This paper analyses the textual-mythographical transformation of Viet origin myths from their transcription in the distant past through their exploitation for political purposes in the 1950s by scholarly elites. It attempts to demonstrate that, as early as the fifteenth century, stories about the Hùng Kings were deliberately collected and codified by members of the Việt elite, who sought to exploit their potential as catalysts of identify-formation and unification under the leadership of the imperial state. However, as a result of the confluence of two currents, that of the monarchical state's mythographical construction and that of popular, village-based, animistic worship, the Hùng Kings came to be venerated as ancestral founders of the Việt quốc in temples throughout the Red River Delta and beyond. During the French colonial and early national periods, the codified myths were the object of severe criticism and strident defence by both French and Viet scholars.

The world might have become, for the first time in human history, a majority urban place, but there are clearly important seams of research to mine in the Southeast Asian countryside. These six books amply show why there is a continuing interest in rural areas and agrarian living in the region.

For the past three decades, student movements in most countries in the world have been beaten back, but there are signs that some may be returning. In response to the Arab Spring, students participated fully in Tahrir Square and beyond. The student elections in Egypt that followed, however, seem to have been divided according to the various links that each student group had with the political groups contending for state power, like the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists on the one side, against secular and revolutionary groups on the other. It is not certain if the student elections really reflected the overall mood of the country or whether they were simply shaped by political protagonists outside the campuses.

Historians may have come late to the study of women and gender in Southeast Asia, but when these three books are placed along a historiographical spectrum one can only be impressed at how far the field has moved in approach and methodology. Exploiting previously untapped sources that emanate from very different sites — a Dutch East India Company courtroom, the women's quarters of a Malay palace, the privacy of a Javanese home — the authors open up new avenues by which to explore the complexity of Southeast Asia's gender history. Though the contexts are very different, the movement through time (Wives, slaves and concubines is set in the late eighteenth century, Victorious wives in the nineteenth, and Realizing the dream in the twentieth) provides an opportunity to gauge shifts in representations of ‘femaleness’, attitudes towards gender roles, and women's responses to change.