The American War in Contemporary Vietnam

The American War in Contemporary Vietnam
Author: Christina Schwenkel
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2009-07-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0253003318

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.

Other Moons

Other Moons
Author:
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0231551630

In this anthology, Vietnamese writers describe their experience of what they call the American War and its lasting legacy through the lens of their own vital artistic visions. A North Vietnamese soldier forms a bond with an abandoned puppy. Cousins find their lives upended by the revelation that their fathers fought on opposite sides of the war. Two lonely veterans in Hanoi meet years after the war has ended through a newspaper dating service. A psychic assists the search for the body of a long-vanished soldier. The father of a girl suffering from dioxin poisoning struggles with corrupt local officials. The twenty short stories collected in Other Moons range from the intensely personal to narratives that deal with larger questions of remembrance, trauma, and healing. By a diverse set of authors, including many veterans, they span styles from social realism to tales of the fantastic. Yet whether describing the effects of Agent Orange exposure or telling ghost stories, all speak to the unresolved legacy of a conflict that still haunts Vietnam. Among the most widely anthologized and popular pieces of short fiction about the war in Vietnam, these works appear here for the first time in English. Other Moons offers Anglophone audiences an unparalleled opportunity to experience how the Vietnamese think and write about the conflict that consumed their country from 1954 to 1975—a perspective still largely missing from American narratives.

Military Justice in Vietnam

Military Justice in Vietnam
Author: William Thomas Allison
Publisher:
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN:

A concise look at how military justice during the Vietnam War served the dual purpose of punishing U.S. solders' crimes and infractions while also serving the important role of promoting core American values--democracy and rule of law--to the Vietnamese.

Nixon's Vietnam War

Nixon's Vietnam War
Author: Jeffrey P. Kimball
Publisher:
Total Pages: 536
Release: 1998
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

The signing of the Paris Agreement in 1973 ended not only America's Vietnam War but also Richard Nixon's best laid plans. After years of secret negotiations, threats of massive bombing and secret diplomacy designed to shatter strained Communist alliances, the president had to settle for a peace that fell far short of his original aims.

The Remasculinization of America

The Remasculinization of America
Author: Susan Jeffords
Publisher:
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1989
Genre: History
ISBN:

"In this book the author examines representations of the Vietnam experience in film, oral history, novels, and short stories and finds that the media have helped remasculinize, or regender social relations. She argues that the war, instead of leading to a reexamination of the US value system, has spurred a revitalization of the traditional values of capitalism and bourgeois individualism."--Amazon.com.

Kill for Peace

Kill for Peace
Author: Matthew Israel
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2013-07-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0292745435

“The book addresses chronologically the most striking reactions of the art world to the rise of military engagement in Vietnam then in Cambodia.” —Guillaume LeBot, Critique d’art The Vietnam War (1964–1975) divided American society like no other war of the twentieth century, and some of the most memorable American art and art-related activism of the last fifty years protested U.S. involvement. At a time when Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art dominated the American art world, individual artists and art collectives played a significant role in antiwar protest and inspired subsequent generations of artists. This significant story of engagement, which has never been covered in a book-length survey before, is the subject of Kill for Peace. Writing for both general and academic audiences, Matthew Israel recounts the major moments in the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement and describes artists’ individual and collective responses to them. He discusses major artists such as Leon Golub, Edward Kienholz, Martha Rosler, Peter Saul, Nancy Spero, and Robert Morris; artists’ groups including the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) and the Artists Protest Committee (APC); and iconic works of collective protest art such as AWC’s Q. And Babies? A. And Babies and APC’s The Artists Tower of Protest. Israel also formulates a typology of antiwar engagement, identifying and naming artists’ approaches to protest. These approaches range from extra-aesthetic actions—advertisements, strikes, walk-outs, and petitions without a visual aspect—to advance memorials, which were war memorials purposefully created before the war’s end that criticized both the war and the form and content of traditional war memorials. “Accessible and informative.” —Art Libraries Society of North America

Armed with Abundance

Armed with Abundance
Author: Meredith H. Lair
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807834815

Popular representations of the Vietnam War tend to emphasize violence, deprivation, and trauma. By contrast, in Armed with Abundance, Meredith Lair focuses on the noncombat experiences of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, redrawing the landscape of the war

Vietnam

Vietnam
Author: Michael Lind
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2013-07-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1439135266

Michael Lind casts new light on one of the most contentious episodes in American history in this controversial bestseller. In this groundgreaking reinterpretation of America's most disatrous and controversial war, Michael Lind demolishes enduring myths and put the Vietnam War in its proper context—as part of the global conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. Lind reveals the deep cultural divisions within the United States that made the Cold War consensus so fragile and explains how and why American public support for the war in Indochina declined. Even more stunning is his provacative argument that the United States failed in Vietnam because the military establishment did not adapt to the demands of what before 1968 had been largely a guerrilla war. In an era when the United States so often finds itself embroiled in prolonged and difficult conflicts, Lind offers a sobering cautionary tale to Ameicans of all political viewpoints.

Ghosts of War in Vietnam

Ghosts of War in Vietnam
Author: Heonik Kwon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2013-08-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781107659421

This is a fascinating study of the Vietnamese experience and memory of the Vietnam War through the lens of popular imaginings about the wandering souls of the war dead. These ghosts of war play an important part in postwar Vietnamese historical narrative and imagination and Heonik Kwon explores the intimate ritual ties with these unsettled identities which still survive in Vietnam today as well as the actions of those who hope to liberate these hidden but vital historical presences from their uprooted social existence. Taking a unique approach to the cultural history of war, he introduces gripping stories about spirits claiming social justice and about his own efforts to wrestle with the physical and spiritual presence of ghosts. Although these actions are fantastical, this book shows how examining their stories can illuminate critical issues of war and collective memory in Vietnam and the modern world more generally.

Four Decades On

Four Decades On
Author: Scott Laderman
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2013-06-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822354748

In Four Decades On, historians, anthropologists, and literary critics examine the legacies of the Second Indochina War, or what most Americans call the Vietnam War, nearly forty years after the United States finally left Vietnam. They address matters such as the daunting tasks facing the Vietnamese at the war's end—including rebuilding a nation and consolidating a socialist revolution while fending off China and the Khmer Rouge—and "the Vietnam syndrome," the cynical, frustrated, and pessimistic sense that colored America's views of the rest of the world after its humiliating defeat in Vietnam. The contributors provide unexpected perspectives on Agent Orange, the POW/MIA controversies, the commercial trade relationship between the United States and Vietnam, and representations of the war and its aftermath produced by artists, particularly writers. They show how the war has continued to affect not only international relations but also the everyday lives of millions of people around the world. Most of the contributors take up matters in the United States, Vietnam, or both nations, while several utilize transnational analytic frameworks, recognizing that the war's legacies shape and are shaped by dynamics that transcend the two countries. Contributors. Alex Bloom, Diane Niblack Fox, H. Bruce Franklin, Walter Hixson, Heonik Kwon, Scott Laderman, Mariam B. Lam, Ngo Vinh Long, Edwin A. Martini, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Christina Schwenkel, Charles Waugh