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)

Vicky Davis, "Central Asia in World War Two: The Impact and Legacy of Fighting for the Soviet Union" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Vicky Davis, "Central Asia in World War Two: The Impact and Legacy of Fighting for the Soviet Union" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Central Asia in World War Two: The Impact and Legacy of Fighting for the Soviet Union (Bloomsbury, 2024) is the first book to tackle the subject of minorities fighting for the Soviet Union under Stali...

28 Des 20241h 19min

Kit Kowol, "Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Kit Kowol, "Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War" (Oxford UP, 2024)

We think we know all there is to know about Britain's Second World War. We don't. This radical re-interpretation of British history and British Conservatism between 1939 and 1945 reveals the bold, at ...

28 Des 202437min

Amy Helen Bell, "Under Cover of Darkness: Murders in Blackout London" (Yale UP, 2024)

Amy Helen Bell, "Under Cover of Darkness: Murders in Blackout London" (Yale UP, 2024)

Fear was the unacknowledged spectre haunting the streets of London during the Second World War; fear not only of death from the German bombers circling above, but of violence at the hands of fellow Lo...

22 Des 202423min

Dianne Ashton and Melissa R. Klapper, "The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai" (NYU Press, 2024)

Dianne Ashton and Melissa R. Klapper, "The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai" (NYU Press, 2024)

Emma Mordecai lived an unusual life. She was Jewish when Jews comprised less than 1 percent of the population of the Old South, and unmarried in a culture that offered women few options other than mar...

15 Des 202456min

Barbara A. Biesecker, "Reinventing World War II: Popular Memory in the Rise of the Ethnonationalist State" (Penn State Press, 2024)

Barbara A. Biesecker, "Reinventing World War II: Popular Memory in the Rise of the Ethnonationalist State" (Penn State Press, 2024)

By the 1970s, World War II had all but disappeared from US popular culture. But beginning in the mid-eighties it reemerged with a vengeance, and for nearly fifteen years World War II was ubiquitous ac...

13 Des 202446min

Lucy Noakes, "Dying for the Nation: Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain" (Manchester UP, 2022)

Lucy Noakes, "Dying for the Nation: Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain" (Manchester UP, 2022)

Death in war matters. It matters to the individual, threatened with their own death, or the death of loved ones. It matters to groups and communities who have to find ways to manage death, to support ...

12 Des 202447min

Mie Nakachi, "Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Mie Nakachi, "Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Today I talked to Mie Nakachi about Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union (Oxford UP, 2021) In 1920, the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to le...

10 Des 20241h 8min

Wendy Pearlman, "The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora" (Liveright, 2024)

Wendy Pearlman, "The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora" (Liveright, 2024)

War forced millions of Syrians from their homes. It also forced them to rethink the meaning of home itself. In 2011, Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom. Brutal government repression transfo...

10 Des 20241h 4min

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