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 treats love, desire and eroticism, arguing that eros and philotes serve as metapoetic structuring principles of epic narrative. It begins with a preliminary survey of the foundational texts, focusing on the scene of Helen at the loom as she weaves a tapestry of warriors in battle, essentially a figuration of the Iliad as an artistic product of sexual longing. The chapter then moves forward to consider how these same erotic structuring principles play out in imperial Greek epic, which absorbs Homer’s models through the filter of romantic fiction. Smith focuses on the first three books of Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica – the events surrounding Penthesileia, Memnon, and the death of Achilles – reading them as flirtatious manipulations that intensify readerly anticipation, and then turns to Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, specifically the tendril imagery in the Ampelos episode and its sequel, the romance of Calamus and Carpus. These episodes serve as exemplars of the regenerative powers of epic desire.

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.

This chapter explores the complex relationship between epic and the tricky genre of lyric. Spelman begins with brief historical orientation and then focuses on broader and more theoretical questions of genre, which have been given new impetus by Culler’s Theory of the Lyric. Taking ‘lyric’ in a broad sense to include iambos and elegy as well as melic poetry, Spelman considers some of the most famous and important lyric passages (especially drawing from Pindar and Sappho) that engage with Homeric epic, the Homeric Hymns and the Epic Cycle. Spelman ultimately examines how and whether lyric works out a definition for itself in contradistinction to epic—and whether such a definition can offer us a more nuanced understanding of what epic itself is.

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.

This chapter focuses on emotions and affects in Greek epic. Leven demarcates the difference between emotion and affect in this context: emotions are defined as complex phenomena that involve embodied minds, gendered individuals and their societies, as well as instincts, cognition and values; and affects are understood as more ineffable feelings, which lie ‘beneath’ the surface: the innumerable microevents that bodies and selves undergo in their experience of the world around them, rarely indexed in conventional language. The chapter then starts by outlining the main questions that have divided scholarship on ancient emotions in general, and epic emotions in particular, with special focus on two cases, anger and fear. It then turns to episodes featuring what Leven calls ‘scenes of affect’ and argues, first, that epic is not in fact solely dominated by ‘big emotions’ but is rather shaped by a multitude of affects. Focusing on representative passages of the Odyssey, the Argonautica, and the Posthomerica, the chapter ultimately shows that epic provides its own tools to conceptualise these affects.

This chapter probes the powerful presence of Greek epic in the world of late antique Christianity. The chapter begins by exploring the dynamic variety of uses to which hexameter verse was put by late antique Christians, including poems on surprisingly salacious themes. It then turns to consider hexameter poems on specifically Christian topics. First it examines the earliest examples of such texts, the Sibylline Oracles and the poems in the Codex of Visions. He then analyses the group of poems all composed in the fifth century CE: the Metaphrase of the Psalms of ps.-Apollinaris, the Homeric Centos and Martyrdom of St Cyprian of Eudocia and the Paraphrase of John’s Gospel by Nonnus. Each of these is, in a different way, a transcription into hexameter verse of a pre-existing Christian text — a striking development in the history of Greek poetry. Whitmarsh shows how this shift enacts, and indeed puts pressure on, the distinction between form and content. Yet for all that they have in common, each of the three fifth-century poets has a different agenda, and reflects a unique poetic vision and aesthetic.