Newly published: Mark D. White, The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero (2d ed., Wiley, 2024) @profmdwhite

 New from Wiley:

Mark D. White, The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero (2d. ed., 2024).

Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Learn how Captain America's timeless ethical code is just as relevant in the twenty-first century as it was during the 1940s

Captain America, or simply “Cap,” provides an example of the virtues that define personal excellence, as well as the ideals and principles upon which the United States of America was founded. In The Virtues of Captain America, philosopher and long-time comics fan Mark D. White shows us that this fictional superhero's “old-fashioned” moral code is exactly what we need today to restore kindness and respect in our personal and civic lives.

Presenting Captain America's personal morality within a virtue ethics framework, the book opens with an introduction to basic concepts in moral and political philosophy and addresses issues surrounding the use of fictional characters as role models. The following chapters examine Captain America in detail, exploring the individual virtues that Cap exemplifies, the qualities that describe his moral character, his particular brand of patriotism, his ongoing battle with fascism, his personal vision of the “American Dream,” his moral integrity and sense of honor, and much more.

Now in its second edition, The Virtues of Captain America is updated to include all the new developments in Captain America's saga, including new examples from the last ten years of Captain America's appearances in Marvel Comics. New coverage of the recent “Secret Empire” storyline, in which Captain America was brainwashed by the fascist organization Hydra, features new sections examining the nature of fascism and how Captain America's character and virtues were affected by the change. This edition also offers new material on Sam Wilson—formerly Captain America's partner the Falcon who recently became Captain America himself—and how his interpretation of the role compares to Steve Rogers'.

Showing how we can be better people if we pay attention to the choices made by the Sentinel of Liberty, The Virtues of Captain America:

• Examines the moral and political philosophy behind 80 years of Captain America comics and movies in a light-hearted, often humorous tone
• Demonstrates that the core principles and judgment exhibited by Captain America in the 1940s remain relevant in the twenty-first century
• Describes the basic themes of Captain America's ethics, such as courage, humility, perseverance, honesty, and loyalty
• Illustrates how Captain America stands for the basic ideals of America, not its politics or government

Requiring no background in philosophy or familiarity with the source material, the second edition of The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero remains a must-read for everyone wanting to make ethical decisions in complex real-world situations and tackle the personal and political issues of today with integrity and respect.

Adams and Stanger-Ross on The Unlawful Dispossession of Japanese-Canadians During WWII @ericadams99 @UVicHistory

Eric M. Adams, University of Alberta Faculty of Law, and Jordan Stanger-Ross, University of Victoria, are publishing Promises of Law: The Unlawful Dispossession of Japanese Canadians in volume 54 of the Osgoode Hall Law Journal. Here is the abstract.

This article is about the origins, betrayal, and litigation of a promise of law. In 1942, while it ordered the internment of 21,457 Canadians of Japanese descent, the Canadian government enacted orders-in-council authorizing the Custodian of Enemy Property to seize all real and personal property owned by Japanese Canadians living within coastal British Columbia. Demands from the Japanese Canadian community and concern from within the corridors of government resulted in amendments to those orders which made clear that the Custodian held that property as a “protective” trust, and would return it to Japanese Canadians at the conclusion of the war. That is not what happened. In January 1943, a new order-in-council authorized the sale of all seized Japanese-Canadian-owned property. The trust abandoned, a promise broken, the Custodian sold everything it had taken. This article traces the promise to protect property from its origins in the federal bureaucracy and demands on the streets to its demise in Nakashima v Canada, the Exchequer Court decision holding that the legal promise carried no legal consequence. We argue that the failure of the promise should not obscure its history as a product of multi-vocal processes, community activism, conflicting wartime pressures, and competing conceptions of citizenship, legality, and justice. Drawing from a rich array of archival research, our article places the legacy of the property loss of Japanese Canadians at the disjuncture between law as a blunt instrument capable of gross injustice and its role as a social institution of good faith.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.