  Debye shielding, collisional transport, Landau damping of Langmuir waves, and
spontaneous emission of these waves are introduced, in typical plasma physics
textbooks, in different chapters. This paper provides a compact unified
introduction to these phenomena without appealing to fluid or kinetic models,
but by using Newton's second law for a system of $N$ electrons in a periodic
box with a neutralizing ionic background. A rigorous equation is derived for
the electrostatic potential. Its linearization and a first smoothing reveal
this potential to be the sum of the shielded Coulomb potentials of the
individual particles. Smoothing this sum yields the classical Vlasovian
expression including initial conditions in Landau contour calculations of
Langmuir wave growth or damping. The theory is extended to accommodate a
correct description of trapping or chaos due to Langmuir waves. In the linear
regime, the amplitude of such a wave is found to be ruled by Landau growth or
damping and by spontaneous emission. Using the shielded potential, the
collisional diffusion coefficient is computed for the first time by a
convergent expression including the correct calculation of deflections for all
impact parameters. Shielding and collisional transport are found to be two
related aspects of the repulsive deflections of electrons.
