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.

Yoon Sun Lee discusses how Enlightenment understandings of race shaped ideas about inheritance, such that property ownership came to be understood in racialized terms and race came to be understood in economic terms. Burke’s and Kant’s writings about heritability thus shed light on the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, whereby, as Lee puts it, “enslaved women of African descent bore children who counted not as population that could inherit things but as property that could be inherited by others, on the basis of a color that had to be ascribed or assumed as the material sign of a legal condition.”

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.

Standard narratives of the American war in Vietnam contend that the US Army squandered its chances of victory because of misguided strategy. Such works claim that once President Lyndon B. Johnson deployed American ground combat troops to South Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, the US military commander in Vietnam, pursued an ill-advised strategy of attrition. Worse, these narratives continue, the general implemented this strategy despite being presented with a clearly better alternative from US Marine Corps commanders operating in the northern provinces of South Vietnam. Such conventional wisdom, however, presents a flawed understanding of American strategy under Westmoreland, who never subscribed to an “either–or” approach to confronting the political-military threat inside South Vietnam. At no point did Westmoreland concentrate solely on conventional battle at the expense of counterinsurgency. Likewise, the general never believed local civic action or pacification programs to be a panacea. In reality, American strategy from 1964 to 1968 rested on a belief that South Vietnam was facing a dual threat – both conventional and unconventional – that required a similarly comprehensive response. By reexamining American strategy under Westmoreland, one finds no “missed opportunity,” a conclusion that raises important questions about the limits of American military power abroad in the mid-1960s.

Superficially, the Vietnam War might seem a high point of congressional resistance to the Cold War consensus. After all, two consecutive presidents, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, faced ferocious criticism as they expanded the US military commitment in Southeast Asia. Yet for most of the Johnson and Nixon years, Congress was mostly reacting to executive decisions, and struggled to stop either the escalation of the war under Johnson or its expansion under Nixon. Ironically, perhaps the best chance for Congress to influence Vietnam policy came before a significant commitment of US combat forces, during the Kennedy administration. Yet for a combination of ideological and tactical reasons, members of both the House and the Senate who might have been inclined to challenge the administration’s approach to Vietnam declined to do so in a meaningful way.

President Lyndon Johnson reluctantly began the sustained bombing of North Vietnam with Operation Rolling Thunder on March 2, 1965. Johnson initially thought that gradually increasing attacks against the North Vietnamese heartland might break the North’s morale and end its support of the insurgency, but the significant restrictions that the president placed on bombing limited its effectiveness. More importantly, the character of the war fought by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese – an infrequently waged guerrilla conflict that required minimal supplies to wage – negated the utility of bombing the North’s supply lines, oil, and its meager amount of industry. Meanwhile, in South Vietnam, air force, navy, and marine fighters and helicopters supported American and South Vietnamese ground operations, as did US Air Force B-52s, which began bombing Southern targets in a massive campaign known as Arc Light in June 1965. Compared to bombing the North, air attacks on South Vietnamese territory had few limitations and often inflicted significant civilian casualties. Though air power often tilted the scales toward American forces in rare conventional engagements like Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive, it could not guarantee survival of a Southern government that was fundamentally corrupt and out of touch with its populace.

In the Epilogue Christoforou offers an impressionistic essay on encounters with ancient Greek epic in modern Greek lands. In an alternative, personal perspective on the political account provided in Hanink’s chapter, he explores the problematic ownership of the past in Greece and how the central place held by Greek antiquity, and in particular epic, in the construction of western civilisation has created a strange distance between Greeks and the Greek past and its literature. Reflecting on his own experience as a Grecophone classicist, Christoforou shows how the story of Greekness and epic is now played out in the background of Greeks performing their Hellenicity in a world that does not always trust their inheritance.

Essaka Joshua discusses the relationship between disability and race, both where they intersect in literary and nonliterary discourses and, importantly, where they are deliberately opposed. For example, in the writing of the blind writer and staunch abolitionist Edward Rushton, the critique of racism hinges on the idea that racial prejudice derives from sightedness. Rushton thus serves as an important counterpoint to the more widely taught Edmund Burke, whose ableist assumptions about blindness in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful undergird a belief in blackness and Black subjects as inherently terrifying.

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 traces the emergence of published women’s rights demands in Western Europe and America. While this history begins with seventeenth-century French debates and broadened through the eighteenth century, it was in the immediate run-up to, and then during the course of, the French Revolution that arguments for women’s civil and political rights flared up and arrived at their modern expression. From Condorcet to Olympe de Gouges, many more writers of both sexes advocated les droits des femmes, demanding legal, educational, economic, and social equality with men. Early expressions of these claims sometimes met with scorn and disbelief, particularly from influential German philosophers, but the claims would nevertheless resurface periodically and gain momentum throughout the nineteenth century, especially during the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 and 1870–1 (and eventually in 1917 Russia), and the women’s suffrage campaigns in the West. Many advocates of women’s rights in France and in the English-speaking world, including Sarah Grimké, made common cause with abolitionists (of Black slavery) and with early social reformers and socialists. As democratic ideas slowly made headway, claims for women’s inclusion and equal rights grew louder and more insistent, ultimately fostering attitudinal changes and proposals for legislative action in many nation-states.

This chapter considers the place of epic, above all Homer, in three overlapping areas of ancient Greek and Roman culture – education at all levels, elite literary culture, and the more specialised interpretations of scholars and philosophers. Homer was central to Greek education and Hunter considers the various types of evidence for this centrality – anecdotes, literary descriptions, papyri – and the reasons for the greater attention given to the Iliad over the Odyssey. He then illustrates the place of epic in the creative poetry and prose of the Hellenistic and imperial periods and finally samples the scholarly and philosophical approaches taken to Homer from Ptolemaic Alexandria to late antiquity. The chapter brings together a range of authors and thinkers, from Quintilian to Horace, Dio Chrysostom to Eustathius, and Porphyry’s remarkable allegorical treatment of Homer.