Faculty Books

Title: Martyrs and Players In Early Modern England: Tragedy, Religion and Violence On Stage
Publisher: Ashgate
Year: 2014

Martyrs and Players argues that the tragedy of Shakespeare and his contemporaries can be better understood within the context Reformation-era religious culture. Specifically, the book asserts that the tragedians were reflecting a crisis of conscience within their society over acts of religious violence and coercion. Reading plays like King Lear, Doctor Faustus and Samson Agonistes alongside religious writers (foremost among them the martyrologist John Foxe), the book explores how Protestant England negotiated the ethical confrontation between collective power and the individual victim.

Title: Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Year: 2017

In her first nonfiction collection, award-winning novelist Rilla Askew casts an unflinching eye on American history, both past and present. As she traverses a line between memoir and social commentary, Askew places herself—and indeed all Americans—in the role of witness to uncomfortable truths about who we are. Through nine linked essays, Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place evokes a vivid impression of the United States: police violence and gun culture, ethnic cleansing and denied history, spellbinding landscapes and brutal weather. To render these conditions in the particulars of place, Askew spotlights the complex history of her home state. From the Trail of Tears to the Tulsa Race Massacre to the Murrah Federal Building bombing, Oklahoma appears as a microcosm of our national saga. Yet no matter our location, Askew argues, we must own our contradictory selves—our violence and prejudices, as well as our hard work and generosity—so the wounds of division in our society can heal.

“Askew offers Oklahoma history as a microcosm of our national saga as Americans, insisting--and demonstrating--that our personal and state stories fall within national and global narratives. Askew's essays are particularly timely today, her themes playing out in the Black Lives Matter movement. Few books offer such a clear, engaging, and revealing evocation of particular Oklahoma sites and scenes, which Askew repeatedly places within the larger national and global frame. Most American is an important book, an artful contribution to literature that raises vital issues for Oklahoma and national conversations.”

Title: Kind of Kin
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Year: 2013

Using anti-immigration laws in Oklahoma and Alabama as inspiration, Kind of Kin is a story of self-serving lawmakers and complicated lawbreakers, Christian principle and political scapegoating. When a church-going, community-loved, family man is caught hiding a barn-full of undocumented immigrant workers near a small town in southeastern Oklahoma, he is arrested and sent to jail. This shocking development sends ripples through the town—dividing neighbors, causing riffs amongst his family, and spurring controversy across the state. Longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Prize and a finalist for the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, and the Oklahoma Book Award, Kind of Kin is a funny and poignant novel that explores what happens when upstanding people are pushed too far—and how an ad-hoc family, and ultimately, an entire town, will unite to protect their own.

Title: Harpsong
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Year: 2007

Harlan Singer, a harmonica-playing troubadour, shows up in the Thompson family’s yard one morning. He steals their hearts with his music, and their daughter with his charm. Soon he and his fourteen-year-old bride, Sharon, are on the road, two young hobos hitchhiking and hopping freights across the Great Plains at the height of the Great Depression. In this moving, redemptive tale inspired by Oklahoma folk heroes, Rilla Askew continues her exploration of the American story. Harpsong is a novel of love and loss, of adventure and renewal, and of a wayfaring orphan’s search for home—all set to the sounds of Harlan’s haunting music. The book received seven literary awards, including the Oklahoma Book Award, the Western Heritage Award, the WILLA Award from Women Writing the West, and the Violet Crown Award from the Writers League of Texas.

Title: Fire in Beulah
Publisher: Viking/Penguin
Year: 2001

Askew's acclaimed novel about the Tulsa Race Riot, Fire in Beulah, is set during the tense days of the Oklahoma oil rush. The book centers on the complex relationship between Althea Whiteside, an oil wildcatter's high-strung white wife, and her enigmatic black maid, Graceful. Their juxtaposing stories—and those of others close to them—unfold against a volatile backdrop of oil-boom opulence, fear, hatred, lynchings that climax in the 1921 race war, when whites burned the city's prosperous black community to the ground and hundreds died, forever shaping the course of Oklahoma’s—and, indeed, America’s—history. Winner of the American Book Award and the Myers Books Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights, Fire in Beulah was selected for Oklahoma’s one-book/one-state reading program, Oklahoma Reads Oklahoma, in 2007.

Title: The Mercy Seat
Publisher: Viking/Penguin
Year: 1997

Set in the harsh and beautiful Ouachita Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, Askew’s first novel is an unblinking vision of the settling of the American West, told first by a ten-year-old girl, Matt Lodi, and echoed in the voices of the white townspeople who migrate into Indian Territory. The Mercy Seatfollows young Mattie as she struggles to hold her disintegrating family together with a mix of spite, loyalty, and fierce will. When she is struck down by fever, a Choctaw healer brought in to pull the girl back from the territory of the dead recognizes in her a powerful gift of visions. But Matt turns away even from this imperative call in her desperation to restore her family to their home back East. As bitter conflict mounts between her father and his brother, so does the war between her visions and her will - and in the final, unavoidable clash, Mattie grips both mercy and destruction in her hands. A finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, nominated for the Dublin IMPAC Prize, and winner of the Oklahoma Book Award and the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, The Mercy Seat established Rilla Askew early on in her career as a noted chronicler of the American story.

Editor: Joyce Coleman with Kathryn A. Smith (Art History, New York University) and Mark Cruse (French, Arizona State University)
Title: The Social Life of Illumination: Manuscripts, Images, and Communities in the Late Middle Ages
Publisher: Brepols
Year: 2013

The Medieval Review (Oct. 31, 2014): "This edited collection of essays provides a vivid and up-to-date examination of the 'social life' of late medieval French and English illuminated manuscripts. ... The editors should be commended on their production of an unusually coherent and strong field of essays that may be relevant to scholars interested in medieval literature, art history, drama, family and political history, the history of music, religion and piety, and the role of women."
H-France Review 14 (2014): "Each insightful essay contextualizes the visual within a literary and historical interpretation and provides a thoughtful yet clear assessment, accompanied by adequate illustrations to support arguments. ... The Social Life of Illumination offers well-argued and well-written essays ... [that] connect and interweave aspects of social history and iconography into political currents and events happening on both sides of the Channel."

Title: Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France 
Publisher: Cambridge University Press 
Year: 1996; paperback edition 2005

This book assembles and analyzes in depth, for the first time, an overwhelming mass of evidence about the reading practices of late-medieval literate elites. Coleman establishes that, contrary to assumptions that were and are still prevalent among scholars, these audiences preferred to share in a public reading of books rather than to read them privately. Coleman's book offers the first sustained critique of Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy (1982), which has encouraged medievalists to underestimate the nature and role of late medieval public reading. 
Times Literary Supplement, July 25, 1997: 'This is ground-breaking work, conducted with impressive wit and incision, and it yields a great deal of intellectual fruit. ... It ought to be a turning-point in our approach to literacy and in our construction of the history of reading."

Title: International Bohemia: Scenes of Nineteenth-Century Life
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Year: 2013

This book is concerned with how the vagabond word bohemia migrated across various national borderlines over the course of the nineteenth century and, in doing so, was developed, transformed, contested, or rejected. It focuses on how individuals and groups sought to take possession of this word and to make it serve as the basis for the elaboration of identities, passions, cultural forms, politics, and histories that they wanted to bring to life. It begins with the invention of the modern sense of this word in Paris during the 1830s and 1840s and then traces some of its most important twists and turns, through the rest of this era and into the early years of the twentieth century, in the United States, England, Italy, and, to a lesser extent, Spain and Germany.

Title: Unhuman Culture
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Year: 2006

“For better or worse, ours is now an unhuman culture”: such is the argument of this book, which analyzes, among other things, the aesthetics of misanthropy, Gothic literature, Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War, the iconoclasm of the suffragist Mary Richardson, the Futurist movement, the Kent State Massacre, and Orlan’s “body art.”

Title: Why Education Is Useless
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Year: 2003

With chapters devoted to “Humanity,” “Love,” “Beauty,” “Identity,” “Survival,” and “Utility,” this work proceeds from the assumption that hostility to education is an extremely complex phenomenon, both historically and in contemporary American life. With references ranging from Montaigne to George W. Bush, from Sappho to Timothy McVeigh, it confronts the conception of utility articulated in the nineteenth century by John Stuart Mill and opposes the hostile conceptions of inutility popularized in recent decades by such ideologues as Allan Bloom, Harold Bloom, and John Ellis. Maintaining that education is not a stand-alone value, it argues that education must indeed be useless, in a sense, if it is to be worthy of its name.

Title: Cannibals and Philosophers
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Year: 2001

This book argues that the artifact known as the Enlightenment was defined from the beginning through an obsession with guts and disgust as much as through the mind and reason. Indeed, it contends that we falsify history when we fail to recognize the visceral turn that binds together the former and the latter termss. This argument is developed through chapters that focus on eighteenth-century physiological theories, the art of Jean-Siméon Chardin, the automatons made by Jacques de Vaucanson, the city of Bath, the voyages of Captain James Cook, and Thomas de Quincey’s conception of the act of kissing.

Title: Women, Love, and Commodity Culture in British Romanticism
Publisher: Ashgate; Routledge Kindle Edition 
Year: 2012

Offering a new understanding of canonical Romanticism, Daniela Garofalo suggests that representations of erotic love in the period have been largely misunderstood. Commonly understood as a means for transcending political and economic realities, love, for several canonical Romantic writers, offers, instead, a contestation of those realities. Garofalo argues that Romantic writers show that the desire for transcendence through love mimics the desire for commodity consumption and depends on the same dynamic of delayed fulfillment that was advocated by thinkers such as Adam Smith. As writers such as William Blake, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, and Emily Bronte engaged with the period's concern with political economy and the nature of desire, they challenged stereotypical representations of women either as self-denying consumers or as intemperate participants in the market economy. Instead, their works show the importance of women for understanding modern economics, with women's desire conceived as a force that not only undermines the political economy's emphasis on productivity, growth, and perpetual consumption, but also holds forth the possibility of alternatives to a system of capitalist exchange.

Title: Manly Leaders in Nineteenth-Century British Literature
Publisher: SUNY
Year: 2009

From the 1790s to the 1840s, the fear that Britain had become too effeminate to protect itself against the anarchic forces unleashed by the French Revolution produced in many British writers of the period a desire to portray strong leaders who could control the democratic and commercial forces of modernization. While it is commonplace in Romantic studies to emphasize that Romantic writers are interested in the solitary genius or hero who separates himself from the community to pursue his own creative visions, Daniela Garofalo argues instead that Romantic and early Victorian writers are interested in charismatic males--military heroes, tyrants, kings, and captains of industry--who organize modern political and economic communities, sometimes by example, and sometimes by direct engagement. Reading works by William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, William Hazlitt, Thomas Carlyle, and Charlotte Brontë, Garofalo shows how these leaders, endowed with an inherent virility rather than simply inherited rank, legitimize hierarchy anew for an age suffering from a crisis of authority.

Title: The Glory Gets
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Year: 2015

“This book is a miracle. The wisdom and the courage in these poems cuts straight into me. Jeffers is wrestling with what I thought I’d learned to put over there and call History, and she brings it back over here where I stand. It is alive. It watches me. How much of what we are and what we run from is caught―held, trapped, but also illuminated―by that gaze? These poems make clear how much we turn our backs to, trying to forget. This poet sings it beautifully and brutally back into being.”

--Tracy K. Smith

Title: Red Clay Suite
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Year: 2007

“Honorée Jeffers leads with her ear and follows with her rigorous intellect, then adds an emotional depth and fearlessness that make her poems uniquely powerful. This brilliant third book is a thinking woman’s blues that continues to challenge, delight, and terrify.”

—Elizabeth Alexander

Title: Outlandish Blues
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Year: 2003

“Outlandish Blues is a book as wide-open-armed and as terrifying as the blues themselves. What violence and grief, and sweetness too! These poems will bring you to your knees with their tough, wild beauty.”

—Maggie Anderson

Title: The Gospel of Barbecue
Publisher: The Kent State University Press
Year: 2000

“Honoree Jeffers is an exciting and original new poet, and the Gospel of Barbecue is her aptly titled debut work. These poems are sweet and sassy, hot and biting, flavored in an exciting blend of precise language and sharp and surprising imagery that delights. They leave a taste in your mouth, these poems; they are true to themselves and to the world. They are gospel, indeed, and this young poet will be heard more and more spreading the true word. Good news!”

—Lucille Clifton

Title: Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing
Publisher: Duke Press, 2003 University Press of the West Indies
Year: 2004

Clear Word and Third Sight coins the term "Diaspora Consciousness" to talk about the collective ways of knowing, that fall outside the realms of the rational which are the particular legacy of the descendants of formerly enslaved Africans in the Americas. By examining the extent to which this consciousness is represented in the oral traditions that Black Caribbean writers have captured in their writing and literature, the text argues for the existence of "an alternative philosophical world sense" that functions as a cultural link among African diasporic populations in various locales.

Title: The Western in the Global South (co-edited with MaryEllen Higgins and Dayna Oscherwitz)
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2015

The Western in the Global South investigates the Western film genre's impact, migrations, and reconfigurations in the Global South. Contributors explore how cosmopolitan directors have engaged with, appropriated, and subverted the tropes and conventions of Hollywood and Italian Westerns, and how Global South Westerns and Post-Westerns in particular address the inequities brought about by postcolonial patriarchy, globalization and neoliberalism. The book offers a wide range of historical engagements with the genre, from African, Caribbean, South and Southeast Asian, Central and South American, and transnational directors. The contributors employ interdisciplinary cultural studies approaches to cinema, integrating aesthetic considerations with historical, political, and gender studies readings of the international appropriations and U.S. re-appropriations of the Western genre.

Title: Strangers at Home: American Ethnic Modernism between the World Wars 
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Year: 2005 (hardcover), 2009 (paperback)

Strangers at Home reframes the way we conceive of the modernist literature that appeared in the period between the two world wars. This work shows that a body of texts written by ethnic writers during this period poses a challenge to conventional notions of America and American modernism. By engaging with modernist literary studies from the perspectives of minority discourse, postcolonial studies, and postmodern theory, the book questions the validity of modernism's claim to the neutrality of culture. She argues that literary modernism grew out of a prejudiced, racially biased, and often xenophobic historical context that necessitated a politically conservative and narrow definition of modernism in America. With the changing racial, ethnic, and cultural makeup of the nation during the interwar era, literary modernism also changed its form and content. Contesting traditional notions of literary modernism, the book examines American modernism from an ethnic perspective in the works of Harlem Renaissance, immigrant, and Native American writers. 

Title: Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Year: 2018

Nostalgic Design presents a rhetorical analysis of twenty-first century nostalgia and a method for designers to create more inclusive technologies. Nostalgia is a form of resistant commemoration that can tell designers what users value about past designs, why they might feel excluded from the present, and what they wish to recover in the future. By examining the nostalgic hacks of several contemporary technical cultures, from female software programmers who knit on the job to anti-vaccination parents, Kurlinkus argues that innovation without tradition will always lead to technical alienation, whereas carefully examining and layering conflicting nostalgic traditions can lead to technological revolution.

Title: Women's Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition co-authored with Michelle Ballif and Diane Davis
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2008

Title: The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces
Publisher: Southern Illinois UP
Year: 2003

Title: Progressive Traditions: Identity in Cherokee Literature and Culture 
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Year: 2014

According to a dichotomy commonly found in studies of American Indians, some noble Native people defiantly defend their pristine indigenous traditions in honor of their ancestors, while others in weakness or greed surrender their culture and identities to white American economies and institutions. This traditionalist-versus-assimilationist divide is, Joshua B. Nelson argues, a false one. Exploring a range of linked cultural practices and beliefs through the works of Cherokee thinkers and writers from the nineteenth century to today, Nelson finds ample evidence that tradition can survive through times of radical change: Cherokees do their cultural work both in progressively traditional and traditionally progressive ways. Studying individuals previously deemed either “traditional” or “assimilationist,” Nelson presents a more nuanced interpretation. Among the works he examines are the political rhetoric of Elias Boudinot, a forefather of American Indian literature, and of John Ross, the principal chief during the Removal years; the understudied memoirs of Catharine Brown, a nineteenth-century Cherokee convert to Christianity; the novel Kholvn, by contemporary traditionalist Sequoyah Guess, a writer of peculiarly Cherokee science fiction; his conclusion turns a critical eye on the controversial disenrollment of the Cherokee Freedmen. Across several genres—including autobiography, fiction, speeches, laws, and letters—Progressive Traditions identifies an “indigenous anarchism,” a pluralist, community-centered political philosophy that looks to practices that preceded and surpass the nation-state as ways of helping Cherokee people prosper. This critique of the common call for expansion of tribal nations’ sovereignty over their citizens represents a profound shift in American Indian critical theory and challenges contemporary indigenous people to rethink power among nations, communities, and individuals.

Title: Pain and Suffering
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2014

Pain is felt by everyone, yet understanding its nature is fragmented across myriad modes of thought. In this compact, yet thorough integrative account uniting medical science, psychology, and the humanities, Schleifer offers a deep and complex understand along with possible strategies of dealing with pain in its most overwhelming forms. This book is a volume in "The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture."

Author: Ronald Schleifer, Ph.D., and Jerry Vannatta, MD
Title: The Chief Concern of Medicine: The Integration of the Medical Humanities and Narrative Knowledge into Medical Practices
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Year: 2013

Unlike any existing studies of the medical humanities, The Chief Concern of Medicine brings to the examination of medical practices a thorough exposition of the nature of narrative. The book build on the work of linguistics, semiotics, narratology, and discourse theory and examines many literary works and narrative vignettes. Theoughout, the book presents usable expositions of the ways storytelling can allow physicians to be more attentive to the stories patients tell.

Title: Modernism and Popular Music
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2011

Traditionally, ideals about twentieth-century “modernism” – whether focused on literature, music, or the visual arts – have made a distinction between “high” art and the “popular” arts of best-selling fiction, jazz, and commercial art of one sort or another. In Modernism and Popular Music, Schleifer show instead how the music of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Thomas “Fats” Waller, and Billie Holiday can be considered as artistic expressions equal to those of the traditional high modernist practices in music and literature.

Title: Intangible Materialism: The Body, Scientific Knowledge, and the Power of Language
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Year: 2009

Taking as his point of departure Norbert Wiener’s statement that information is basic to understanding materialism in our era, Schleifer shows how discoveries of modern physics have altered conceptions of matter and energy and the ways in which both information theory and the study of literature can enrich these conceptions. Schleifer's project attempt to bridge the division between the humanities and the sciences and to create a nonreductive materialism for the information age.

Title: Reframing the Relational: A Pedagogical Ethic for Cross-Curricular Literacy Work
Publisher: Conference on College Composition and Communication/National Council of Teachers of English
Year: 2017

Reframing the Relational examines how writing specialists and faculty in other disciplines communicate with each other in face-to-face conversations about teaching writing. Sandra L. Tarabochia argues that a pedagogical approach to faculty interactions in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) contexts can enhance cross-disciplinary communication and collaboration and ultimately lead to more productive, sustainable initiatives.

Theorizing pedagogy as an epistemic, reflexive, relational activity among teacher-learners, she uses a pedagogical framework to analyze conversations between writing specialists and faculty in other disciplines, drawing on transcripts from interviews and recorded conversations. The author identifies the discursive moves faculty used to navigate three communicative challenges or opportunities: negotiating expertise, orienting to change, and embracing play. Based on this analysis, she constructs a pedagogical ethic for WAC/WID work and shows how it can help faculty embrace the potential of cross-disciplinary communication.

Title: Texas...To Get Horses
Publisher: That Painted Horse Press
Year: 2019

Kimberly Wieser takes us on an expansive journey across mixedblood Indian Americana in this collection of poetry.  Home is a place where our surroundings are familiar, an embodiment of one’s very own being. It represents a sacred place for healing. 

“Na he dum—Cheyenne for ‘I’m telling the truth’—is the phrase that lingers after reading Kimberly Wieser's no-holds-barred roaring whirlwind of a collection. This is the poetry of a woman, unabashed and unafraid, speaking from her whole mind and whole heart, emphatically declaring, here is the truth of my history, my people, my family, my body, my sex, my languages, my being, my very spirit. Written with unflinching eyes, this is work without hesitation or doubt, that refuses suffering and victimization, that celebrates survival and memory.”  —ire'ne lara silva, author of Flesh to Bone and Blood Sugar Cantos

Title: Back to the Blanket: Recovered Rhetorics and Literacies in American Indian Studies
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Year: 2017

For thousands of years, American Indian cultures have recorded their truths in the narratives and metaphors of oral tradition. Stories, languages, and artifacts, such as glyphs and drawings, all carry Indigenous knowledge, directly contributing to American Indian rhetorical structures that have proven resistant—and sometimes antithetical—to Western academic discourse. It is this tradition that Kimberly G. Wieser seeks to restore in Back to the Blanket, as she explores the rich possibilities that Native notions of relatedness offer for understanding American Indian knowledge, arguments, and perspectives.

Back to the Blanket analyzes a wide array of American Indian rhetorical traditions, then applies them in close readings of writings, speeches, and other forms of communication by historical and present-day figures. Wieser turns this pathbreaking approach to modes of thinking found in the oratory of eighteenth-century Mohegan and Presbyterian cleric Samson Occom, visual communication in Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, patterns of honesty and manipulation in the speeches of former president George W. Bush, and rhetorics and relationships in the communication of Indigenous leaders such as Ada-gal’kala, Tsi’yugûnsi’ni, and Inoli.

Exploring the multimodal rhetorics—oral, written, material, visual, embodied, kinesthetic—that create meaning in historical discourse, Wieser argues for the rediscovery and practice of traditional Native modes of communication—a modern-day “going back to the blanket,” or returning to Native practices. Her work shows how these Indigenous insights might be applied in models of education for Native American students, in Native American communities more broadly, and in transcultural communication, negotiation, debate, and decision making.

Title: Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black Radicalism
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Year: 2015

During the early years of the Cold War, racial segregation in the American South became an embarrassing liability to the international reputation of the United States. For America to present itself as a model of democracy in contrast to the Soviet Union's totalitarianism, Jim Crow needed to end. While the discourse of anticommunism added the leverage of national security to the moral claims of the civil rights movement, the proliferation of Red Scare rhetoric also imposed limits on the socioeconomic changes necessary for real equality.

Describing the ways anticommunism impaired the struggle for civil rights, James Zeigler reconstructs how Red Scare rhetoric during the Cold War assisted the black freedom struggle's demands for equal rights but labeled "un-American" calls for reparations. To track the power of this volatile discourse, Zeigler investigates how radical black artists and intellectuals managed to answer anticommunism with critiques of Cold War culture. Stubbornly addressed to an American public schooled in Red Scare hyperbole, black radicalism insisted that antiracist politics require a leftist critique of capitalism.

Zeigler examines publicity campaigns against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 's alleged Communist Party loyalties and the import of the Cold War in his oratory. He documents a Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored anthology of ex-Communist testimonials. He takes on the protest essays of Richard Wright and C. L. R. James, as well as Frank Marshall Davis's leftist journalism. The uncanny return of Red Scare invective in reaction to President Obama's election further substantiates anticommunism's lasting rhetorical power as Zeigler discusses conspiracy theories that claim Davis groomed President Obama to become a secret Communist. Long after playing a role in the demise of Jim Crow, the Cold War Red Scare still contributes to the persistence of racism in America.