The fighting stopped in 1975 with Hanois victory. But the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people continued and was propelled by politicians manipulating the mythical cause of POWs/MIAs. Postwar movies filled out the scenario of a war lost because of poor leadership in Washington combined with the baleful influence of the anti-war movement. Presidents wrestled with the legacy of Vietnam, including the controversy over the national Vietnam Memorial. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter both attempted to move the nation beyond the grasp of the Vietnam Specter. Both failed. Ronald Reagan used it to help him win the presidency in 1980, after the debacle that followed the occupation of the American Embassy in Tehran, which only seemed to emphasize the nations lost claims to world leadership after Vietnam. George H. W. Bush claimed that it had been buried in the sands of Iraq after the rapid victory in Gulf War I. Bill Clinton succeeded in establishing diplomatic and economic relations with Vietnam. But it re-emerged with renewed force during the Second Gulf War and the never-ending war in Afghanistan. Even today it shapes much thinking about military interventionism.

This chapter outlines the development of the theory of natural selection and the events surrounding the publication and reviewing of Darwin’s Origin of Species, especially in non-specialist publications. The different responses in Britain and the United States are noted. The role of supporters such as T. H. Huxley in reaching a popular audience is explored, although their reservations about the adequacy of the theory are also taken into account. Conservative efforts to present evolution as the unfolding of a divine plan provided a very different way of understanding the general idea of evolution. Many popular accounts failed to understand the difference between Darwin’s ‘tree of life’ model and older ideas of a linear ascent toward humanity, especially when dealing with the issue of human origins. In this area, popular interest in the gorilla as a potential ancestral form distracted attention from some aspects of Darwin’s model, as shown in more detail in Chapter 3. The early evolutionism of Herbert Spencer is introduced and his relationship to Darwinism explained.

Nineteen sixty-eight was an exceptional year in which people across the world mobilized in protest against imperialism, authoritarianism, and Cold War hegemony. The “Global 1968” has come to represent an era of social and political transformation, and its meaning has been debated into the twenty-first century. This chapter provides an overview of two major events that challenged the bipolar world order in 1968 – the Tet Offensive and the Prague Spring – and explores how the Vietnam War and Vietnamese people influenced protest movements around the world in this historic year. The Vietnamese communist revolution became a global symbol of anti-imperialism and Third World self determination, while South Vietnamese dissidents carried out protests for freedom and democracy that mirrored uprisings in other parts of the world.

The historiography of Nigerian independence from colonial rule has not often considered the role played by trade unions. This chapter seeks to correct this gap in the literature by tracing the history of Nigerian trade unions from the precolonial period to 1960 and beyond. Far from a British import, trade unions were rooted in local craft organizations that predated colonization. The protectionist goals of these organizations informed the development of the first formal trade union in Nigeria in 1912, named the Civil Service British Workers’ Union. This union and others soon expanded their purview from labor conditions to a broader anticolonial agenda, especially because of shared leadership and institutional affiliation with nationalist organizations. As trade unions became politically radicalized, nationalist groups borrowed tactics developed by the unions such as strikes and collective bargaining. Trade unions were instrumental in the nationalist movement and remain powerful engines of social and economic justice.

This chapter will address the various peoples, polities, individuals, movements, and the social-political and economic conditions of Nigeria before the colonial era (1900). It will also go over the processes that spurred ongoing transformations in the complex patchwork of political, cultural, and religious entities that dominated what is known today as Nigeria. This chapter names five principal events as the primary catalysts for these transformations. They are the abolition of the slave trade and the switch to legitimate trade; the Sokoto Jihad; the decline and eventual collapse of the Old Oyo Empire; freed captives returning from Sierra Leone along with the arrival of missionaries; and the advent of colonial rule. These events would result in an environment of instability which gave way to new powers prompted by shifting demands from an increasingly industrialized and interconnected world. The chapter explores the social and economic shifts that resulted from these political changes and how these social and economic processes impacted the political changes in question. Finally, the chapter gives specific examples of lifestyle changes experienced by millions during this period, such as changes in clothing, religious practices, and diet.

How the Fatimids, locally considered foreign easterners and heretical Shiʿa, negotiated sufficient acceptance in the Maghrib to withstand fierce opposition from Maliki Sunnis and Ibadi Kharijis, raises key issues concerning the formation of Islamic empires. Despite a plethora of enemies among the population, their rule endured and even prospered. What we know has grown substantially with new sources about the interaction of Ismaili authorities with the local ʿulamāʾ and the inner dynamics of their daʿwa and its allocation of restricted knowledge to members. Conversion of sections of the local elite and the demotion or expulsion of hostile elements helped. An internal document preserved by the daʿwa explains how its adherents were expected to prove their loyalty and the reward for doing so. The Ismailis existed both as one component in the new society and yet also remained apart as a community of Believers within the broader society of Muslims.

This chapter explores how aspects of culture informed the compositions of Nigeria’s various precolonial and colonial societies. These happenings will be shown through several unique customs and practices, such as dance, music, and art. The second part of the chapter explains how the onset of colonialism shifted the cultural landscape of Nigeria. These cultural transformations are framed in three primary ways: the often racist and violent diffusion of Western culture, the retainment of Indigenous cultures, and the fusion of the former and latter. The social, economic, and political ramifications of these transformations will be detailed, along with the subtle, often insidious role colonialism and Western culture had to play in the changing mental constructs of the Nigerian people, most prominent amongst the growing class of Western-educated elites.

This chapter offers an overview of developments in postwar Vietnam until the 2010s. After the war, the communist government sought to impose a socialist system in the South in the same way they had done in the North since 1954. This utopian march to socialism was draconian and produced an economic collapse and a looming famine in the mid 1980s. With leadership change and support from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Vietnamese leaders embarked on market reform but refused political reform. For more than three decades, the communist party has overseen rapid economic growth that lifted millions out of poverty and raised national income many times. Despite impressive economic achievements, Vietnam’s political system is undergoing severe decay, with an aging leadership still pledging loyalty to communism while party and state bureaucracies are thoroughly penetrated by corrupt patronage networks that peddle offices and influences to serve officials and their cronies. The perverse outcome of a communist revolution that produced an oppressive and corrupt regime in Vietnam today has lately brought about the moment of reckoning for many Vietnamese about the true meaning of the Vietnam War.