Chapter five analyses the period between 1914 and 1989. Several sociological theories frame this period as one of rational planning, certain knowledge and control. Such beliefs were certainly prominent but they were related to uncertainty: The First World War ended in the fall of empires and social upheaval. Intellectual and political reactions were threefold: art emphasized a fractured world, social sciences accommodated uncertainty and political ideologies claimed to banish uncertainty and offered total control. Totalitarian states blended promises of certainty and determinism with a world of omnipresent threats and dangers. The Second World War was heavily influenced by their conviction that they had uncovered the hidden laws of history. After 1945, the advent of thermonuclear weapons caused widespread existential uncertainty. I interpret the strategy of deterrence as a pragmatic expression of minimal communication in an unpredictable world. The experience of insecurity and a breakdown of international society also spurred scientific ontologies of certainty. Modernization theory and Marxism dominated post-war social science and created the strategies that reaped tragedy in Vietnam.

Bonds’s setting of the Du Bois Credo continues and extends the series of musical appeals for racial justice that had led to The Montgomery Variations, just as the revised version of Credo published at the head of his first autobiography, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, in 1920 extends the ideas that had led to the original 1904 version of Du Bois’s text. This chapter frames both the Du Bois Credo and Bonds’s musical setting thereof as articulations of the themes and issues of the works’ respective biographical contexts and, taken together, a dyadic lens into their creators’ perspectives on the societal upheavals of the most turbulent years of the twentieth century. Then, after demonstrating why, and how, the Credo was effectively silenced during Margaret Bonds’s lifetime despite its obvious importance, timeliness, and musical genius – including conversation with the publisher who insisted that the work could not be published unless its text were altered – the chapter closes by exploring the work’s first posthumous performances and documenting the ringing endorsement of Shirley Graham Du Bois, widow of the poet, for this “work of art that is eternal.”

The Cold War, oil, and new borders intensified the fight for hegemony in the Middle East. The shah maneuvered around thorny international issues by keeping intact his ties to different US administrations. Iran watched the Vietnam War with concern but maintained a balanced stance. Elsewhere, the creation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) brought some regional cooperation. However, in the Persian Gulf, Iran became isolated and faced competition from the Arabian Peninsula and the newly Arab states of the south. Its conflict with Iraq escalated until a short-lived truce was concluded in 1975. Iran also flexed its muscles by supporting the Sultanate in Oman during the conflict in Dhofar, but the shah’s interventions only fueled the domestic unrest against his rule. Student groups and artists increasingly decried the shah’s dictatorial ways.

In 1966, more than 600 people from 82 countries travelled to Havana for the Tricontinental Conference. The unprecedented event defined a new, radical Third Worldist political tendency that reverberated throughout the international Left and provided a militant alternative to the old communist and socialist parties. Tricontinentalism rested on the belief that what was demanded by the current historical moment was the broadest possible united front of political forces willing to wage militant struggle against US imperialism. Cuba and North Korea stood at the forefront of this disruption, which correlated to a major shift in North Korean foreign policy, and the beginning of a new high point in DPRK–Cuba relations. By 1966, North Korea, Cuba, and North Vietnam were widely recognized as constituting a new, informal bloc within the socialist camp, increasingly bold in its willingness to speak on behalf of the Third World and to challenge the authority of Moscow and Beijing.

This chapter examines the origins and development of the “War Story” as a subgenre of American short fiction. It argues that the “War Story” evolved out of the Civil War and the subsequent flowering of realism, which influenced this subgenre both stylistically and philosophically. This chapter explores the major iterations of the “War Story” and documents its adaptation by writers such as Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and Tim O’Brien.

This chapter explores the mediation of experience in Middle Republican Rome. Mediation ‘facilitates the externalization of memories we produce in our minds … [and] through the internalization of mediated memories … we participate in collective memory’.1 In what follows, I will suggest that the First Punic War was the first event in Roman history to be mediated in certain ways that held the real potential to transmute lived experience and personal recollection, supplementing them, or even replacing them, with a different set of narratives that emerged from innovations in Roman artistic production. In Rome in the late third and early second centuries BC, especially in the years after Rome’s first war with Carthage, we encounter the first time that memories of conflict were tied to Latin poetry and public narrative art. Accordingly, this chapter will track the impact that these new memorial media made on Rome’s cultures of memory.2

Despite coordinated international protest, the United States continued to increase its involvement in Vietnam. The escalating war, an increasingly militant global political landscape, and a new conception of anti-imperialist struggle pushed thousands of radicals to escalate their activism beyond the ideological terrain. Black radicals in the United States argued that the best way to support national liberation struggles was to wage war inside the “belly of the beast.” Latin American revolutions like Che Guevara exhorted radicals across the globe to create “two, three, many Vietnams.” And Vietnamese revolutionaries publicly welcomed this sharp radicalization of antiwar engagement. Frustrated with the limits of earlier activism, radicals in France leapt at the opportunity. Coordinating with other anti-imperialists in the North Atlantic, they tried to translate the Vietnamese struggle into their own particular contexts, and their efforts eventually lit the fuse that set off the explosive events of May 1968. In this way, the Vietnam War made May ’68 possible. May itself, radicals thought, was nothing other than another front in the revolutionary wave led by Vietnam. And just as Vietnamese revolutionaries inspired the French, the events of May ’68 inspired radicals elsewhere, who in turn tried to translate May ’68 into their own political vernacular. By the end of the year, thousands of radicals across North America and Western Europe believed it was their internationalist duty to make war at home.

In the early 1960s, Vietnamese resistance to US aggression galvanized a generation of activists, prompting the French in particular to forge an international antiwar alliance with their peers across Western Europe and North America, especially the United States. Together, they came to believe that the Vietnam War was caused by a broader “system” that made such wars possible in the first place. Searching for a way to not only explain this system, but overthrow it, they increasingly turned to Leninism. Radicals in the North Atlantic named the system imperialism, defined their internationalism as anti-imperialism, and called for a coordinated worldwide revolution based in the principle of the right of nations to self-determination. Following the lead of African American, Latin American, and Vietnamese revolutionaries, they argued that the best way to combat this imperialist system was to open new fronts inside the imperialist centers, triggering a wave of domestic upheaval that reached new heights in May 1968. But when this anti-imperialist front faced state repression and imprisonment in France, the United States, and South Vietnam, these same radicals began to advocate individual rights alongside anti-imperialist revolution in the early 1970s. In so doing, they lent legitimacy to a competing form of internationalism that shared the progressive aspirations of Leninist anti-imperialism but rejected nationalism in favor of human rights. When genocide, internecine war, and refugee crises in Southeast Asia eroded faith in national self-determination in the late 1970s, former French radicals sided with the US government in a global movement championing human rights against the sovereignty of states like Vietnam.

In response to the radicalization of the late 1960s, many governments turned to repression. With so many of their comrades behind bars, radicals in the North Atlantic decided to pay closer attention to prisoners, promote civil rights, build alliances with progressives, rebrand themselves as defenders of liberty. At the same time that activists were reconsidering their revolutionary priorities, the United States reoriented its war in Vietnam by using the issue of the POWs to reframe American intervention as a fight for humanitarian principles. Antiwar radicals in the United States and France responded by focusing on political dissidents in South Vietnam. Drawing on their experiences with prison organizing, they connected their newfound concern with civil liberties to antiwar activism, calling for the liberation of political prisoners in South Vietnam. Despite their new focus on rights, anti-imperialist radicals still thought in Leninist terms, framing their internationalism around the problematic of the right of nations to self-determination. Yet in arguing that South Vietnam violated civil rights, anti-imperialist solidarity increasingly took the form of criticizing the internal affairs of a sovereign state, which brought radicals close to competing visions of internationalism like human rights. While most radicals never agreed on a single radical rights discourse, and did not convert to human rights in the early 1970s, their new collective attention to rights, along with alliances with groups such as Amnesty International, shifted the political terrain in a way allowed a rival approach to global change to attract new audiences. In so doing, anti-imperialists lent legitimacy to a competing form of internationalism that shared the progressive aspirations of anti-imperialism but rejected nationalism in favor of human rights.

The sweeping changes of the early 1960s gave rise to a new cycle of struggle across the North Atlantic. It was in this context that the United States escalated its involvement in Vietnam. At the forefront of the antiwar struggle were radicals who advanced a systemic critique, arguing that ending the war meant transforming the system that had created it in the first place. Believing that the system exceeded the borders of the United States, these American radicals internationalized the struggle by reaching out to antiwar activists across the globe. Radicals in Western Europe proved especially responsive to the call, with the French in particular insisting on the strategic value of internationalist coordination in the North Atlantic. French activists took a lead in not only uniting activists across borders but creating a new sense of radical internationalism centered around Vietnam. For their part, Vietnamese revolutionaries played a central role in facilitating this new internationalism. By 1967, tens of thousands of activists across North America and Western Europe had come together in a new radical international.

Chapter 2 reviews the hippie movement’s history and ideology. Using the flower children metaphor often used to describe the hippies, the review relates to four periods labeled as seeding (1945–1964), sprouting (1965–1966), growing (1967–1969), and blossoming and withering (1970–1973). The hippie ideology is described according to five dominant ethics: dope, sex, rock, community, and cultural opposition. This chapter also summarizes the literature exploring where all the hippies went and what legacy they contributed to the world.

The combination of changing international circumstances alongside significant developments in China’s domestic politics made 1960 a turning point in Chinese international scientific outreach. Chapter 3 examines the impacts of these on Chinese engagement with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and the World Federation of Scientific Workers, considering the reasons for the significant divergence in how each was viewed and, consequently, those relationships evolved into the early years of the new decade. As had been the case in the 1950s, elite Chinese scientists and scientific organisations worked with foreign affairs officials, but in the context of the early 1960s this meant significantly adjusting and adapting their approaches to such external events and organisations. In all, Chinese science diplomacy via united front work was less well suited to the combative context of the Sino-Soviet split than when the two powers were not so overtly locked in competition for influence.

The 1964 Peking Science Symposium and 1966 Summer Physics Colloquium were the two largest-scale international science congresses hosted by Mao’s China. Chapter 4 delves into the inner workings of these events, which brought hundreds of visitors to the People's Republic of China from throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. From planning through to post-conference tours organised for participants, it examines the network of organisations and individuals at national and local levels that collectively shaped these major initiatives to bring foreign scientists to China on the cusp of the Cultural Revolution. In doing so, it shows the extent of integration and coordination between science and foreign relations systems during the Mao era.

Chapter 11 looks at Rosemary Taylor and Ellen Moir, the leading Australian humanitarians during the Vietnam War. Both were staunch advocates of inter-country adoption and supported evacuating war orphans to Australia, the United States and other countries. This created great debate and controversy at the time. Rosemary Taylor was one of the most prominent and high-profile humanitarians over the course of the history of child refugees and humanitarianism. She arrived in Saigon in 1967 as an educational social worker with a refugee service sponsored by the Australian Council of Churches. Taylor’s efforts in Vietnam with child refugees and orphanages captured the attention of the press, which called the children ‘Rosemary’s babies’. Acting as an informal liaison officer for orphanages across Vietnam, she was involved with the infamous Babylift of 1975, in which several hundred children were flown out of Vietnam to Australia – some for adoption by Australian families. Ellen Moir, a staunch advocate for inter-country adoption, was involved in smuggling five orphans into Australia without permits or documents in 1972, and worked with Taylor to attempt to expand the possibility of Australians adopting Vietnamese War orphans. Moir lobbied government agencies to allow children to enter the country. The role of humanitarian activists such as Taylor and Moir working largely outside of organised bodies led to a form of humanitarian activism which was at times ad hoc, chaotic and strident, and which allowed them to advocate for inter-country adoption to be seen as a solution to the increase in the number of child refugees and war orphans.