More than 2.7 million men and approximately 65,000 women served in Vietnam or in the Southeast Asian theater between 1963 and 1975. Yet much of the literature on the American side of the Vietnam War discusses the role of decision-making by presidents and their civilian advisors, along with military strategy developed and directed by general-grade officers. This chapter instead deals with the combat soldiers and marines who actually did the fighting in the jungles and rice paddies of South Vietnam. These “grunts” had to first be selected, then trained, then sent to “repo-depots” where they became replacements for those who had been killed or wounded by the National Liberation Front or People’s Army of Vietnam soldiers. They were then sent to the field with their new units and would serve one year before “coming home.” Society would then have to deal with thousands of returning veterans, many with PTS(D) and some with a newly identified condition – moral injury.

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.

For Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, the significance of rights lay in the value of freedom. The distinctive feature of persons, their capacity to determine their own ends, grounded the obligation of other human beings to respect the conditions of free agency and thus to acknowledge one another as bearers of rights. All understood rights as universal and intersubjective: it follows that rights can only be fully realized in an appropriately constituted social state. For Kant, this meant that rights in the state of nature are merely provisional, and that to make rights claims is to commit oneself to the pursuit of a civil state, indeed to a civil state in federation with other such states, subject to principles of international law and cosmopolitan right. For Fichte, the intersubjective nature of rights was even more central to their meaning, for the guarantee of rights enables our self-understanding as free beings, with the capacity to cultivate our individuality and pursue a distinctive identity. Rights thus understood not only respect our personhood but actually constitute us as persons. Kant’s emphasis on external freedom, freedom from outside interference, led him to focus almost exclusively on property rights, while Fichte recognized far more expansive socioeconomic rights as security the material conditions of free agency. Finally, Hegel’s account, though deeply influenced by Kant and Fichte’s grounding of rights in the value of freedom, maintained that individual rights are insufficient for the realization of complete freedom, which must be realized in common. In so doing he partly anticipated Marx’s critique of the limitations of rights as fundamentally bourgeois property rights and thus as incapable of undergirding truly human emancipation.

This chapter explores the history of Americans’ opposition to their country’s military involvement in Vietnam. Energized by the escalation of the conflict, and the emergence of the wider student New Left, the relatively modest protests that had taken place in the early 1960s soon burgeoned into a genuine mass movement: by the time the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973 some 6 million Americans had taken to the streets or engaged in other forms of dissent. Highlighting the diversity of activists and the range and creativity of their tactics, the movement’s vital – if sometimes prickly – relations with contemporaneous social movements, and its wide geographical reach, the chapter concludes by evaluating the legacy and impact of American opposition to the war. While the protests certainly helped to shape the nation’s political culture – not least by inspiring subsequent social activism on both the left (gay liberation) and right (the early anti-abortion movement) – it remains far from clear what role, if any, domestic opposition to the Vietnam War had on the eventual outcome on the conflict in southeast Asia.

This chapter proposes an alternative to the more economically driven historiography on French Enlightenment rights talk, by highlighting the role of philosophers, most notably Locke and Rousseau. It was their insistence on the inalienability of liberty that defined the philosophical discourse of rights in the eighteenth century. Locke repudiated the standard argument by natural lawyers (from Grotius to Pufendorf) that we could alienate our freedom, either by selling ourselves into slavery or subjecting ourselves to an absolutist sovereign. In both of these cases, we violate our right to self-preservation, which as a dictate of natural law is sacrosanct. Montesquieu similarly rejected Roman arguments for slavery in the name of self-preservation. And Rousseau insisted on the inalienability of liberty, through an operation (the social contract) that transforms natural liberty into political freedom. These arguments, too, informed the revolutionary understanding of human rights.

This chapter highlights the crucial role of property in the history of rights, both as one of the key concepts driving the development of rights theories (and protections) onward from an early time, and their modern adaptations in the eighteenth century. Given property’s oversized importance in this history, it is surprisingly missing from many recent accounts. But since the French Revolution, property has been at the heart of most political efforts to secure and protect rights. As this chapter demonstrates, the centrality of property for so many later reforms can in large part be credited to the insistent claims of the Physiocrats. Political society, they argued, must extend natural rights, rather than replace them with positive laws. Economic circulation was itself part and parcel of a “natural order,” with subjective rights at its basis. The chapter suggests that contemporary theories and assessments of the role of rights in political society remain partial as long as they do not include an understanding of the historical role that property has played among them.

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.

From the outset, US military intervention in Vietnam provoked popular campaigns and mass rallies in support of the United States global anticommunist agenda. While these early initiatives were often orchestrated by rightwing activists long versed in the practices of populist anticommunism, the burgeoning of domestic opposition to the war intensified and greatly diversified prowar activism. Appealing to patriotism, conservative leaders rallied popular support in favor of total victory but later endorsed Richard Nixon’s call for “peace with honor.” As the war dragged on, internal divisions eroded the confidence of prowar conservatives in achieving their aims and forced them to reevaluate the political viability of their hardline Cold War rhetoric. Rightwing activists still managed to make use of grassroots patriotic campaigns to marshal support for the war, particularly among white ethnic workers opposed to the antiwar movement and wider social changes. In so doing, conservatives altered the nature and direction of their agenda, and furthered a new majoritarian political coalition. This chapter explores the origins and nature of these grassroots campaigns in support of the Vietnam War and demonstrates that the groundwork for a decades-long resurgence in populist rightwing patriotism was born amidst domestic strife over American purpose in Vietnam.

This chapter concentrates on the pivotal figure of Jean Barbeyrac, translator extraordinaire of Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, Richard Cumberland, and others. A French Huguenot refugee, Barbeyrac introduced the great Protestant natural law treatises to a French (and ultimately English) audience. But Barbeyrac was much more than a translator. He recast earlier natural law theories around individual conscience and made subjective right the foundation for society and politics. Where Grotius and Pufendorf had conceived of permission or “natural liberty” as the freedom to do whatever the law did not forbid (and thus, not really a right), Barbeyrac insisted a contrario that both natural and civil law tacitly determined – and thus legalized – what was permissible for subjects to do. For Barbeyrac, rights thus took precedence over duties, though only because every action had been made permissible by God. He extended this argument to property, which originated from a God-given natural right to first possession.

This chapter calls attention to the dream world of aesthetic representations that almost immediately engulfed the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, as well as its 1793 successor. These representations played an important political role, notably by legitimating and disseminating the foundations of the new regime. This visual language, widely viewed as more popular and (after 1792) republican, also influenced the meaning of the Declaration, by emphasizing both its universal applicability to all (including, eventually, enslaved) peoples, and its “lethality” for both internal enemies and foreign tyrants.

This chapter seeks to discern the nature of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and military contribution it made to the wider Vietnam War. Often written off as a mere stooge of the West or a puppet of imperialism, the ARVN needs to be understood as a Vietnamese institution. Though it grew from the shattered wreckage of French colonialism and served a flawed American war effort, the ARVN was indeed Vietnamese. And although it failed in the end that failure needs to be seen from within a Vietnamese context. The ARVN for years commanded the loyalty and sacrifice of millions and fought much more effectively than its American sponsors were willing to admit or its North Vietnamese foes ever expected. Understanding ARVN as an institution is critical to understanding the Vietnam War. And understanding both its military successes and critical failures are key to understanding why the American war in Vietnam failed. That the ARVN perhaps had a real chance to succeed brings the larger failings of the American war in Vietnam into focus.

Drawing on the burgeoning scholarship on the Global 1960s, this chapter argues that the Vietnam War was a key historic event that internationalized radical social movements. The war did so in three main ways. First, through the conflict, activists in different parts of the world formed a global public sphere. Opposition to the war helped to transcend Cold War and colonial divisions, but the political movements that emerged resonated differently through various parts of the First, Second, and Third Worlds. Second, resistance against the Vietnam War fostered internationalism by foregrounding the agency of the marginalized. The war featured a David versus Goliath competition between a presumably backward, peasant society against the mightiest military in the world. Third, the wars in Southeast Asia helped to internationalize antiwar resistance by illuminating the interconnectedness of various systems of inequality. Imperialism and colonization became part of the activist lexicon, utilized to interpret cultural, racial, class, gender, and other forms of exploitation. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the agency of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front in consciously cultivating these antiwar internationalist affiliates.

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.

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.