This chapter provides a geographical, ethnic, and economic overview of the coal mining frontier of Quảng Yên in northern Vietnam during the precolonial period, before large-scale coal mining began in the late nineteenth century. The first part of this chapter highlights the ethnic diversity, political volatility, rampant piracy, cross-border smuggling, and illicit trade that characterized this porous Sino-Vietnamese borderland, where state surveillance was often absent. The chapter also examines precolonial mining patterns, the Nguyễn dynasty’s mining policies, and the role of the Chinese in precolonial mining exploitation in Vietnam. Notably, the chapter attributes the decline of the precolonial mining economy in Vietnam to several environmental, political, and technological factors. The last part of this chapter documents the French struggle to stabilize and pacify this complex and volatile mining frontier in the late nineteenth century, paving the way for the region’s first large-scale coal mining enterprises and mining settlements.

By late 1964, peace activists coalesced to oppose US policy on the emerging Vietnam crisis. US government decisions stimulated greater dissent, turning a peace movement trying to stop the war’s escalation into a persistent antiwar movement. The movement had three primary constituencies that differed in fundamental ways: liberals, pacifists, and leftists. Their essential arguments fell into different categories. Practically, the United States could not create a stable representative South Vietnamese government from the outside. Its open-ended commitment to Vietnam did not involve vital US interests, would divert resources from more significant needs, and did not justify the costs. Morally, protesters believed that the destruction and cost of an extended war would be worse for the Vietnamese than communist rule and making the Vietnamese suffer for American objectives was ethically unacceptable. Others claimed that the process of intervention violated US political ideals and threatened its democracy. Pragmatists argued that China was the real Asian threat, and that America’s policy was counterproductive by undermining regional stability.

This chapter offers, first, some how-to tips for close analysis of documents and other texts to uncover a greater range and depth of meaning. Examining the choice of words, the grammatical structures, and the leaps of logic within metaphors and other figures of speech can yield fresh insight into the assumptions, the categories of analysis, and the overt as well as the less conscious agendas of historical actors. Cadence, inflection, repetition, and even silences can in this sense “speak.xy4 Physical presentation, cultural practices, and personal behaviors can suggest how leaders oriented themselves toward others and their likely intents. Second, this chapter explains how historians can read sources for evidence of the interplay between more emotional and more rational modes of thinking. Historians studying the emotions do not need training in neuroscience or psychology. Rather, they need to read texts carefully and evaluate such evidence as discussion of emotion, words signifying emotion, emotion-provoking tropes, and bodily actions triggered by emotion. Also significant is language evidencing excited behaviors, ironies, silences – and the cultural milieus of these and other expressions. Like all historical evidence, such signs of emotion should be interpreted and contextualized rather than taken at face value.

This chapter investigates how local priests related to their superiors by examining a set of handbooks for bishops that were made in the Rhineland and surrounding regions. These handbooks have been overshadowed in the historiography by Regino of Prüm’s well-known Sendhandbuch. However, Regino’s handbook was not the only collection of material available, and this chapter highlights nine manuscripts that – it argues – were composed for the organisation of the episcopal Sendgericht. Through these itinerary courts of law that these manuscripts point to, bishops imposed discipline on priests in their diocese, who during the tenth and eleventh centuries experienced an increasing degree of control that they had not known before.

In 1965, an antiwar movement with disparate constituencies united uneasily in a loose coalition, but remained so amorphous that no single entity could provide either leadership or direction. Local actions built around teach-ins, the international days of protest, or as independent events, dominated antiwar activism that year. Peace liberals and pacifists pursued moderate actions such as lobbying, education and persuasion, legal and peaceful rallies, and picketing, while hoping for change through an international solution or the electoral process. Radicals and leftists connected the war with domestic injustice and questioned some fundamental assumptions about American power. Despite its limitations, organized dissent provided a significant enough challenge that the Johnson administration felt compelled to push back. Government officials mixed efforts to persuade public opinion with denigrating activists as communist-inspired or threatening protesters with military induction. President Johnson aimed his April negotiating proposal and a brief December bombing halt over North Vietnam at impressing his domestic critics as much as his foreign adversaries.

The national security paradigm is a comprehensive framework or methodology that relates variables to one another and allows for diverse interpretations of American foreign policy in particular periods and contexts. National security policy encompasses the decisions and actions deemed imperative to protect domestic core values from external threats. This definition underscores the relationship of the international environment to the internal situation in the United States and accentuates the importance of people’s ideas and perceptions in constructing the nature of external dangers as well as the meaning of national identity, American ideals, and vital interests. This chapter outlines the key tasks to employ a national security methodology, beginning with identifying the key decision-makers, for example by reading memoirs, diaries, biographies, and oral histories. It then discusses the sources to use to appraise how these decision-makers assessed the intentions and capabilities of prospective foes, as well as perceptions of their own country’s strength and cohesion, the lessons of the past, the impact of technological innovations, and the structural patterns of the international system. The chapter emphasizes the importance of using empathy, understanding the core values of the past, and defining the meaning of power.

This chapter offers a brief historical overview of selected works by A. S. Mopeli-Paulus, Legson Kayira, Charles Mungoshi, Aldino Muianga, Miriam Tlali, and Yvonne Vera to foreground the historical and material presence of migrants from other Southern African countries in Johannesburg’s literary archive. Tracing trajectories of change and continuity in the post-apartheid migrant city, the chapter shows how South African texts have shifted from employing intra-African migrants as marginal figures or metaphors for post-apartheid urban precariousness and/or multiculture toward more nuanced depictions of migrants as embodied urban agents post-2008. While Johannesburg at best serves as a fragile home for migrant and diasporic characters who often remain dislocated or temporary sojourners in the city, the urban imaginaries by intra-African diasporic authors bring into focus narratives obfuscated by a narrow linguistic and national literary history of Johannesburg, reclaiming the continent’s long-standing place in the city’s literary archive.

The past is freighted for queer Africans. Because of the ubiquitous accusation of being “un-African,” envisioning historical existence for same-gender-loving and gender-diverse Africans offers the promise of establishing cultural authenticity in the present. Queer pasts, however, tend to be elusive, complex, and contested – as recent novels explore. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea gives readers glimpses of a queer relationship from the past through two unreliable witnesses recounting their differing versions of what happened many years later, underlining the inevitable mediation of memory and narration. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing places a more straightforwardly “gay” character in the 1790s, but this biracial, culturally hybrid figure entangles homosexuality with the history of slavery. Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu and Nakisanze Segawa’s The Triangle take on a queer past that has been leveraged for homophobic ends, rather than leading to an acceptance of gay people – the story of late nineteenth-century Bugandan leader Mwanga II. Mwanga’s execution of Christian pages has been represented by missionaries then and Ugandan politicians now as the result of demonic homosexual desire. Kintu’s and The Triangle’s counter-interpretations of this historical nexus show the past and present to be linked sites of political struggle, rather than seeing the past as the source of an authenticated belonging.

Writers in African literature who address the thematic of transatlantic slavery either write historical narratives, mythic narratives, or “narratives of return” to an imagined homeland. The literature explored in this chapter include The Moor’s Account (2014) by Laila Lalami and A gloriosa família: o tempo dos flamengos (1997) by Pepetela, who fictionalize the earliest period of the trade. Two Thousand Seasons (1973) by Ayi Kwei Armah, Season of the Shadow (2013) by Leonora Miano, and the play Slave (1981) by Mohammed Ben-Abdallah mythically revision the past. A play like Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) by Ama Ata Aidoo and the novels Comes the Voyager at Last by Kofi Awoonor (1992) and Call Me by My Rightful Name (2004) by Isidore Okpewho, as narratives of return, focus on diasporic subjectivity. These texts, this chapter further argues, exemplify an “embodied archive” where the past and present and the ancestral and psychical bond entwine in bodily, experiential memory seen in how the characters approach common thematics such as African collusion in the slave trade intertwined with the colonial encounter, resistance to domination, diasporic subjectivity in relation to Africa, and the formation of Pan-African unity.

The introduction presents the aim and themes of the book within its historiographical framework. It accounts for the relative obscurity of local priests in historical research on the period by examining their role in three influential historiographical approaches and explains the way in which the study of this group of clergymen can improve our understanding of the tenth and early eleventh centuries. As well as setting out the structure of the rest of the book, this introduction provides an overview of the sources examined in the following chapters and briefly discusses the study’s geographical scope.

North Vietnam launched a major offensive in 1972 and President Nixon responded with intensified bombing. The competing antiwar coalitions rallied modest demonstrations. Militant tactics attracted much of the public attention, but represented an approach overwhelmingly condemned by antiwar activists. The broader movement launched a “spring offensive” that appeared more cathartic than influential. College campuses continued as dependable sites of protest, but Congress struggled for efficacy and public opinion remained ambiguous. Individual organizations or focused alliances provided the most effective antiwar activity. Women targeted Congress, religious groups confronted corporations, and resistance continued within the armed forces, but most activists in 1972 tried to elect presidential nominee George McGovern and other officials who would finally end the war. A final spasm of retribution in December preceded the 1973 peace settlement. The Watergate scandal weakened the Nixon presidency and strengthened congressional authority, which, combined with determined grassroots activities, finally observed the war’s end two years later.

The Vietnam antiwar movement moved along mutually supportive paths; one within the formal political system and one outside. Dissent within the government expanded over time. Distinct elements of the outsider movement exerted greater influence at different points. Liberal reformers dominated until 1967 and after mid-1971, and intermittently during election campaigns and the fall 1969 Moratorium. Leftists were most evident during major coalition events of 1967 through the May Day demonstrations of spring 1971. Massive student protests in both 1968 and 1970 were ideologically ambiguous. Drawing encouragement and political leverage from the “outsider” movement, federal and state legislators and officials in the executive branch played their most significant role in collaboration with the activist core after 1971.

This chapter looks at moments when local priests came together. It focuses on the diocesan synod, the regular meeting which in theory all priests in the diocese were supposed to attend. Drawing on different kinds of evidence, including liturgies, charters, sermons, hagiography and poems, it argues that local priests attended these meetings more frequently than has been supposed, and examines what sort of things they might have learned and experienced at the synod. It argues for a change in the nature of the diocesan synod from the year 1000, as the occasion became more ceremonial, perhaps as part of episcopal strategies of representation, but perhaps also simply in response to the rising numbers of attendees, as the Church network continued to expand and consolidate.

This chapter explores the transformations caused by the 1920s coal boom in Tonkin, especially with respect to forests and the ways in which they were exploited. Demand for mine timber soared during this period, since coal mining enterprises required a large number of mine props to support their underground tunnels. With hard timber becoming a highly sought-after commodity, illicit timber exploitation and trading networks began operating under the radar of French colonial surveillance. Taking advantage of this mining-driven high demand for timber, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Dao loggers and traders exploited and sold hard timber to large-scale coal mining companies, often without permission. Forest rules were flouted in a frenzied search for mine timber. This chapter underscores how capitalist developments, such as coal mining, were the main perpetrators of the destruction of timber forests in Tonkin, as opposed to indigenous swidden farming practices. This story of coal mining and deforestation also demonstrates the adaptability of indigenous networks, the internal weakness of colonial rule, and the ecological consequences of unchecked capitalist developments.