Philippe M. F. Peycam completes the first ever English-language study of Vietnam's emerging political press and its resistance to colonialism. Published in the decade that preceded the Communist Party's founding, this journalistic phenomenon established a space for public, political contestation that fundamentally changed Vietnamese attitudes and the outlook of Southeast Asia. Peycam directly links Saigon's colonial urbanization to the creation of new modes of individual and collective political agency. To better justify their presence, French colonialists implemented a peculiar brand of republican imperialism to encourage the development of a highly controlled print capitalism. Yet the Vietnamese made clever use of this new form of political expression, subverting colonial discourse and putting French rulers on the defensive, while simultaneously stoking Vietnamese aspirations for autonomy. Peycam specifically considers the work of Western-educated Vietnamese journalists who, in their legal writings, called attention to the politics of French rule. Peycam rejects the notion that Communist and nationalist ideologies changed the minds of "alienated" Vietnamese during this period. Rather, he credits colonial urban modernity with shaping the Vietnamese activist-journalist and the role of the French, even at their most coercive, along with the modern public Vietnamese intellectual and his responsibility toward the group. Countering common research on anticolonial nationalism and its assumptions of ethno-cultural homogeneity, Peycam follows the merging of French republican and anarchist traditions with neo-Confucian Vietnamese behavior, giving rise to modern Vietnamese public activism, its autonomy, and its contradictory aspirations. Interweaving biography with archival newspaper and French police sources, he writes from within these journalists' changing political consciousness and their shifting perception of social roles.

Through the voices of senior officials, teachers, soldiers, journalists, and artists, The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975, presents us with an interpretation of "South Vietnam" as a passionately imagined nation in the minds of ordinary Vietnamese, rather than merely as an expeditious political construct of the United States government. The moving and honest memoirs collected, translated, and edited here by Tuong Vu and Sean Fear describe the experiences of war, politics, and everyday life for people from many walks of life during the fraught years of Vietnam's Second Republic, leading up to and encompassing what Americans generally call the "Vietnam War." The voices gift the reader a sense of the authors' experiences in the Republic and their ideas about the nation during that time. The light and careful editing hand of Vu and Fear reveals that far from a Cold War proxy struggle, the conflict in Vietnam featured a true ideological divide between the communist North and the non-communist South.

This volume is a comprehensive study of VietnamÕs greatest and most controversial 20th century writer who died tragically in 1939 at the age of 28. Vu Trong Phung is known for a remarkable collection of politically provocative novels and sensational works of non-fiction reportage that were banned by the communist state from 1960 to 1986. Leading Vietnam scholar, Zinoman, resurrects the life and work of an important intellectual and author in order to reveal a neglected political project that is excluded from conventional accounts of modern Vietnamese political history. He sees Vu Trong Phung as a leading proponent of a localized republican tradition that opposed colonialism, communism, and unfettered capitalismÑand that led both to the banning of his work and to the durability of his popular appeal in Vietnam today.

There is no single volume that shines a light on Asia's collective involvement in the First World War, and the impact that war had on its societies. Moreover, no volume in any language explores the experiences Asian countries shared as they became embroiled, with divergent results, in the war and its repercussions. Asia and the Great War moves beyond the national or even international level by presenting a 'shared' history from non-national and transnational perspectives. Asian involvements make the Great War not only a true 'world' war but also a 'great' war. The war generated forces that would transform Asia both internally and externally. Asian involvement in the First World War is a unique chapter in both Asian and world history, with Asian participation transforming the meaning and implications of the broader conflict. Asia and the Great War also takes steps to recover memories of the war and re-evaluate the war in its Asian contexts. Asia's part in the war and the part the war played in the collective development of Asia represent the first steps of the long journey to full national independence and international recognition. This volume aims to bring the Great War more fully into Asian history and the people of Asia into the international history of the war, in the hope that the shared history could lay the groundwork for a shared future.

Western observers have long considered communism to be synonymous with Vietnam’s modern historical experience. Eager to make sense of the North Vietnamese victory in the Vietnam War, scholars and journalists have spilled much ink on the history of Vietnamese communists. But this preoccupation has obscured the diversity of ideas and experiences that defined Vietnam in the twentieth century, in which communism represented just one of many tendencies. Building a Republican Nation in Vietnam, 1920–1963, posits that republicanism shaped modern Vietnam no less profoundly than communism. Republicans championed representative government, the universal rights of man, civil liberties, and the primacy of the nation. These ideas infused the thinking of Vietnamese reformers, dissidents, and revolutionaries from the 1900s onward, including many men and women who went on to lead the struggle for independence. Republicanism was also one of the chief inspirations for the establishment of the Republic of Vietnam (also known as South Vietnam) in 1955. This interdisciplinary volume brings together eleven essays by historians, political scientists, literary scholars, and sociologists, who make use of fresh sources to study the development of republicanism from the colonial period to the First Republic of Vietnam (1955–1963). The introduction by coeditors Nu-Anh Tran and Tuong Vu critically analyzes the existing scholarship on the First Republic, explains how the concept of republicanism can illuminate developments in the Saigon-based state, and situates the regime in a comparative context with South Korea. Peter Zinoman’s chapter reviews the historiography on republicanism and modern Vietnam and heralds the arrival of the “republican moment” in the field of Vietnam studies. Several chapters by Nguyễn Lương Hải Khôi, Martina Thucnhi Nguyen, and Yen Vu examine the transformation of republican ideas. Nu-Anh Tran and Duy Lap Nguyen explore competing concepts of democracy and the factional politics of the First Republic. The essays by Jason Picard, Cindy Nguyen, Hoàng Phong Tuấn, Nguyễn Thị Minh, and Y Thien Nguyen analyze nation- and state-building efforts in the 1950s and 1960s. Collectively, the essays give voice to Vietnamese republicans, from the ideas they espoused to the institutions they built and the legacies they left behind.

By highlighting the connections between domestic political struggles and overseas imperial structures, The Politics of Imperial Memory in France, 1850–1900 explains how and why French Republicans embraced colonial conquest as a central part of their political platform. Christina B. Carroll explores the meaning and value of empire in late-nineteenth-century France, arguing that ongoing disputes about the French state's political organization intersected with racialized beliefs about European superiority over colonial others in French imperial thought. For much of this period, French writers and politicians did not always differentiate between continental and colonial empire. By employing a range of sources—from newspapers and pamphlets to textbooks and novels—Carroll demonstrates that the memory of older continental imperial models shaped French understandings of, and justifications for, their new colonial empire. She shows that the slow identification of the two types of empire emerged due to a politicized campaign led by colonial advocates who sought to defend overseas expansion against their opponents. This new model of colonial empire was shaped by a complicated set of influences, including political conflict, the legacy of both Napoleons, international competition, racial science, and French experiences in the colonies. The Politics of Imperial Memory in France, 1850–1900 skillfully weaves together knowledge from its wide-ranging source base to articulate how the meaning and history of empire became deeply intertwined with the meaning and history of the French nation.

Foreign Aid and Journalism in the Global South: A Mouthpiece for Truth examines the way in which foreign aid has shaped professional ideologies of journalism as part of systematic and orchestrated efforts since the beginning of the twentieth century to shape journalism as a political institution of the Global South. Foreign aid pushed for cultural convergence around a set of ideologies as a way of exporting ideology and expanding markets, reflecting the market society along with the expansion of U.S. power and culture across the globe. Jairo Lugo-Ocando argues that these policies were not confined to the Cold War and were not a purely modern phenomenon; today’s journalism grammar was not invented in one place and spread to the rest, but was instead a forced colonial and post-colonial nation-building exercise that reflected both imposition and contestation to these attempts. As a result, Lugo-Ocando claims, journalism grammar and ideology differ between societies in the Global South, regardless of claims of universality. Scholars of journalism, international relations, Latin American Studies, and history will find this book particularly useful.

The effects of the War outside present-day Vietnam are ongoing. Substantial Vietnamese communities in countries that participated in the conflict are contributing to renewed interpretations of it. This collection of new essays explores changes in perceptions of the war and the Vietnamese diaspora, examining history, politics, biography and literature, with Vietnamese, American, Australian and French scholars providing new insights. Twelve essays cover South Vietnamese leadership and policies, women and civilians, veterans overseas, smaller allies in the war (Australia), accounts by U.S., Australian and South Vietnamese servicemen as well as those of Indigenous soldiers from the U.S. and Australia, memorials and commemorations, and the legacy of war on individual lives and government policy.

Post-Mandarin offers an engaging look at a cohort of Vietnamese intellectuals who adopted European fields of knowledge, a new Romanized alphabet, and print media—all of which were foreign and illegible to their fathers. This new generation of intellectuals established Vietnam’s modern anticolonial literature. The term “post-mandarin” illuminates how Vietnam’s deracinated figures of intellectual authority adapted to a literary field moving away from a male-to-male literary address toward print culture. With this shift, post-mandarin intellectuals increasingly wrote for and about women. Post-Mandarin illustrates the significance of the inclusion of modern women in the world of letters: a more democratic system of aesthetic and political representation that gave rise to anticolonial nationalism. This conceptualization of the “post-mandarin” promises to have a significant impact on the fields of literary theory, postcolonial studies, East Asian and Southeast Asian studies, and modernist studies.