The Columbia Guide To The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War remains a major point of reference in discussions of U.S. foreign policy and national character. The lessons and legacies of the most divisive event in U.S. history in the twentieth century are hotly debated to this day. Written by a renowned scholar of the conflict, The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War provides students and researchers with the materials to think seriously about the conflict's many paradoxes and ramifications.

America's experience in Vietnam continues to figure prominently in debates over strategy and defense and within the discourse on the identity of the United States as a nation. Through fifteen essays rooted in recent scholarship, The Columbia History of the Vietnam War is a chronological and critical collective history central to any discussion of America's interests abroad.David Anderson opens with an essay on the Vietnam War's major themes and enduring relevance. Mark Philip Bradley (University of Chicago) reexamines the rise of Vietnamese revolutionary nationalism and the Vietminh-led war against French colonialism. Richard Immerman (Temple University) revisits Eisenhower's and Kennedy's efforts at nation-building in South Vietnam. Gary Hess (Bowling Green State University) reviews America's military commitment under Kennedy and Johnson, and Lloyd Gardner (Rutgers University) investigates the motivations behind Johnson's escalation of force. Robert McMahon (Ohio State University) focuses on the pivotal period before and after the Tet Offensive, and Jeffrey Kimball (Miami University) makes sense of Nixon's paradoxical decision to end U.S. intervention while pursuing a destructive air war. John Prados (National Security Archive) and Eric Bergerud (Naval Postgraduate School) devote their essays to America's military strategy. Helen Anderson (California State University, Monterey Bay) and Robert Brigham (Vassar College) explore the war's impact on Vietnamese women and urban culture. Melvin Small (Wayne State University) recounts the domestic tensions created by America's involvement in Vietnam, and Kenton Clymer (Northern Illinois University) follows the spread of the war to Laos and Cambodia. Concluding essays by Robert Schulzinger (University of Colorado) and George Herring (University of Kentucky) trace the legacy of the war within Vietnamese and American contexts and diagnose the symptoms of the "Vietnam Syndrome" evident in later U.S. foreign policy debat.

The Vietnam War remains a major point of reference in discussions of U.S. foreign policy and national character. The lessons and legacies of the most divisive event in U.S. history in the twentieth century are hotly debated to this day. Written by a renowned scholar of the conflict, The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War provides students and researchers with the materials to think seriously about the conflict's many paradoxes and ramifications.

The Cold War was the longest conflict in American history, and the defining event of the second half of the twentieth century. Since its recent and abrupt cessation, we have only begun to measure the effects of the Cold War on American, Soviet, post-Soviet, and international military strategy, economics, domestic policy, and popular culture. The Columbia Guide to the Cold War is the first in a series of guides to American history and culture that will offer a wealth of interpretive information in different formats to students, scholars, and general readers alike. This reference contains narrative essays on key events and issues, and also features an A-to-Z encyclopedia, a concise chronology, and an annotated resource section listing books, articles, films, novels, web sites, and CD-ROMs on Cold War themes.

The Vietnam War endured for thirty years, cost billions of dollars, and resulted in thousands of Vietnamese, French, and American deaths. Massive American military intervention in Vietnam embroiled America in protests, placed enormous strains on the western alliance, and altered U.S. relations with the Soviet Union and China. David L. Anderson's concise overview critiques U.S. errors in magnifying the strategic importance of South-east Asia in the Cold War and in underestimating the strength of the Vietnamese communist movement.

Sources of Vietnamese Tradition provides an essential guide to two thousand years of Vietnamese history and a comprehensive overview of the society and state of Vietnam. Strategic selections illuminate key figures, issues, and events while building a thematic portrait of the country's developing territory, politics, culture, and relations with neighbors. The volume showcases Vietnam's remarkable independence in the face of Chinese and other external pressures and respects the complexity of the Vietnamese experience both past and present. The anthology begins with selections that cover more than a millennium of Chinese dominance over Vietnam (111 B.C.E.–939 C.E.) and follows with texts that illuminate four centuries of independence ensured by the Ly, Tran, and Ho dynasties (1009–1407). The earlier cultivation of Buddhism and Southeast Asian political practices by the monarchy gave way to two centuries of Confucian influence and bureaucratic governance (1407–1600), based on Chinese models, and three centuries of political competition between the north and the south, resolving in the latter's favor (1600–1885). Concluding with the colonial era and the modern age, the volume recounts the ravages of war and the creation of a united, independent Vietnam in 1975. Each chapter features readings that reveal the views, customs, outside influences on, and religious and philosophical beliefs of a rapidly changing people and culture. Descriptions of land, society, economy, and governance underscore the role of the past in the formation of contemporary Vietnam and its relationships with neighboring countries and the West.

An overview of the revisionist case on the Vietnam War, showing how it could have been won by the US at a lower cost than was suffered in defeat.

In the Tet Offensive of 1968, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces launched a massive countrywide attack on South Vietnam. Though the Communists failed to achieve their tactical and operational objectives, James Willbanks claims Hanoi won a strategic victory. The offensive proved that America's progress was grossly overstated and caused many Americans and key presidential advisors to question the wisdom of prolonging combat. Willbanks also maintains that the Communists laid siege to a Marine combat base two weeks prior to the Tet Offensive-known as the Battle of Khe Sanh—to distract the United States. It is his belief that these two events are intimately linked, and in his concise and compelling history, he presents an engaging portrait of the conflicts and singles out key problems of interpretation. Willbanks divides his study into six sections, beginning with a historical overview of the events leading up to the offensive, the attack itself, and the consequent battles of Saigon, Hue, and Khe Sahn. He continues with a critical assessment of the main themes and issues surrounding the offensive, and concludes with excerpts from American and Vietnamese documents, maps and chronologies, an annotated list of resources, and a short encyclopedia of key people, places, and events. An experienced military historian and scholar of the Vietnam War, Willbanks has written a unique critical reference and guide that enlarges the debate surrounding this important turning point in America's longest war.