officials into direct action. Emblematic of these actors was Uruguayan university professor and editor for the New York–based Free World magazine, Hugo Fernández Artucio, who, with various degrees of success, sought to shape public opinion and policy via his internationally broadcasted concerns about the Nazi menace. Though his anti-fascist crusading was often welcomed, as it helped to facilitate certain Uruguayan and US government policies, at times it was deemed as “impracticable” or “dangerous” in the view of government officials.

Josefa Llanes Escoda (1898–1945) was one of the early social workers in the Philippines. As a social worker she moved from the residual approach and initiated sustainable welfare programs. She was also an advocate for decent work for women. She was able to merge her role as a social worker and as a suffragist by mobilizing members of the National Federation of Women’s Club (NFWC) of the Philippines to educate women on the importance of the right to vote. During World War II, when the social welfare system was in disarray, she mobilized members of the NFWC to feed prisoners of war and other displaced persons. In her own way, she was a freedom fighter.

Ernest Frederic Witte (1904–1986) was an educator and administrator. His work in the social welfare field, particularly during World War II, was influential both in the United States and internationally. He was among the first to deal with survivors of the Nazi death camps.

The lives of Latin American Japanese were disrupted during World War II, when their civil and human rights were suspended. National security and continental defense were the main reasons given by the American countries consenting to their uprooting. More than 2,000 ethnic Japanese from Peru, Panama, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, and Nicaragua were transferred as “illegal aliens” to internment camps in the United States. Initially, US and Latin American agencies arrested and deported male ethnic Japanese, regardless of their citizenship status. During the second stage, women and children joined their relatives in the United States. Most forced migration originated in Peru. Brazil and Mexico established similar displacement programs, ordering the population of Japanese descent to leave the coastal zones, and in the case of Mexico the border areas. In both countries, ethnic Japanese were under strict monitoring and lost property, employment, and family and friend relationships, losses that affected their health and the opportunity to support themselves in many cases. Latin American Japanese in the United States remained in camps operated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the army for the duration of the war and were among the last internees leaving the detention facilities, in 1946. At the conclusion of World War II, the Latin American countries that had agreed to the expulsion of ethnic Japanese limited greatly their return. Some 800 internees were deported to Japan from the United States by the closure of the camps. Those who remained in North America were allowed to leave the camps to work in a fresh produce farm in Seabrook, New Jersey, without residency or citizenship rights. In 1952, immigration restrictions for former Latin American internees were lifted. Latin American governments have not apologized for the uprooting of the ethnic Japanese, while the US government has recognized it as a mistake. In 1988, the United States offered a symbolic compensation to all surviving victims of the internment camps in the amount of $20,000. In contrast, in 1991, Latin American Japanese survivors were granted only $5,000.

Anti-Semitism has deep roots in Argentina, which has the largest Jewish community in Latin America. Its violent and rhetorical manifestations have shifted over time. The so-called Jewish question that fueled anti-Semitism in Argentina gained momentum during changing local and international sociopolitical constellations. Three constellations in which the Jewish question was exacerbated by local and external factors need to be addressed: the impact of European fascisms, World War II, and the emergence of populist nationalist movements; the use of anti-Semitism associated with anticommunism during the first Cold War; and implications for the security of Jews in Argentina due to the unresolved conflict in the Middle East.

The Japanese colonial empire was composed of territories adjacent to the Japanese archipelago, ranging from Southern Sakhalin in the north to Taiwan in the south. Unlike most European powers, Japan did not acquire colonial territories that were far away from the metropolis; rather, it did so within the region in which it was located—East Asia. The geographical proximity between the metropolis and its colonial territories influenced not only the structure of the colonial administration, racial hierarchies in the empire, and colonial and metropolitan identities but also the rhetorical strategies that were used to legitimize colonial rule. Although the government generally envisioned a European-style empire, the creation of which would earn Japan the respect of the Great Powers and eventually lead to the recognition of Japanese equality, a significant number of politicians, writers, and activists argued that it was Japan’s mission to unite the Asian people and protect or liberate them from Western colonial rule. These discourses have been summarized under the term “Pan-Asianism,” a movement and an ideology that emerged in the late 19th century and became mainstream by the time World War I began. However, although some advocates of Pan-Asianism were motivated by sincere feelings of solidarity, the expansion of Japanese colonial rule and the escalation of war in China and throughout Asia in the 1930s brought to the fore an increasing number of contradictions and ambiguities. By the time World War II started, Pan-Asianism had become a cloak of Japanese expansionism and an instrument to legitimize the empire, a process that culminated in the Greater East Asia Conference of 1943. The contradictions between Japan’s brutal wars in Asia and the ideology of Asian solidarity continue to haunt that country’s relations with its neighbors, by way of ambiguous historical memories of the empire and war in contemporary Japanese politics and society.

Understood as a system of actions designed to reduce the suffering of distant humans across the world, humanitarianism is intimately connected to storytelling as a means of raising awareness and generating empathy. Humanitarian beliefs and efforts are as diverse as the religious and secular moral philosophies that motivate them. Both aid organizations and government leaders have drawn on humanitarian discourses to gather support for such things as shipments of clothing and medical supplies to those in need, resettlement opportunities for refugees, and even military interventions in the Global South. As cultural platforms that promote themes of human dignity as well as liberal freedom and autonomy, humanitarianism and literature share long histories of influencing each other since the late 18th century. With the adoption of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in response to the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany during World War II, humanitarianism and the related discourse of human rights have received an increase in popular and literary interest in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Whether or not these discourses are enough to counter the incredible violence of the contemporary period has been the subject of much debate. Global literatures support and critique humanitarianism and human rights as they retell histories of disaster, warfare, and state violence. As literature continues to variously imagine the causes of and responses to world suffering, the intersections of humanitarianism, human rights, and global literature embody a rich site of contestation and possibility for study in the 21st century.

Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s gunboat diplomacy provided the Japanese with the first known opportunity to observe a major American performing art inspired by black culture: the minstrel show. The “Ethiopian entertainment,” held on the USS Powhatan, presented “Colored ‘Gemmen’ of the North” and “Plantation ‘Niggas’ of the South” to shogunate officials four times in 1854. While this performance initiated a binational cultural exchange, the 1878 tour of the Fisk Jubilee Singers was an epoch-making event; the group’s successful concerts, given in three cities, offered Japanese audiences their first opportunity to appreciate genuine African-American artistic pieces—spirituals, distinguished from blackface minstrelsy. The Japanese attitude toward African Americans at this initial stage was a mixture of pity and wonder. A growing self-awareness of Japan’s inferior status vis‐à‐vis Western nations, however, gave rise to a strong interest in slavery and racial oppression. The popularity of studies focused on American race problems since 1905, including multiple versions of the biography of Booker T. Washington, attests to prewar intellectuals’ attempt to define the position of the Japanese people by both analogy and contrast with African Americans. In the meantime, a partial translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), serialized from 1897 to 1898 in a liberal paper, the Kokumin, and a translation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) in 1921 paved the way for Japan’s introduction to the New Negro literature, the first major body of black writings gaining in popularity in the American literary market in the 1920s. Successive publications of works by W. E. B. DuBois, Walter White, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes in translation in the 1930s generated a distinctive artistic backdrop comparable to the American Jazz Age. Various authors of the era—from novelists to haiku poets—learned about literary motifs informed by blackness and began to elaborate their own racial representations to delineate the affectional substructure of modernity. Even though World War II briefly disrupted the expansion of the Japanese literary imagination through the creative inspiration of African Americans, a translation of Richard Wright’s Native Son within the year of the original publication (1940) signifies the persistence of interest throughout the war period. Indeed, defeat in 1945, resentment over the subsequent U.S. occupation, coincident remorse for their country’s imperial aggression, and anger at its eventual rearmament following the Korean War, in conjunction, reoriented postwar authors toward the development of black characters in diverse works over the following four decades. In addition, the civil rights movement facilitated studies in African-American literature in universities from the 1960s onward. Today, African-American literature is one of the most popular areas in English departments in Japan; one can find virtually every subject from the slave narrative to rap music in undergraduate course syllabi.

Evelio Grillo, the son of black Cuban cigar makers in Tampa, Florida, was born in 1919, in Ybor City, an immigrant enclave whose population was predominantly Cuban, Spanish, and Sicilian. When the Cuban population, which was the largest of the three primary ethnic cohorts, had started arriving, in 1885, from Key West and Cuba, its members were approximately 15 percent Afro-Cuban, or darker skinned, and 75 percent white, or lighter-skinned. The number of black Cubans later dwindled significantly, in the 1930s and 1940s, because of the Depression and drastically reduced employment opportunities. Many Cuban immigrants headed North to New York City and other urban centers in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic searching for and finding better work, more educational opportunities, and more Afro-Latin people and communities to mingle and join forces with, which led to their major involvement in Northern civil rights efforts. Grillo grew up on the “unofficial” border between Ybor City proper and a small, marginalized, African American area between Ybor City and downtown Tampa known as the Scrub. Early on, he came to feel somewhat alienated from his white Cuban counterparts, despite the fact he and they shared a great deal in common—language, history, culture, and religion. The idea of racial unity that had been promoted by José Martí and other Cuban leaders and intellectuals in the years leading up to and during the 1895 Cuban War of Independence, and which had never really totally existed, was quickly abandoned. Eventually, thanks to an extraordinary school experience that took him out of Tampa and to Washington, DC, he became more comfortable and functional in the African American world of Tampa and elsewhere. Grillo ended up receiving a first-rate education at Dunbar High School in the Capitol; earned a bachelor of arts degree at Xavier University, in New Orleans, Louisiana; took three years of courses in Latin American history at Columbia University, in New York City, after the war; and then moved to Oakland, California, to work and earn a master’s degree in social welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. After completing his undergraduate degree at Xavier, Grillo had been drafted into the US Army—the segregated army—and was shipped to India with the 853rd Engineering Battalion to build roads. While there, the developed many talents that he would later synthesize and that served him well later on in life, for example, community organizing, administration, research and writing, communications, and dealing with institutionalized racism and discrimination. Upon moving to Oakland, he took a position in a community center, and after earning his master’s degree from Berkeley, he continued to be involved in community, social, and political organizing. He was active in in local politics and black, Mexican, and Latina/o affairs and initiatives at the national, governmental, and nonprofit levels, working, for example, for the City of Oakland, in the administration of President Jimmy Carter, the War on Poverty, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Community Service Organization, and had the opportunity to work with the likes of Herman Gallegos, César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, Fred Ross, and Saul Alinsky.

In May 1906, museum workers from across the country gathered in New York City at the American Museum of Natural History for the first annual meeting of the American Association of Museums (AAM). Over the course of two days, AAM members elected officers, ratified a constitution, and shared ideas about how best to collect, store, and display objects and specimens. The meeting culminated with a resolution to create a formal partnership with the National Education Association (NEA). AAM members’ interest in linking their work with the NEA signified that by the early 20th century, most museum leaders agreed that educating the public was a priority. This commitment to education shaped exhibition and collecting practices and the services that museums provided and expanded the power of museum visitors and audiences. While administrators, curators, and exhibit preparers often agreed on the collective goal of educating the public, their approaches varied. How museum education was defined and assessed depended on the type of museum in which one was employed, and it changed over time in response to broader social, cultural, and political forces. By 1945, however, museums of all types had formalized and institutionalized their practices in ways that placed education at the core of their purpose and actions.

Since the late 19th century, the relationship between journalists and the makers of US foreign policy has been both cooperative and contentious. Reporters depend on government officials for information about policy decisions and their implementation. The White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon use the news media to build support for their policies and, at times, to communicate directly with allies and adversaries. Since World War I, presidential administrations have developed increasingly sophisticated methods to manage the news and influence public understanding of international affairs. Wartime censorship has been one tool of news management. Self-censorship, however, has also affected coverage of international affairs, as journalists have voluntarily refrained from publishing information for fear of impairing national security or undermining support for US wartime or Cold War policies. Allegations of bias and sensationalism became acrimonious during the Vietnam War and have continued to shape the debate about accurate, critical, and legitimate reporting. Arguments over “fake news,” which became commonplace during the presidency of Donald J. Trump, have many precursors, as both journalists and government officials have been responsible for misleading or distorted news coverage of international affairs since the Spanish–American War.

Since the founding of the United States of America, coinciding with the height of the Atlantic slave trade, U.S. officials have based their relations with West Africa primarily on economic interests. Initially, these interests were established on the backs of slaves, as the Southern plantation economy quickly vaulted the United States to prominence in the Atlantic world. After the U.S. abolition of the slave trade in 1808, however, American relations with West Africa focused on the establishment of the American colony of Liberia as a place of “return” for formerly enslaved persons. Following the turn to “legitimate commerce” in the Atlantic and the U.S. Civil War, the United States largely withdrew from large-scale interaction with West Africa. Liberia remained the notable exception, where prominent Pan-African leaders like Edward Blyden, W. E. B. DuBois, and Marcus Garvey helped foster cultural and intellectual ties between West Africa and the Diaspora in the early 1900s. These ties to Liberia were deepened in the 1920s when Firestone Rubber Corporation of Akron, Ohio established a long-term lease to harvest rubber. World War II marked a significant increase in American presence and influence in West Africa. Still focused on Liberia, the war years saw the construction of infrastructure that would prove essential to Allied war efforts and to American security interests during the Cold War. After 1945, the United States competed with the Soviet Union in West Africa for influence and access to important economic and national security resources as African nations ejected colonial regimes across most of the continent. West African independence quickly demonstrated a turn from nationalism to ethnic nationalism, as civil wars engulfed several countries in the postcolonial, and particularly the post-Cold War, era. After a decade of withdrawal, American interest in West Africa revived with the need for alternative sources of petroleum and concerns about transnational terrorism following the attacks of September 11, 2001.