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)

The Origins of World War One

The Origins of World War One

Who or what originated and/or caused the Great War from breaking out in July 1914? Was it Serbia with its expansionist and aggressive designs on Austria-Hungary? Was it Austria-Hungary itself, unneces...

12 Mar 20201h 7min

Steve Vogel, "Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation" (Custom House, 2019)

Steve Vogel, "Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation" (Custom House, 2019)

In his new book Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation (Custom House, 2019), Steve Vogel tells the astonishing true story of the Berlin Tunnel, one of ...

11 Mar 20201h 1min

Jamie L. H. Goodall, "Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay: From the Colonial Era to the Oyster Wars" (The History Press, 2020)

Jamie L. H. Goodall, "Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay: From the Colonial Era to the Oyster Wars" (The History Press, 2020)

The story of Chesapeake pirates and patriots begins with a land dispute and ends with the untimely death of an oyster dredger at the hands of the Maryland Oyster Navy. From the golden age of piracy to...

11 Mar 202047min

Sarah Burns, "The Politics of War Powers: The Theory and History of Presidential Unilateralism" (UP of Kansas, 2020)

Sarah Burns, "The Politics of War Powers: The Theory and History of Presidential Unilateralism" (UP of Kansas, 2020)

Sarah Burns’ new book The Politics of War Powers: The Theory and History of Presidential Unilateralism (University Press of Kansas, 2020) pulls together distinct threads in analyzing the theoretical f...

9 Mar 202050min

Aimee Fox, "Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914-1918" (Cambridge UP, 2017)

Aimee Fox, "Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914-1918" (Cambridge UP, 2017)

Learning, innovation and adaptation are not concepts that we necessarily associate with the British Army of the First World War. Yet the need to learn from mistakes, to exploit new opportunities and t...

5 Mar 202034min

Kathy Peiss, "The Information Hunters" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Kathy Peiss, "The Information Hunters" (Oxford UP, 2019)

While armies have seized enemy records and rare texts as booty throughout history, it was only during World War II that an unlikely band of librarians, archivists, and scholars traveled abroad to coll...

4 Mar 202034min

Maria Ryan, "Full Spectrum Dominance: Irregular Warfare and the War on Terror" (Stanford UP, 2019)

Maria Ryan, "Full Spectrum Dominance: Irregular Warfare and the War on Terror" (Stanford UP, 2019)

America's war on terror is widely defined by the Afghanistan and Iraq fronts. Yet, as this book demonstrates, both the international campaign and the new ways of fighting that grew out of it played ou...

2 Mar 202041min

Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)

Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMast...

25 Feb 202042min

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