Following Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the November 1864 presidential election, some Confederates performed what Jason Phillips has described as “somersaults of reasoning” to convince themselves that this outcome was not a blow to their hopes of independence. That summer, rumor had traveled around Confederate army camps and in correspondence home that the North was beset by disaffection and that success for the Democratic Party in the election would bring peace. These assumptions were challenged when the Democratic candidate George McClellan announced his war policy and seriously compromised when Lincoln’s reelection was confirmed. Facing this situation, a good few Confederate diehards slipped into the realms of the far-fetched to maintain their belief that peace and independence remained within their grasp; some, for instance, claimed that more states were now sure to secede and further fracture the Union. B. P. Alston, writing from his camp near Richmond, joined in with such questionable reasoning.

This chapter looks at local priests and their kinship relations, as recorded chiefly in archives from what is today France. The historiographical focus in this area has been on priests and their wives, but this chapter instead begins with priests and their parents, with a special focus on their mothers. The chapter then turns to priests and their children and wives, and the evidence for how priests made arrangements for these relatives, before turning to their uncles and nephews. The chapter concludes with a study of priests’ families as church owners. Overall, it argues that priests’ kinship ties were not noticeably different from those of the laity, with the possible exception of relations with their mothers, and that change in how these priests feature in charters from the mid eleventh century could be due to shifts in documentary practice.

This Introduction provides an overview of the main arguments and contributions of the book to the literature on the environmental and economic history of French colonial Vietnam and the larger French colonial empire. It emphasizes how the book pays special attention to the significance of local networks and the role of diverse indigenous actors as it explores the formation of a regional and transnational coal regime of French colonial Vietnam. The Introduction also offers outlines of all chapters as well as the book’s key sources.

This chapter investigates the intricate intertextual discourse between African writers and their European counterparts, exploring their responses to the often distorted representations of Africa by European authors. From historical figures such as Luís de Camões and Joyce Cary to modern writers like Albert Camus and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, these encounters with Africa have had a significant impact on global literature. African writers, influenced by their European predecessors, navigate a nuanced relationship marked by both admiration and critique. They draw from similar literary traditions and styles while simultaneously challenging and subverting racist stereotypes. Through their narratives, they carve out a unique space, amplifying silenced voices and reclaiming agency over their own stories and identities. As agents of change, they reveal obscured truths and guide readers through the complexities of colonial and postcolonial histories. Ultimately, the African novelists discussed in this chapter demonstrate that just as imperialism is rooted in European history, modernism is an integral aspect of Africa’s narrative landscape, reshaping perceptions and reclaiming narratives for future generations.

This chapter documents the conflicts among Đông Triều Coal Company (also known as SCDT), the city of Hải Phòng, and the French colonial government in Tonkin over the protection of potable water at a time when uncontrolled mining expansion in the Đông Triều highland, where SCDT was based, threatened to pollute the Hương River – Hải Phòng city’s source of potable water. This chapter argues that the French colonial state’s environment-centered attempts to safeguard the Hương River and public health, such as the creation of a massive water protection zone, were primarily driven by French concerns about the lack of hygiene and infectious diseases circulating within the indigenous communities located close to the Hương River rather than the industrial pollution caused by SCDT. The chapter also underlines issues pertaining to environmental laws, such as the logistical challenges of surveying and protecting water sources, and the lack of compliance with environmental regulations by big coal companies such as SCDT. More importantly, the chapter underscores the complex impact of mining expansion and environmental regulations on local ethnicities, such as the Dao communities.

This chapter revisits the enduring question of orality in relation to writing in the rendition of modern African literature since the advent of Western colonization. It argues that rather than affirming an artificial binary between orality and writing in the evaluation of African literature, a paradigm of complementarity is advocated. The discussion articulates with Eileen Julien’s formulation on the integrality of orality in written literature as a global phenomenon. The chapter additionally affirms a natural expressive process that begins with oral communication and orbits at scribal representation. It argues that literary traditions are invented following this complex of natural impulses that find primal expression in speech and on lithic natural surfaces. Invariably, instead of rendering writing as the transcendence of orality, both are conceived of as vital constitutive elements of language deployed in the production of literary traditions. Drawing on classical and contemporary African texts, the chapter offers a critical discussion in demonstration of the convergent values of orality and writing in the continual making and remaking of modern African literature.

Scholarship on the gendered dimensions of US foreign relations flourished in the twenty years following the appearance in 1986 of Joan Scott’s “Gender: A Useful Category of History Analysis.” But a worrisome drop-off in the last decade or so merits a reminder that gender matters and that we have good tools for integrating gender analysis in our work. This chapter encourages historians of US foreign relations to pay careful attention to the types of sources we use and the questions we ask of them; the assumptions and stereotypes that permeate diplomatic interactions; the ways in which gender helps create, maintain, and justify hierarchies of power; and the role of sex and sexuality in shaping relations between the United States and the world.

This chapter documents the development of urban mining centers along the coal frontier of Quảng Yên and their impact on the landscape and its people. It examines the French vision of turning coal towns into orderly landscapes where spatial and racial segregation, as well as medical and hygiene surveillance, could be applied. The architects of these emerging mining towns expected their newly designed urban spaces to stabilize the restless and highly mobile indigenous migrant mining workforce while also protecting the towns’ tiny European population from epidemic diseases and security threats. However, several factors reduced these urban visions to a patchwork of modernity. Racial divides, security and medical concerns, coupled with strained resources, led to the unequal distribution of living space and public resources between the European and indigenous quarters. Infectious diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, and plague, spread rapidly across the overcrowded dormitories of mine workers. In addition, crime and illicit activities flourished on the commercial streets of these towns and cities.

Building an empire demands more than political will, abundant wealth, and military might. It also requires a tremendous amount of stuff. This chapter considers the ways that materials and material have been essential to the consolidation of US power and influence in the postwar world. It explains why and how materiality should be considered a utensil in the historian’s toolbox, helping find and tell the richest stories possible.

The chapter examines how North African fiction in French has engaged with gaps in official history by foregrounding the stories of and about erased or forgotten events and actors, thus seeking to fill the factual and experiential lacunae of archival records. It first provides an overview of different generations of writers from the anti-colonial group who leveraged the symbolic powers of fiction to pave the way for independence to post-independence authors such as those who in the 1980s self-identified as “Beur” (first-generation French citizens born of parents who immigrated from North Africa) and the following generation of “banlieue” writers who emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The chapter then focuses on Assia Djebar’s 1985 novel L’Amour, la fantasia as a work that both exemplifies and exceeds the ethical stance and the aesthetic potential of the archival novel insofar as it mobilizes all the genre’s strategies of research, recovery, and representation while also questioning the very project of restoring the archive and thus revoking its presumed authority. The chapter admits to its own incompleteness, unknowing and linguistic partiality as it does not purport to account for the rich literary production in other languages such as Arabic, Tamazight, and English.

The chapter sets out to examine Nairobi as a site of cultural imagination. It argues that since its founding by the British colonialists, Nairobi has featured prominently as a site of “rest” for its many immigrant communities but also for the local Kenyans from its rural hinterlands. The chapter further examines how writers of African fiction have tapped into its rich tapestry, turning it into a powerful archive and a rich source of literary imagination. The chapter shows how Nairobi has become a site where the antinomies of the new nation-state play themselves out, as it gets mobilized by writers of fiction to figure a number of competing cultural and social imaginaries within Kenya and the East African region more broadly. By drawing attention to a set of fictional works on Nairobi, the chapter allows us to literally take a “walk” through the streets of Nairobi and to absorb its full significance as a layered site of archival imagination. It offers a glimpse of Nairobi as a bottomless resource for archive-building – a site of endless potential for literary imagination.

When Cheikh Anta Diop suggested, in 1951, that ancient Egypt had been a black civilization, this was the start of a lifelong commitment to researching, arguing, and defending this idea. His work has since opened up and provided contexts for discussions dating back to antiquity, controversially pushing back against long-held, sometimes wrong-headed imperial notions such as that Western philosophy began in Greece. He seeks to recenter and restore meaning to an Africa uniquely severed from precolonial origins.