Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young, “Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars” (Oxford UP, 2008)

Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young, “Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars” (Oxford UP, 2008)

What to think about the Vietnam War? A righteous struggle against global Communist tyranny? An episode in American imperialism? A civil war into which the United States blindly stumbled? And what of the Vietnamese perspective? How did they–both North and South–understand the war? Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young have assembled a crack team of historians to consider (or rather reconsider) these questions in Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Transnational and International Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). The book is part of the National History Center‘s Reinterpreting History series. The pieces in it are wide-ranging: some see the war from the heights of international diplomacy, others from the hamlets of the Mekong Delta. They introduce new themes, for example, the role of American racial stereotypes in the conflict. More than anything else, however, they are nuanced. Their authors provide no simple answers because there are none. You will not find easy explanations, good guys and bad guys, or ideological drum-beating in these pages. What you will find is a sensitive effort to understand an event of mind-boggling, irreducible complexity. There’s a lesson here: we may think we know what we are doing on far-away shores, but we are fooling ourselves. Reminds one a bit of Tolstoy’s thoughts on the philosophy of history at the end of War and Peace. Still worth a read, as is this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Episoder(1612)

William Doyle, "Napoleon at Peace: How to End a Revolution" (Reaktion Books, 2022)

William Doyle, "Napoleon at Peace: How to End a Revolution" (Reaktion Books, 2022)

The French Revolution facilitated the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, but after gaining power he knew that his first task was to end it. In this book William Doyle describes how he did so, beginning with ...

19 Okt 202519min

Francis L. Sampson, "Look Out Below!: A Story of the Airborne by a Paratrooper Padre" (Catholic U of America Press, 2023)

Francis L. Sampson, "Look Out Below!: A Story of the Airborne by a Paratrooper Padre" (Catholic U of America Press, 2023)

A veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War, Francis L. Sampson was a real-life hero whose exploits inspired one of the most famous war films of all time, Saving Private Ryan. From rural begi...

16 Okt 202548min

Gustav Meibauer, "The No-Fly Zone in US Foreign Policy: The Curious Persistence of a Flawed Instrument" (Policy Press, 2025)

Gustav Meibauer, "The No-Fly Zone in US Foreign Policy: The Curious Persistence of a Flawed Instrument" (Policy Press, 2025)

Suggested additional channels: Political Science, National Security, American Politics, Middle Eastern Studies, Eastern European Studies, New Books with Miranda Melcher NB: I don’t think this needs to...

12 Okt 202548min

Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

Civil War Americans, like people today, used the past to understand and traverse their turbulent present. As Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean reveals in this fascinating work of comparative intellectual history...

12 Okt 202555min

Nick Higham, "Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution and the Forgotten Battle of World War One" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Nick Higham, "Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution and the Forgotten Battle of World War One" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

As the First World War drew to a close and regimes began to collapse across Europe, British officials plotted a daring campaign to send an unlikely band of maverick soldiers, diplomats and spies to th...

10 Okt 202549min

Tyler Jost, "Bureaucracies at War: The Institutional Origins of Miscalculation" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Tyler Jost, "Bureaucracies at War: The Institutional Origins of Miscalculation" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Why do states start conflicts that they ultimately lose? Why do leaders possess inaccurate expectations of their prospects for victory? Bureaucracies at War (Cambridge UP, 2024) examines how national ...

8 Okt 202549min

Chuck Steele and John M. Jennings, "The Worst Military Leaders in History" (Reaktion Books, 2022)

Chuck Steele and John M. Jennings, "The Worst Military Leaders in History" (Reaktion Books, 2022)

For Chuck Steele and John M. Jennings's book The Worst Military Leaders in History (Reaktion Books, 2022), fifteen distinguished historians were given a deceptively simple task: identify their choice ...

6 Okt 202543min

Madison Schramm, "Why Democracies Fight Dictators" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Madison Schramm, "Why Democracies Fight Dictators" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Over the course of the last century, there has been an outsized incidence of conflict between democracies and personalist regimes—political systems where a single individual has undisputed executive p...

3 Okt 202554min

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