Accidental Gods by Anna Della Subin

Della Subin’s "accidental gods" are humans venerated as deities, usually in their lifetimes and often under protest, and they include everyone from Christopher Columbus to James Cook, Douglas MacArthur, Haile Selassie, Gandhi, various petty colonial administrators whose insatiable spirits crave whisky and cigars, and Donald Trump:

"The accidental god haunts modernity. He, always he, walks bewildered into the twenty-first century, striving for a secular authority yet finding himself sacred instead. He appears on every continent on the map, at times of colonial invasion, nationalist struggle, and political unrest. To speak of men unwittingly turned divine is to sing a history of how the modern world came to be."

Possession by modernity in the form of a chugging locomotive also makes an appearance. 

Many astute reviews were written about this unexpectedly thrilling book (see: NYT, LRB, NYRB) and it is a true unicorn, the rare academic work that is actually fun to read as a non-credentialed person, stuffed with enough fascinating detail to inspire a half-dozen popular histories and story collections. (Someone needs to pitch a page-turner biography of the absolutely wild life of Annie Besant—radical labor organizer turned entrepreneurial mystic and agitator for Indian independence. The mix of activism, spiritualism, idealism, white savior-ism, and motherhood is absolutely tuned to the now.) 

Like spaghetti strands twining around a twirled fork, Subin's tales of happenstance gods wind into one big bite: the story of how whiteness became divine, the ultimate false idol to overthrow. Two other things I took from it (probably obvious to others but one of my joys in reading is stumbling across reminders of big obvious things that I too easily forget): that situating events more broadly in time changes how you understand them (a man acclaimed as the son of God is not so very radical or miraculous in a culture where emperors and famous people are regularly deified) and how translation, even careful translation, inevitably shifts meanings and confers power, often in perilous ways. So much of what we think we know/take as "true" is the garbled message at the end of a long, long game of telephone.