Download or read book The Road to Vietnam written by Pablo de Orellana and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did the USA become involved in Vietnam? What led US policy makers to become convinced that Vietnam posed a threat to American interests? In The Road to Vietnam, Pablo de Orellana traces the origins of the US-Vietnam War back to 1945-1948 and the diplomatic relations fostered in this period between the US, France and Vietnam, during the First Vietnam War that pitted imperial France against the anti-colonial Vietminh rebel alliance. With specific focus on the representation of the parties involved through the processes of diplomatic production, the book examines how the groundwork was laid for the US-Vietnam War of the 60's and 70's. Examining the France-Vietminh conflict through poststructuralist and postcolonial lenses, de Orellana reveals the processes by which the US and France built up the perception of Vietnam as a communist threat. Drawing on archival diplomatic texts, the representation of political identity between diplomatic actors is examined as a cause leading up to American involvement in the First Vietnam War, and will be sure to interest scholars in the fields of fields of diplomatic studies, international relations, diplomatic history and Cold War history.
Download or read book Hanoi s Road to the Vietnam War 1954 1965 written by Pierre Asselin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Using new and largely inaccessible Vietnamese sources as well as French, British, Canadian and American archives, Pierre Asselin sheds valuable light on Hanoi's path to war. Step by step the narrative makes Hanoi's revolutionary strategy from the end of the French Indochina War to the start of the Anti-American Resistance Struggle for Reunification and National Salvation (the Vietnam War) transparent. The book reveals how North Vietnamese leaders moved from a cautious policy emphasizing nonviolent political and diplomatic struggle to a far riskier pursuit of military victory"--
Download or read book The Road Not Taken Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam written by Max Boot and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (Biography) A New York Times bestseller, this “epic and elegant” biography (Wall Street Journal) profoundly recasts our understanding of the Vietnam War. Praised as a “superb scholarly achievement” (Foreign Policy), The Road Not Taken confirms Max Boot’s role as a “master chronicler” (Washington Times) of American military affairs. Through dozens of interviews and never-before-seen documents, Boot rescues Edward Lansdale (1908–1987) from historical ignominy to “restore a sense of proportion” to this “political Svengali, or ‘Lawrence of Asia’ ”(The New Yorker). Boot demonstrates how Lansdale, the man said to be the fictional model for Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, pioneered a “hearts and minds” diplomacy, first in the Philippines and then in Vietnam. Bringing a tragic complexity to Lansdale and a nuanced analysis to his visionary foreign policy, Boot suggests Vietnam could have been different had we only listened. With contemporary reverberations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, The Road Not Taken is a “judicious and absorbing” (New York Times Book Review) biography of lasting historical consequence.
Download or read book Road to Disaster written by Brian VanDeMark and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 992 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The most thoughtful and judicious one-volume history of the war and the American political leaders who presided over the difficult and painful decisions that shaped this history. The book will stand for the foreseeable future as the best study of the tragic mistakes that led to so much suffering."—Robert Dallek Many books have been written on the tragic decisions regarding Vietnam made by the young stars of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Yet despite millions of words of analysis and reflection, no historian has been able to explain why such decent, brilliant, and previously successful men stumbled so badly. That changes with Road to Disaster. Historian Brian VanDeMark draws upon decades of archival research, his own interviews with many of those involved, and a wealth of previously unheard recordings by Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford, who served as Defense Secretaries for Kennedy and Johnson. Yet beyond that, Road to Disaster is also the first history of the war to look at the cataclysmic decisions of those in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations through the prism of recent research in cognitive science, psychology, and organizational theory to explain why the "Best and the Brightest" became trapped in situations that suffocated creative thinking and willingness to dissent, why they found change so hard, and why they were so blind to their own errors. An epic history of America’s march to quagmire, Road to Disaster is a landmark in scholarship and a book of immense importance.
Download or read book Radicals on the Road written by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traveling to Hanoi during the U.S. war in Vietnam was a long and dangerous undertaking. Even though a neutral commission operated the flights, the possibility of being shot down by bombers in the air and antiaircraft guns on the ground was very real. American travelers recalled landing in blackout conditions, without lights even for the runway, and upon their arrival seeking refuge immediately in bomb shelters. Despite these dangers, they felt compelled to journey to a land at war with their own country, believing that these efforts could change the political imaginaries of other members of the American citizenry and even alter U.S. policies in Southeast Asia. In Radicals on the Road, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu tells the story of international journeys made by significant yet underrecognized historical figures such as African American leaders Robert Browne, Eldridge Cleaver, and Elaine Brown; Asian American radicals Alex Hing and Pat Sumi; Chicana activist Betita Martinez; as well as women's peace and liberation advocates Cora Weiss and Charlotte Bunch. These men and women of varying ages, races, sexual identities, class backgrounds, and religious faiths held diverse political views. Nevertheless, they all believed that the U.S. war in Vietnam was immoral and unjustified. In times of military conflict, heightened nationalism is the norm. Powerful institutions, like the government and the media, work together to promote a culture of hyperpatriotism. Some Americans, though, questioned their expected obligations and instead imagined themselves as "internationalists," as members of communities that transcended national boundaries. Their Asian political collaborators, who included Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, Foreign Minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government Nguyen Thi Binh and the Vietnam Women's Union, cultivated relationships with U.S. travelers. These partners from the East and the West worked together to foster what Wu describes as a politically radical orientalist sensibility. By focusing on the travels of individuals who saw themselves as part of an international community of antiwar activists, Wu analyzes how actual interactions among people from several nations inspired transnational identities and multiracial coalitions and challenged the political commitments and personal relationships of individual activists.
Download or read book The Road to Dien Bien Phu written by Christopher Goscha and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A multifaceted history of Ho Chi Minh’s climactic victory over French colonial might that foreshadowed America’s experience in Vietnam On May 7, 1954, when the bullets stopped and the air stilled in Dien Bien Phu, there was no doubt that Vietnam could fight a mighty colonial power and win. After nearly a decade of struggle, a nation forged in the crucible of war had achieved a victory undreamed of by any other national liberation movement. The Road to Dien Bien Phu tells the story of how Ho Chi Minh turned a ragtag guerrilla army into a modern fighting force capable of bringing down the formidable French army. Taking readers from the outbreak of fighting in 1945 to the epic battle at Dien Bien Phu, Christopher Goscha shows how Ho transformed Vietnam from a decentralized guerrilla state based in the countryside to a single-party communist state shaped by a specific form of “War Communism.” Goscha discusses how the Vietnamese operated both states through economics, trade, policing, information gathering, and communications technology. He challenges the wisdom of counterinsurgency methods developed by the French and still used by the Americans today, and explains why the First Indochina War was arguably the most brutal war of decolonization in the twentieth century, killing a million Vietnamese, most of them civilians. Panoramic in scope, The Road to Dien Bien Phu transforms our understanding of this conflict and the one the United States would later enter, and sheds new light on communist warfare and statecraft in East Asia today.
Download or read book The American War in Contemporary Vietnam written by Christina Schwenkel and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-13 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christina Schwenkel's absorbing study explores how the "American War" is remembered and commemorated in Vietnam today -- in official and unofficial histories and in everyday life. Schwenkel analyzes visual representations found in monuments and martyrs' cemeteries, museums, photography and art exhibits, battlefield tours, and related sites of "trauma tourism." In these transnational spaces, American and Vietnamese memories of the war intersect in ways profoundly shaped by global economic liberalization and the return of American citizens as tourists, pilgrims, and philanthropists.
Download or read book Journey to South Vietnam written by John Williams and published by Page Publishing Inc. This book was released on 2020-11-05 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a different perspective on the Vietnam conflict. Journey to South Vietnam is a story of real life events, including my career in the military services—the United States Marine Corps (USMC) and the United States Air Force (USAF). These compelling and life-altering experiences seemed to defy the imagination. I was also searching for my god. I volunteered for South Vietnam when the United States was in turmoil and the military was not respected by the media
Download or read book On Blood Road written by Steve Watkins and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taylor is a rebellious teenager with a habit of sneaking out to hang with his anti-war friends, so in January 1968 his mother drags him off to Saigon where his father is attached to the United States embassy; bored (and still rebellious) Taylor sneaks out of the embassy to watch the Tet celebrations, just as the war erupts all over Vietnam and there he is captured by the North Vietnamese Army and sent North as a prisoner and hostage--and during the brutal journey Taylor is forced to confront the realities of war and survival for the first time in his sheltered life.
Download or read book The Path to Vietnam written by Andrew J. Rotter and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What path led Americans to Vietnam? Why and how did the United States become involved in this conflict? Drawing on materials from published and unpublished sources in America and Great Britain, historian Andrew Rotter uncovers and analyzes the surprisingly complex reasons for America's fateful decision to provide economic and military aid to the nations of Southeast Asia in May 1950.
Download or read book Lyndon Johnson s War The Road to Stalemate in Vietnam written by Larry Berman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1991-04-17 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lyndon Johnson's war focuses on the repercussions from President Johnson's failure to address the fundamental incompatibility between his political objectives at home and his military objectives in Vietnam.
Download or read book America s War in Vietnam written by Larry H. Addington and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2000-04-22 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If you want to read one book about Vietnam, read this one.” —New York Review of Books Drawing on years of experience teaching about the war, Larry H. Addington presents a short, narrative history of the origins, course, and outcome of America’s military involvement in Vietnam. Not intended as a competitor to the many excellent comprehensive studies of the Vietnam Era, this book will prove a useful introduction and a concise reference to America’s longest, most controversial war. Addington reviews the history of pre-colonial Vietnam, the impact of French imperialism and the Indochina War, and the Cold War origins of American involvement. He then details US policy after the 1954 Geneva Accords, its role in the establishment of South Vietnam, and the outbreak of a new war. Turning to America’s deepening involvement, Addington examines the US strategies for waging air and ground war, the impact of the war at home, and the reasons for the failure of US policy under President Johnson. He studies the successes and failures of the policy of withdrawal under President Nixon and concludes with an overview of the war’s aftermath and its legacy.
Download or read book When Heaven and Earth Changed Places written by Le Ly Hayslip and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the most important books of Vietnamese American and Vietnam War literature...Moving, powerful.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer In these pages, Le Ly Hayslip—just twelve years old when U.S. helicopters landed in her tiny village of Ky La—shows us the Vietnam War as she lived it. Initially pressed into service by the Vietcong, Le Ly was captured and imprisoned by government forces. She found sanctuary at last with an American contractor and ultimately fled to the United States. Almost twenty years after her escape, Le Ly found herself inexorably drawn back to the devastated country and loved ones she’d left behind, and returned to Vietnam in 1986. Scenes of this joyous reunion are interwoven with the brutal war years, creating an extraordinary portrait of the nation, then and now—and of one courageous woman who held fast to her faith in humanity. First published in 1989, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places was hailed as an instant classic. Now, some two decades later, this indispensable memoir continues to be one of our most important accounts of a conflict we must never forget.
Download or read book Into the Quagmire written by Brian VanDeMark and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-05-18 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In November of 1964, as Lyndon Johnson celebrated his landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, the government of South Vietnam lay in a shambles. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor described it as a country beset by "chronic factionalism, civilian-military suspicion and distrust, absence of national spirit and motivation, lack of cohesion in the social structure, lack of experience in the conduct of government." Virtually no one in the Johnson Administration believed that Saigon could defeat the communist insurgency--and yet by July of 1965, a mere nine months later, they would lock the United States on a path toward massive military intervention which would ultimately destroy Johnson's presidency and polarize the American people. Into the Quagmire presents a closely rendered, almost day-by-day account of America's deepening involvement in Vietnam during those crucial nine months. Mining a wealth of recently opened material at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and elsewhere, Brian VanDeMark vividly depicts the painful unfolding of a national tragedy. We meet an LBJ forever fearful of a conservative backlash, which he felt would doom his Great Society, an unsure and troubled leader grappling with the unwanted burden of Vietnam; George Ball, a maverick on Vietnam, whose carefully reasoned (and, in retrospect, strikingly prescient) stand against escalation was discounted by Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy; and Clark Clifford, whose last-minute effort at a pivotal meeting at Camp David failed to dissuade Johnson from doubling the number of ground troops in Vietnam. What comes across strongly throughout the book is the deep pessimism of all the major participants as things grew worse--neither LBJ, nor Bundy, nor McNamara, nor Rusk felt confident that things would improve in South Vietnam, that there was any reasonable chance for victory, or that the South had the will or the ability to prevail against the North. And yet deeper into the quagmire they went. Whether describing a tense confrontation between George Ball and Dean Acheson ("You goddamned old bastards," Ball said to Acheson, "you remind me of nothing so much as a bunch of buzzards sitting on a fence and letting the young men die") or corrupt politicians in Saigon, VanDeMark provides readers with the full flavor of national policy in the making. More important, he sheds greater light on why America became entangled in the morass of Vietnam.
Download or read book Hanoi s War written by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-07-15 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While most historians of the Vietnam War focus on the origins of U.S. involvement and the Americanization of the conflict, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen examines the international context in which North Vietnamese leaders pursued the war and American intervention ended. This riveting narrative takes the reader from the marshy swamps of the Mekong Delta to the bomb-saturated Red River Delta, from the corridors of power in Hanoi and Saigon to the Nixon White House, and from the peace negotiations in Paris to high-level meetings in Beijing and Moscow, all to reveal that peace never had a chance in Vietnam. Hanoi's War renders transparent the internal workings of America's most elusive enemy during the Cold War and shows that the war fought during the peace negotiations was bloodier and much more wide ranging than it had been previously. Using never-before-seen archival materials from the Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as materials from other archives around the world, Nguyen explores the politics of war-making and peace-making not only from the North Vietnamese perspective but also from that of South Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China, and the United States, presenting a uniquely international portrait.
Download or read book The Vietnam War written by Mark Atwood Lawrence and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-27 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Vietnam War remains a topic of extraordinary interest, not least because of striking parallels between that conflict and more recent fighting in the Middle East. In The Vietnam War, Mark Atwood Lawrence draws upon the latest research in archives around the world to offer readers a superb account of a key moment in U.S. as well as global history. While focusing on American involvement between 1965 and 1975, Lawrence offers an unprecedentedly complete picture of all sides of the war, notably by examining the motives that drove the Vietnamese communists and their foreign allies. Moreover, the book carefully considers both the long- and short-term origins of the war. Lawrence examines the rise of Vietnamese communism in the early twentieth century and reveals how Cold War anxieties of the 1940s and 1950s set the United States on the road to intervention. Of course, the heart of the book covers the "American war," ranging from the overthrow of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem to the impact of the Tet Offensive on American public opinion, Lyndon Johnson's withdrawal from the 1968 presidential race, Richard Nixon's expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos, and the problematic peace agreement of 1973, which ended American military involvement. Finally, the book explores the complex aftermath of the war--its enduring legacy in American books, film, and political debate, as well as Vietnam's struggles with severe social and economic problems. A compact and authoritative primer on an intensely relevant topic, this well-researched and engaging volume offers an invaluable overview of the Vietnam War.
Download or read book Boots on the Ground written by Elizabeth Partridge and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ★ "Partridge proves once again that nonfiction can be every bit as dramatic as the best fiction."* America's war in Vietnam. In over a decade of bitter fighting, it claimed the lives of more than 58,000 American soldiers and beleaguered four US presidents. More than forty years after America left Vietnam in defeat in 1975, the war remains controversial and divisive both in the United States and abroad. The history of this era is complex; the cultural impact extraordinary. But it's the personal stories of eight people—six American soldiers, one American military nurse, and one Vietnamese refugee—that create the heartbeat of Boots on the Ground. From dense jungles and terrifying firefights to chaotic helicopter rescues and harrowing escapes, each individual experience reveals a different facet of the war and moves us forward in time. Alternating with these chapters are profiles of key American leaders and events, reminding us of all that was happening at home during the war, including peace protests, presidential scandals, and veterans' struggles to acclimate to life after Vietnam. With more than one hundred photographs, award-winning author Elizabeth Partridge's unflinching book captures the intensity, frustration, and lasting impacts of one of the most tumultuous periods of American history. *Kirkus Reviews, starred review of Marching for Freedom
