This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and larger 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 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 complex war.