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(1614)

Sam Wineburg, "Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone)" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Sam Wineburg, "Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone)" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percentage of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately decep...

21 Okt 20211h 1min

Leonidas Mylonakis, "Piracy in the Eastern Mediterranean: Maritime Marauders in the Greek and Ottoman Aegean" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Leonidas Mylonakis, "Piracy in the Eastern Mediterranean: Maritime Marauders in the Greek and Ottoman Aegean" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Dr. Leonidas Mylonakis (PhD in History from the University of California, San Diego) is the author of Piracy in the Eastern Mediterranean: Maritime Marauders in the Greek and Ottoman Aegean (Bloomsbur...

20 Okt 202133min

Timothy Heck and B. A. Friedman, "On Contested Shores: The Evolving Role of Amphibious Operations in the History of Warfare" (Marine Corps UP, 2020)

Timothy Heck and B. A. Friedman, "On Contested Shores: The Evolving Role of Amphibious Operations in the History of Warfare" (Marine Corps UP, 2020)

Perhaps no prediction has been as consistently made—and as consistently wrong—as the imminent death of amphibious operations. Whatever the changes in warfare and technology, the necessity of amphibiou...

19 Okt 202138min

Katherine Chandler, "Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

Katherine Chandler, "Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

Katherine Chandler's Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (Rutgers UP, 2020) studies the conditions that create unmanned platforms in the United States through a genealogy o...

19 Okt 202156min

Heather P. Venable, "How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Marine Corps Mystique 1874-1918" (US Naval Institute Press, 2019)

Heather P. Venable, "How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Marine Corps Mystique 1874-1918" (US Naval Institute Press, 2019)

For more than half of its existence, members of the Marine Corps largely self-identified as soldiers. It did not yet mean something distinct to be a Marine, either to themselves or to the public at la...

18 Okt 202147min

Ivor Sokolić, "International Courts and Mass Atrocity: Narratives of War and Justice in Croatia" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Ivor Sokolić, "International Courts and Mass Atrocity: Narratives of War and Justice in Croatia" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

In his new book International Courts and Mass atrocity: Narratives of War and Justice in Croatia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) Ivor Sokolić explores the effects of international and national transitional...

15 Okt 20211h 1min

Gábor Ágoston, "The Last Muslim Conquest: The Ottoman Empire and Its Wars in Europe" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Gábor Ágoston, "The Last Muslim Conquest: The Ottoman Empire and Its Wars in Europe" (Princeton UP, 2021)

The image of the Ottoman Turks and their interaction with the Christian West, has undergone many changes in the past: from William Gladstone's famous comment that: “[The Turks] one and all, bag and ba...

13 Okt 20212h 27min

Ozan Ozavci, "Dangerous Gifts: Imperialism, Security, and Civil Wars in the Levant, 1798-1864" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Ozan Ozavci, "Dangerous Gifts: Imperialism, Security, and Civil Wars in the Levant, 1798-1864" (Oxford UP, 2021)

From Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798 to the foreign interventions in the ongoing civil wars in Syria, Yemen, and Libya today, global empires or the so-called Great Powers have long assu...

12 Okt 202159min

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