Authoritative and original, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom is among the first works of its kind, exploring the influence that French colonialism and Hmong leadership had on the Hmong people's political and social aspirations.

Based on more than 200 interviews during 2002-2009 under the auspices of the Hmong Oral History Project. Several full-text interviews are available on the project's website.

Hmong American immigrants first came to the United States as refugees of the Vietnam War. Forty years on, they have made a notable impact in American political life. They have voter participation rates higher than most other Asian American ethnic groups, and they have won seats in local and state legislative bodies. Yet the average level of education among Hmong Americans still lags behind that of the general U.S. population and high rates of poverty persist in their community, highlighting a curious disparity across the typical benchmarks of immigrant incorporation. Carolyn Wong analyzes how the Hmong came to pursue politics as a key path to advancement and inclusion in the United States. Drawing on interviews with community leaders, refugees, and the second-generation children of immigrants, Wong shows that intergenerational mechanisms of social voting underlie the political participation of Hmong Americans. Younger Hmong Americans engage older community residents in grassroots elections and conversation about public affairs. And in turn, within families and communities, elders often transmit stories that draw connections between ancient Hmong aspirations for freedom and contemporary American egalitarian projects.

Through a sociological analysis of Hmong former refugees’ grassroots movements in the United States between the 1990s and 2000s, Immigrant Agency shows how Hmong, despite being one of America’s most economically impoverished ethnic groups, were able to make sustained claims on and have their interests represented in public policies. The author, Yang Sao Xiong argues that the key to understanding how immigrants incorporate themselves politically is to understand how they mobilize collective action and make choices in circumstances far from racially neutral. Immigrant groups, in response to political threats or opportunities or both, mobilize collective action and make strategic choices about how to position themselves vis-à-vis other minority groups, how to construct group identities, and how to deploy various tactics in order to engage with the U.S. political system and influence policy. In response to immigrants’ collective claims, the racial state engages in racialization which undermines immigrants’ political standing and perpetuates their marginalization.

Tragic Mountains tells the story of the Hmong's struggle for freedom and survival in Laos from 1942 through 1992. During those years, most Hmong sided with the French against the Japanese and Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh, and then with the Americans against the North Viemamese.

The definitive account of one of the most important battles of the twentieth century, and the Black River borderlands' transformation into Northwest Vietnam This new work of historical and political geography ventures beyond the conventional framing of the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ, the 1954 conflict that toppled the French empire in Indochina. Tracking a longer period of anticolonial revolution and nation-state formation from 1945 to 1960, Christian Lentz argues that a Vietnamese elite constructed territory as a strategic form of rule. Engaging newly available archival sources, Lentz offers a novel conception of territory as a contingent outcome of spatial contests.