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In the tumultuous year after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, 29-year-old Pete O’Neal became inspired by reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X and founded the Kansas City branch of the Black Panther Party (BPP). The same year, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared the BPP was the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” This book is the gripping story of O’Neal, one of the influential members of the movement, who now lives in Africa—unable to return to the United States but refusing to renounce his past. Arrested in 1969 and convicted for transporting a shotgun across state lines, O’Neal was free on bail pending his appeal when Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the BPP, was assassinated by the police. O’Neal and his wife fled the U.S. for Algiers. Eventually they settled in Tanzania, where they continue the social justice work of the Panthers through community and agricultural programs and host study-abroad programs for American students. Paul Magnarella—a veteran of the United Nations Criminal Tribunals and O’Neal’s attorney during his appeals process from 1997–2001—describes his unsuccessful attempts to overturn what he argues was a wrongful conviction. He lucidly reviews the evidence of judicial errors, the prosecution’s use of a paid informant as a witness, perjury by both the prosecution’s key witness and a federal agent, as well as other constitutional violations. He demonstrates how O’Neal was denied justice during the height of the COINTELPRO assault on black activists in the U.S.

An innovative global history of the American Civil War, Reckoning with Rebellion compares and contrasts the American experience with other civil and national conflicts that happened at nearly the same time—the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Polish Insurrection of 1863, and China’s Taiping Rebellion. Aaron Sheehan-Dean identifies surprising new connections between these historical moments across three continents. Sheehan-Dean shows that insurgents around the globe often relied on irregular warfare and were labeled as criminals, mutineers, or rebels by the dominant powers. He traces commonalities between the United States, British empire, Russian empire, and Chinese empire, all large and ambitious states willing to use violence to maintain their authority. These powers were also able to control how these conflicts were described, affecting the way foreigners perceived them and whether they decided to intercede. While the stories of these conflicts are now told separately, Sheehan-Dean argues, the participants understood them in relation to each other. When Union officials condemned secession, they pointed to the violence unleashed by the Indian Rebellion. When Confederates denounced Abraham Lincoln as a tyrant, they did so by comparing him to Tsar Alexander II. Sheehan-Dean demonstrates that the causes and issues of the Civil War were also global problems, revealing the important paradigms at work in the age of nineteenth-century nation-building.