Catherine Peters discusses how writers such as the Cuban poet Juan Francisco Manzano reworked the Romantic trope of the revolutionary “common wind” to forge kinship networks among forcibly displaced peoples. In formulating this argument, Peters shifts the conventional focus on the French Revolution as the hub of radical Romantic thought to the Haitian Revolution, where “fraternité” refers not to an abstract ideal but a very real desire to reconstitute those family relations disrupted by the institution of slavery.

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.

At the prompting of the Nixon White House, President Nguyen Van Thieu sent South Vietnamese forces into Laos in February 1971, seeking to cut North Vietnamese supply lines to the battlefields in the South. Lam Son 719 was a bloody failure, and it shaped the final phase of America’s Vietnam War. Convinced that the South Vietnamese could never withstand a full-scale offensive, the North Vietnamese leadership committed to a nation-wide attack in early 1972, designed to bring a decisive end to the war. The Easter Offensive, as it is remembered in the West, broke on three fronts in late March 1972, initially with a series of victories by the NVA. President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, viewed this offensive as a threat to their political and diplomatic objectives, and ordered a massive deployment of US air and naval forces to reinforce the South Vietnamese. In May 1972, Nixon ordered an air offensive against North Vietnam code-named Linebacker to deny resupply to the North Vietnamese forces. The NVA offensive stagnated in late June, setting the stage for negotiations between the US and Hanoi to end the war. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho reached a settlement in early October, but it was rejected by Thieu, forcing the US to renegotiate the treaty. In the end, Nixon directed the most violent air campaign of the war, sending B-52 heavy bombers over Hanoi to coerce the North Vietnamese into accepting the minor changes required for a settlement.

Since the end of the Vietnam War, the Communist party-state has sponsored one project after another to commemorate that inspired and frenzied age. Memoirs, shrines, sculptures, paintings, fiction and film, each in its own way, lent awe to the revolution. By the mid-1980s – the high noon of market reforms – people from all walks of life began to lay claim to that past, ushering in something of a “commemorative fever.” This chapter examines how Vietnamese letters and the arts met the call to re-examine the Vietnam War, what forms they took, and how the many highroads to history, official and private, cut across one another.

This chapter considers the prominence of and play with temporality in imperial Greek epic through a reading of three poems which thematise time in particularly self-conscious ways: Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica, Triphiodorus’ Sack of Troy and Colluthus’ Abduction of Helen. These epics all return directly to the world of Troy, resurrect Homer’s idiolect and style, and locate their plots before or in-between the timespan of the Iliad and Odyssey. Analysing some key moments of temporal reflexivity in these poems, the chapter outlines the specific ‘imperial Greek temporality’ that they share, which connects these otherwise very different poems and renders them distinct from, for instance, Apollonius’ Alexandrian epic as analysed by Phillips. These poets proudly return to the literary distant past and use this past to convey their own imperial identities, revelling in their paradoxical positions as both pre- and post-Homeric.

This chapter explores three key ways that epic has expressed a sense of temporality. The first is foundational: epic uses genealogy to express the structure of things, through aetiologies and causations and the preserving function of memory. Goldhill shows how this sense of foundational time can be enacted through cosmology, in Hesiod’s Theogony, through social structures, in Hesiod’s Works and Days, and on a political plain, as in Vergil’s Aeneid or Lucan’s Pharsalia. The second is narratological and thematic: epics make time a subject of their narrative, through the centralisation of delay within the heroic mission (as in the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid), and even through making time itself a character, as Nonnus does in his Dionysiaca. The third is poetic: how epic marks its awareness of its place in tradition. As shown most strikingly by works like Quintus’ Posthomerica and Eudocia’s Martyrdom of St Cyprian, epic inhabits its own moment whilst forging connections with previous epics and looking ahead to posterity. Using these three vectors, Goldhill explores the ancient epic tradition on a broad scale in a way that grounds the next two chapters in this section.

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.

In 1968–73, the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China played crucial military and political roles in the Vietnam War, particularly against the background of larger developments in world politics. The Sino-Soviet split, Sino-American rapprochement, and Soviet-American détente all influenced the North Vietnamese conduct of war. The split made coordination of socialist aid in the second half of the 1960s difficult, but also resulted in a Sino-Soviet competition of aid that enabled North Vietnam to launch the Tet Offensive in early 1968 in the first place. Rapprochement convinced the DRV to launch the Easter Offensive – a second Tet Offensive – in the spring of 1972. Détente eventually forced North Vietnam to rethink its strategy of trying to win a victory against the United States on the battlefield in Indochina and humiliate the superpower at the global level in the process. Despite Moscow and Beijing’s sustained loyalty throughout the conflict in the late 1960s and early 1970s, neither supported Hanoi’s overall strategy during the last years of the war. The Soviet Union preferred a negotiated solution to the conflict, while China jettisoned its world revolutionary positions in the 1970–72 period and instead counselled North Vietnam to settle for a negotiated agreement.

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 1973–75 period has received scant attention from western scholars. For most, the war ended when the Americans left, but the seeds of the destruction of South Vietnam were sown with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973. Although both Vietnamese antagonists had suffered tremendous physical damage during the 1972 offensive, their irreconcilable political visions prevented them from creating peace. Hanoi had refused to remove its troops from the country after the offensive, and, despite a signed agreement, it had promptly broken the accords, determined to conquer Saigon and unite the country under its flag. Thus, there are four main reasons for the defeat of South Vietnam: North Vietnamese abrogation of the Paris Peace Accords, dire South Vietnamese economic conditions, the reduction of US aid and its debilitating effect on the South Vietnamese military, and President Nguyen Van Thieu’s strategic military blunders. The first three forced Thieu into an impossible predicament, which led to the fourth. The outcome was the fall of South Vietnam.

Lauren Dembowitz’s chapter focuses on race and visual culture, drawing on Blake’s notion of the “bounding line” with its “infinite inflexions and movements” that recast the visual image without relying on the inhumanity and philistinism of mass production. These “inflexions and movements” allow us to imagine new possibilities for familiar images, such as that of the “Hottentot Venus,” Sarah Baartman. Rather than write off these images as racist stereotypes, we can, with Dembowitz’s Blakean method, attend closely to how the material history of the visual text is imbricated with the history of race, which is subtly transformed with each new iteration. As Dembowitz powerfully concludes, the image compels us to “contend with the ways we are ‘intimately connected’ with, ‘bound up in,’ and ‘dependent upon’ that figure and the real women she overwrites for understanding how racial capitalism lives on in our present.”

This chapter summarizes some of the key issues confronting Vietnam after the so-called “liberation of the South” in 1975. Partly because of the fact that it was a military takeover, the new regime was immediately confronted with new economic, political, and diplomatic pressures from the United States, China, and a host of other countries. In addition, the new leadership plunged Vietnam into more than a decade of difficulties on all fronts – including protracted wars with China and Cambodia – because of over-confidence, ideological steadfastness, and miscalculations. Domestic resistance and international pressures of various kinds finally brought about grudging changes that culminated in the reform process of the late 1980s, which thereby helped to open up a new horizon for Vietnam and its people.

This chapter argues that the 1848 Revolutions can profitably be understood through the prism of arguments over rights. It highlights a series of contests between those who championed a “thin” conception of individual civil and political rights and those who defended a variety of “thicker” understandings: whether of rights as belonging to collectives, especially national minorities; as protecting cultural, linguistic, or gender identities and differences; or as demands for extensive state action to challenge economic domination of workers by landowners and capitalists. The offer of individual rights under a “thinner” constitutional order in the Habsburg monarchy was insufficient to address conflicts between the dominant Magyar nation and the claims of the regime’s other national groups; at the same time, these conflicts generated nuanced efforts to theorize individual and collective rights by figures such as József Eötvös. Ostensibly “thin” demands for individual equality under the law proved unable to protect individuals – particularly emancipated slaves, peasants, laborers, and women – from domination deep-seated in existing social structures.

In the 1980s and beyond, a variety of ways of thinking about the Vietnam War began to coalesce into conventional recollections: the received knowledge and common sense of the war. A truism was that Vietnam veterans had suffered a difficult homecoming worsened by their sense that they alone bore the war’s moral burdens. Aware of that predicament through the emerging understanding of post-traumatic stress, their fellow Americans felt obliged to offer Vietnam veterans the comfort of recognition. To overcome veterans’ isolation and bring together a divided public, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial acknowledged the service and sacrifices of those who had fought. Vietnam veterans became the principal vectors who overcame Cold War–generated divisions about the war, and brought it into public understanding through their testimony in oral histories and documentaries, literary works, and complaints about their grievances. Although opinion polls indicated throughout the decades that most Americans believed that their nation acted wrongly in Vietnam, a generational shift is now occurring as new cohorts grow up separated from the experience of the war by the span of years. As memories fall away through time, the Vietnam War becomes an artifact of American culture, of which everyone becomes the collective custodian and repository.