Joseph Albernaz examines how “the modern category of lyric voice is entangled with processes of racialization.” Albernaz focuses on the complaint poem, a subgenre that was especially important to Romantic-era abolitionists, who often ventriloquized enslaved Africans. And yet, Albernaz contends, Romantic poetry, particularly as it is taken up by Black writers, is also capable of refusing the racial logics it has traditionally upheld. In such instances, complaint negates the world as it is and reveals, however briefly, “the collective undersong of No, the depthless well of non-sense from which all sense springs.”

Atesede Makonnen’s “Romanticism and the Novel(ty) of Race” argues that not only did the Romantic novel take up questions about race, but the novel form was itself racialized during the Romantic era. Makonnen studies in particular Clara Reeve and Anna Letitia Barbauld, who attempted to taxonomize various “species” of prose in a mirror of the categorization central to that of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century racial philosophy and science. For both Reeve and Barbauld, the evolution of the modern novel is a move away from other forms – tales and fables, for instance – linked to the primitive and non-European. Thus, both writers link literary development as a mark of cultural, national, and, implicitly, racial progress.

Until 1954 the strategically important Central Highlands were primarily inhabited by some twenty indigenous ethnic groups that the French and Americans collectively referred to as Montagnards or Highlanders. From 1960 the communist National Liberation Front sought to recruit Highlanders, leading to a rapid deterioration of the security situation in the Central Highlands, which in 1961 provoked the deployment of US Special Forces to lead Highlander militias. In combination with discriminatory policies of successive South Vietnamese governments, the militarization of the Highlands spurred the emergence in 1964 of a Highlands autonomy movement known as FULRO. As the Central Highlands became one of the main theaters of war, an attack by communist forces on an American airstrip close to Pleiku in the Central Highlands prompted the bombing campaign known as Operation Rolling Thunder and the landing of US combat troops near Da Nang in 1965. After a decade of forced resettlement and displacement of Highlanders, it was the silent complicity of FULRO militia and indigenous populations around the Highlands city of Ban Me Thuot that ensured the element of surprise in the attack by regular North Vietnamese cavalry in March 1975, triggering the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam one month later.

This chapter gives an overview of the destruction and transformation of South Vietnam during the war, and especially of the ramifications of the American military presence and its firepower, as well as of the American economic aid that kept the homefront afloat. In the rural areas, the American presence depopulated the countryside and compelled peasants to flee in a “forced draft urbanization and modernization” wave. In the urban areas, it initiated an economic boom, creating a more prosperous middle class, and a more robust entrepreneurial sector dominated by overseas Chinese allied with the military. Overnight, it also created a large service sector that rose to cater to the needs of its military personnel, and the economic rise of this group of formerly underclass people inflicted stress on South Vietnam’s traditional society. This society – and its culture – was further transformed and strained by the introduction of American consumer goods and lifestyle. The American presence also changed the political map, handing the South Vietnamese military unparalleled political power which a fractious political body could not challenge. As the American presence drew to a close, this entire social, military, political, and economic edifice began to crack and eventually collapsed in 1975.

This chapter analyzes what New York Times correspondent David Halberstam called “a war within a war,” the conflict between journalists who reported about the deficiencies of the Saigon government or the US war effort in Vietnam and administration officials in the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations who considered those stories myopic or malicious. It argues that news media coverage of the Vietnam War rankled presidents not because it was slanted or sensational but because it showed the hard realities, high costs, and inconvenient truths of a controversial war. As polls revealed declining popular support for the US war effort, it became politically expedient for Johnson and Nixon to blame the news media – and especially the television networks – for public discontent. The “war within the war” has had enduring legacies. The efforts of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon to discredit the reporting of television journalists, prominent columnists, and newspaper correspondents established precedents that a later generation of government officials has used in 21st-century battles over “fake news.” Like so much of the US experience in Vietnam, the disputes over the reporting of the war remain part of the present, even as they recede further into the past.

The 1968 Tet Offensive proved to be the turning point of the Vietnam War, and its effects were far-reaching. In late January, the combined forces of the People’s Army of Vietnam and the People’s Liberation Armed Forces launched a massive offensive in South Vietnam, striking near simultaneously at 5 of 6 autonomous cities, 36 of 44 province capitals, 72 of 245 district towns, and 23 airfields/bases. Despite intelligence indicators that predicted a major enemy buildup, the United States and its South Vietnamese allies were taken by surprise at the scope and ferocity of the communist attacks. The allies recovered quickly; in the bitter fighting that followed into the early fall months, the communists were soundly defeated at the tactical level and failed to achieve any of their battlefield objectives. However, the fact that the enemy had pulled off such a widespread offensive and caught the allies by surprise ultimately contributed to a psychological victory for the communists at the strategic level. The Tet Offensive set into motion the events that would lead to the election of Richard Nixon, the long and bloody US withdrawal from Southeast Asia, and ultimately the fall of South Vietnam.

By recovering fragments of the political negotiations that took place between native peoples and European colonizing powers in the settler colonies of Canada and Australia, this chapter argues that treaty-making was central to the ability of Indigenous peoples to assert the rights they wanted, rather than those they were granted, against imperial and colonial states. In settler colonies, colonial states used the principles of protection and assimilation to establish the legal status of Indigenous peoples to create them as subjects within a particular legal order that set the place of everyone in relation to the sovereign. Without a treaty, Indigenous peoples were effectively placed in a position where they could only claim rights that were compatible with the aims of protection in the nineteenth century, and so were defined by the colonial authorities. Yet the language of ‘rights’ could restrict, or even distort, some of the political arguments that Indigenous peoples wanted to assert, for example in relation to hunting and fishing rights that Europeans understood in terms of access to resources in order to secure their subsistence.

From the 1950s through 1975, American women served in the Vietnam War through the US armed services, the American Red Cross, and US government agencies. Deficiencies in record-keeping have made it difficult to know exactly how many American women deployed to Vietnam, but estimates suggest that about 8,000 to 10,000 women served military tours, while 25,000 or more went to Vietnam in civilian capacities. Although a few women went to Vietnam before the United States committed combat troops and remained in country until 1975, the majority of American women who served in either military or civilian capacities arrived between 1965, the year of the first deployment of ground troops, and 1973, when the last US combat troops departed. Women were not assigned to infantry or other forward units, but they experienced the trauma of war through their work with US servicemen. In particular, nurses and Red Cross workers saw what combat did to soldiers, yet the nature of their jobs and the expectation that they nurture wounded and traumatized servicemen required them to put aside their own mental and emotional injuries that the war inflicted.

The Introduction makes the case for why it is important and timely to return afresh to ancient greek epic, despite or even because of the huge amount of scholarship that already exists on this genre. After a brief overview of the current state of the field, it outlines the main points of innovation and interventions of the volume, focusing on its thematic structure, its emphasis on the lesser-known authors or dimensions of Greek epic, and its integration of ancient material and modern responses to it. It ends with a brief overview of the sections of the volume and draws out the connections between the chapters within them.

Travis Chi Wing Lau addresses the place of race within Romantic-era medical discourse, calling attention to the disabling forms of experimentation on Black bodies that enabled anatomical research. There is, Lau points out, a key irony in these experiments, as the study of those who were understood to be fundamentally pathological led to universalizing conclusions about the nature of normative, white man. If this sounds like a moment of merely historical interest, Lau assures us it is not. Rather, the legacy of the racialized discourse of medicine can be witnessed in ongoing health disparities among differently racialized groups.

Noting the proliferation of human rights leagues at the turn of the twentieth century, and their significance up to the interwar period, this chapter argues that such leagues built on an organizational and discursive repertoire built over the course of the prior century by three transnational movements above all: the abolitionist, women’s suffrage, and peace movements. These movements shared a recognition of a systemic link between the rule of law, humanitarianism, and political participation by the people, and they sought to realize these connected values through new forms of association and mobilization. These movements shared some personnel, organizing strategies, and rhetoric. Although the language of rights and more particularly “human rights” or “droits de l’homme” was relatively marginal to these movements, especially outside France, their members did invoke human rights both to make their case on behalf of each of these humanitarian aims and also to draw connections between them, particularly between the abolition of slavery and women’s emancipation. Peace societies offered another model for bringing together diverse social groups around common political and humanitarian goals. Members of the French Ligue pour la défense des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, founded in 1898 in the context of the Dreyfus affair, as well as its provincial affiliates and human rights leagues it inspired in other countries, drew not only or even primarily on the legacy of the few prior organizations dedicated specifically to rights, but more generally on the example of these three humanitarian social movements.

The Vietnamese communist leadership displayed a remarkable degree of ingenuity and resourcefulness in its quest to drive out the Americans, finish off the regime in Saigon, and win the conflict by achieving national reunification under its exclusive aegis. At times, it proved callous to the extreme, making choices it understood might result in massive death and suffering for its people. Increasingly reliant over time upon military and other aid from socialist allies, most notably China and the Soviet Union, it still jealously guarded its autonomy, refusing even to consult those allies about major strategic matters. The audacity and temerity of the Hanoi Politburo were matched only by its impenetrability and staunchness. In the end, it prevailed over its enemies owing less to their shortcomings than to the merits of its masterfully crafted and carefully calibrated strategy of “struggle” on three separate yet closely intertwined fronts.

This chapter examines the aversion to theories and programs of natural rights in much mainstream nineteenth-century British political discourse. Following on the heels of their Enlightenment and revolutionary efflorescence, writers in Great Britain articulated various critiques of natural rights philosophies and declarations. Moving from early critics such as Burke and Bentham to later Victorian writers and statesmen – most importantly, J. S. Mill – the chapter traces several threads of skepticism toward natural rights. British writers, it argues, were preoccupied less with the unsound conceptual foundations of natural rights theories than with the perceived consequences of belief in natural rights, which was seen as leading in anarchic, destabilizing, and antinomian directions. Natural rights platforms, it was contended, appealed to passion, ignored context and the weighing of costs and benefits, and undermined both the rule of law and state authority. In addition, natural rights theories were perceived by critics to be connected to a range of worrying trends (democratization and the rise of socialism, among others). Natural rights theories, furthermore, stood in stark contrast to the utilitarian and historicist attitudes towards law and government which prevailed in Britain during these decades. Finally, the conclusion offers a glance at nineteenth-century France, contrasting the loyalty toward natural rights across the Channel with British hostility, and revealing that many of the fears that Britons articulated about the dissemination of natural rights ideas were harbored by the French with regard to the spread of consequentialism.