This chapter explores the place and transformation of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (DDHC) in the subsequent history of France. It argues that the DDHC underwent a process of sacralization, through which it became the foundation of French civil religion. Already in the early twentieth century, the historian Albert Mathiez remarked on this process, drawing on Émile Durkheim’s sociological analysis. This chapter extends Mathiez’s analysis.

During the US War in Vietnam, diverse activists and organizations advanced a range arguments against US intervention in Vietnam. These organizations did not form a singular or united antiwar movement, however, and many histories have overlooked the contributions of activists who did not focus their efforts solely on ending the US war. Indeed, many activists challenged injustices on multiple fronts and created unique antiwar discourses as part of their social justice advocacy. They often linked their advocacy and constituents within the United States with US treatment of Vietnam and the Vietnamese. This chapter describes the diversity of antiwar rhetoric and activism in the 1960s and 1970s with the help of North Vietnam’s government, which fostered a people’s diplomacy with American citizens. In doing so, this chapter illustrates that many participants in antiwar advocacy saw their protests against US intervention in Vietnam as part of their larger fight to create a more just American society.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

Most of the available statistics on the Vietnam War come from the US government. Those for US military personnel strengths in Vietnam, and US casualties, are relatively accurate. Most of the rest are problematic. Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces personnel strengths were exaggerated; more men were listed on unit rosters than were actually serving. US figures for RVNAF casualties were below the actual levels in some periods. US estimates of communist personnel strength were usually well below the actual level. In US figures for communist losses, inflated “body counts” were balanced by communist personnel who died under circumstances not allowing US or RVN forces to count their bodies, so the overall totals may not have been exaggerations. The United States used air power on a huge scale. The bomb tonnage delivered on South Vietnam was the largest for any country in history, and that on Laos the second-largest. But it was indigenous forces that did most of the ground combat and therefore suffered most of the losses. The number of RVNAF personnel who died was far larger than the number of Americans. The number of communist personnel who died was larger still.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

This chapter situates the economic history of the Vietnam War in global context. Beginning in the colonial era, it situates the wars origins in relation to the extractive logic of French colonization. But the United States acted in Indochina for different motivations. Animated by geopolitical fears more than acquisitive purposes, US policymakers pumped economic resources into Vietnam from the early 1950s, wreaking devastation in the process. The war was asymmetric, but the resources Washington committed were sufficient to destabilize the US economy, hastening the end of the postwar boom. For all its might, the United States failed to subdue the communist insurgency in South Vietnam. Instead, Soviet and Chinese resource flows and Hanois highly effective war mobilization sustained the communist war effort against improbable odds. But solutions that proved effective at waging war proved less effective in the production of peacetime growth. After 1975, Vietnam stagnated. A decade of economic failure prompted the Vietnamese Workers Party to mobilize the defeated Souths experience with global capitalism from the mid-1980s as a resource that could inform Vietnams reengagement with the world economy and the United States.

In great depth, Volume II examines the escalation of the Vietnam War and its development into a violent stalemate, beginning with the overthrow of Ngô Đình Diệm in 1963 to the aftermath of the 1968 Tet Offensive. This five-year period was, for the most part, the fulcrum of a three-decade struggle to determine the future of Vietnam and was marked by rival spirals of escalation generated by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the United States. The volume explores the war’s military aspects on all sides, the politics of war in the two Vietnams and the United States, and the war’s international and transnational dimensions in politics, protest, diplomacy, and economics, while also paying close attention to the agency of historical actors on both sides of the conflict in South Vietnam.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

This chapter is focused on the “Secret War” in Laos, which began after the Second Geneva Accords of 1962 were signed, reaffirming Laos’ official neutrality, and ending with the signing of the Vientiane Agreement in 1973, which was designed to lay the groundwork for national reconciliation through establishing a coalition government. However, it instead eventually led to the communist Pathet Lao takeover of the country in mid 1975, and from then little-known but persistent armed conflict between communist forces and anti-communist insurgents continued after 1975. The overall goal of this chapter is to summarize the important circumstances associated with the war in Laos, something that has apparently not been done before. The war in Laos represents a tragedy for Laos and its people, regardless of what side of the political divide one was on. Those from all sides shed blood, and large numbers were displaced due to military conflict and aerial bombardment. The Secret War in Laos stretched for eleven years, between 1962 and 1973, but, as should be clear from this chapter, conflict actually raged, on and off, and to varying degrees in different parts of the country, for over fifty years, beginning in 1945.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

The Nixon administration’s decision in 1969 to begin the systematic bombing of Cambodia fundamentally altered the nature of the war the US was fighting in Vietnam for all parties involved – Americans, North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, and especially the Cambodians. Cambodia had largely remained isolated from the fighting even as it escalated in 1965. North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong cadres had been using the border territory as sanctuaries, but they remained along the border and did not engage the Cambodian population in any way that substantially altered the strategic situation or affected the peasants living in the region. The Nixon administration changed all that by undertaking four actions: 1) initiating a secret bombing campaign in 1969 to disrupt North Vietnamese troops; 2) supporting the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk and his replacement with Lon Nolo in March 1970; 3) authorizing a joint South Vietnamese–US invasion of Cambodia in May–June 1970; and 4) continuing with the bombing of Cambodia until August 1973, many months after the signing of the Paris Peace agreement. The results for Cambodia led to a collapse of the government and the takeover by the Khmer Rouge in April 1975.

This chapter examines the built environment of the Vietnam War and its relationship to soldier morale for American, Army of the Republic of Vietnam, and revolutionary forces. In the early 1960s, American officials relied on improvisation and adaptation to create spaces from which to manage nation-building initiatives. With the shift to combat operations in the mid-1960s, the United States increasingly relied on new construction, building hundreds of bases from which to project violence into the countryside. The American standard of living in many of these spaces, coupled with the indiscriminate violence of search-and-destroy, both exposed and exacerbated South Vietnamese poverty, driving Southern support for the insurgency. At the same time, Vietnamese revolutionaries emphasized austerity as an exemplar of traditional values, casting opposition to the insurgency as distinctly un-Vietnamese. US investment in South Vietnam was simultaneously too much and not enough – too much military hardware, material abundance, and violence to defend South Vietnam without altering it irrevocably, but not enough to defeat the revolution altogether.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.