Newly available evidence has shed new light on the inner workings of the socialist state in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. In a “campaign against modern revisionism” in 1964 the militant faction within the Vietnamese Workers’ Party led by Lê Duẩn sidelined those members who favored a more cautious approach to the struggle for the reunification of the country. After the outbreak of the war, the propaganda machine in the DRV including writers and other artists had to foster popular support for the war and keep morale among civilians and soldiers high. The DRV Ministry of Public Security enforced ideological conformity and after 1965 intensified its efforts to track down and eliminate any party members and individuals who dissented from the aggressive line of the party leadership. Thus, in 1967, in the wake of the Tet Offensive the security apparatus lashed out against those who did not fully support Lê Duẩn’s risky plan for a general offensive and were not deemed fully reliable. The fact that many of those arrested or put under house arrest were close to General Võ Nguyên Giáp shows that the “Antiparty Revisionist Affair,” as the purge came to be known, was also part of internal factional infighting in Hanoi.

The environmental history of the Vietnam War is unique in the twentieth century for the unprecedented scale of aerial bombing and use of incendiaries such as napalm, as well as the United States military’s use of tactical herbicides to destroy forest cover in combat zones. Drawing on recent trends in environmental and military history, this chapter aims to provide a more comprehensive sketch of the environmental legacies of the Vietnam War. Besides the effects of bombing and herbicides, these include inquiries into the footprints of warfare in urban and industrial development, in ethnic and demographic shifts in former warzones, in the dispersion of invasive species, and even in the creation of wilderness or conservation areas.

This paper discusses the succession ceremony organized by Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn in 270/884 for his son and heir, Khumārawayh, as described by Egyptian Arabic sources, notably Sīrat Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn of al-Balawī, an underutilized text for Abbasid history. The paper considers three overlapping questions. First, how should the accounts be read, as “representational” or, alternatively, as prescriptive, thus of a piece with elements of the Mirror for Princes literature? Second, were Ṭūlūnid networks of loyalty and dependence solely reliant on material inducements or did individuals invest themselves in the Egyptian regime beyond the point of self-interest? The question goes to the problem of material vs. emotional ties of dependency. And, third, was Ibn Ṭūlūn successful in creating a lasting power base? The question goes to the extent to which his contemporaries signed on to his “project” of redefining relations with the Abbasid center.

Chapter One examines the historical and legal context that resulted in the abolition of the East India Company and the formal transfer of political sovereignty from the Mughal state to the British Crown. It focuses on the Uprising of 1857 and is arranged around two questions: How did the colonial state attempt to erase the memory of Mughal sovereignty and the popular character of the violence enacted in its name, and what role did mercy play in this story? The chapter positions the trial and punishment of Bahadur Shah Zafar II as a founding trial of colonial sovereignty which exposed both the extraordinary violence and the absolute limits of colonial sovereign power. A former sovereign would be transformed into a criminal and brought within the British imperial order, but for the sake of the future legitimacy of this political project, he could not be killed.

During the writing of this book, the history of imperial mercy has periodically emerged as a site of national debate in India. The issue has revolved almost singularly around Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the ideologue of Hindutva and vocal critic of the Indian National Congress. The historical context around this ongoing controversy requires a short summary.

In 1910, Savarkar was placed on trial in the Bombay High Court for waging war against the king and abetment to murder. The charges were a response to the assassination of Arthur Jackson, the collector of Nasik in western India. As explored briefly in Chapter 5, Jackson had been shot dead by the young revolutionary Anant Kanhere. Before Kanhere was executed, he implicated Savarkar in the plot. Savarkar was subsequently found guilty on both counts and sentenced to transportation for fifty years.

This work is a history of ideas, not a history of science. It uses the past to answer the questions of whether the Darwinian Revolution comes from ideas already prevalent in Victoria society – or is it a work of rebellion? – and whether the Darwinian Revolution was truly revolutionary – or is this a mistaken judgment made by historians and others?

Open-source intelligence is readily available and inexpensive. Hamas collected a lot of information from open sources, mainly the Israeli press. In this case, Hamas exploited the fact that Israel is a democratic state with a relatively free press to get valuable information for its operations. This sort of collection activity became more organized after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip and was Hamas’s main source for strategic analysis. This chapter describes the intelligence content Hamas gathered from open sources and that content’s contribution to its activities.

Politics in South Vietnam (aka the Republic of Vietnam) have long been overlooked in most English-language accounts of the Vietnam War, especially during the final years of the conflict. But the breakdown of the Saigon government’s legitimacy in the eyes of its own anti-Communist constituents during this period was decisive in determining the outcome of the war. This chapter explores the wave of anti-Communist solidarity that swept through South Vietnam’s cities and provincial towns following the 1968 Communist Tet Offensive. It analyzes the South Vietnamese state’s ambitious efforts to implement economic, agricultural, and political reforms. And it demonstrates that President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu’s bid to monopolize political power, following clashes with South Vietnam’s civilian parties and institutions, dealt a fatal blow to the establishment of legitimate anti-Communist government in the South. Thiệu’s autocratic turn betrayed the constitutional order on which the state’s authority was based, deflating post-Tet enthusiasm, accelerating American funding cuts, and precipitating South Vietnam’s collapse from within during the final Communist offensive in 1975. Drawing on newly available Vietnamese-language sources, the chapter examines the underappreciated impact of a diverse range of Vietnamese protagonists, who shaped the decisive political breakdown that brought the Vietnam War to its conclusion.