Steele engages with a wide range of thinkers and their works, as well as historical events: debates over the display of the Confederate flag in public places, Ralph Ellison's exchange with Hannah Arendt over school desegregation in Little Rock, the controversy surrounding Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners, and arguments about the concept of a "clash of civilizations" as expressed by Samuel Huntington, Ashis Nandy, Edward Said, and Amartya Sen. Championing history and literature's capacity to articulate the politics of public imagination, Hiding from History boldly outlines new territory for literary and political theory.