Est-il concevable qu’une période historique longue de quarante ans, qui vit s’instaurer un système bipolaire au niveau mondial, entraînant la planète dans une grille de lecture du monde manichéenne, ...n’ait trouvé aucun écho dans les communes et les départements français ? Peut-on au contraire imaginer découvrir quelques traces de ce conflit géopolitique dans les comportements politiques et les pratiques culturelles qui se sont déployés aux échelons infranationaux ? Ce sont ces deux questions, faussement naïves, auxquelles cet ouvrage se propose de répondre. Adossée au réseau des correspondants de l’Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent (CNRS), pluridisciplinaire dans ses approches, l’enquête collective est portée par une double ambition : retrouver de la Guerre froide ailleurs que là où elle est communément située et interprétée, repérer une autre Guerre froide que celle élaborée par les seuls acteurs des relations internationales. Vue d’en bas, quelle Guerre froide rencontre-t-on ? Est-elle au moins encore guerrière ?
Reviews This book fills a niche in the increasing number of texts on the Vietnam War as it provides a short, readable volume for the novice student written from a `revisionist' (i.e., ...centrist/conservative) perspective. Among its many strengths are:(1)it is accessible to the nonspecialist, (2) it provides the background in Vietnamese history and politics and the long origins of the conflict necessary to understand the context of American involvement, (3) it affords balanced insight into the contending military forces without romanticizing the Communist guerrillas, (4) it incisively critiques inadequate American military strategy and tactics, (5) it assesses honestly the problems, successes, and failures of building a viable political order in South Vietnam, and (6) it daringly challenges the `prevailing wisdom' on a wide range of issues and offers a provocative conclusion...A good volume for high school and public libraries as well as academic collections. Choice In an interesting, fast-paced, and well-written analysis, Anthony James Joes successfully melds the Vietnam War revisionist historian's emphasis on the inability of American and South Vietnamese leaders to understand the political dimensions of the Vietnam War with the post-revisionist historian's focus on looking at the conflict from a Vietnamese viewpoint.
Based on multiarchival research conducted over almost three decades, this landmark account tells how a few men set off a war that would lead to tragedy for millions. Stein Tønnesson was one of the ...first historians to delve into scores of secret French, British, and American political, military, and intelligence documents. In this fascinating account of an unfolding tragedy, he brings this research to bear to disentangle the complex web of events, actions, and mentalities that led to thirty years of war in Indochina. As the story unfolds, Tønnesson challenges some widespread misconceptions, arguing that French general Leclerc fell into a Chinese trap in March 1946, and Vietnamese general Giap into a French trap in December. Taking us from the antechambers of policymakers in Paris to the docksides of Haiphong and the streets of Hanoi, Vietnam 1946 provides the most vivid account to date of the series of events that would make Vietnam the most embattled area in the world during the Cold War period.
Vietnam's Lost Revolution employs newly-released archival material from Vietnam to examine the rise and fall of the Special Commissariat for Civic Action in the First Republic of Vietnam, and in so ...doing reassesses the origins of the Vietnam War. A cornerstone of Ngô Đình Diệm's presidency, Civic Action was intended to transform Vietnam into a thriving, modern, independent, noncommunist Southeast Asian nation. Geoffrey Stewart juxtaposes Diem's revolutionary plan with the conflicting and competing visions of Vietnam's postcolonial future held by other indigenous groups. He shows how the government failed to gain legitimacy within the peasantry, ceding the advantage to the communist-led opposition and paving the way for the American military intervention in the mid-1960s. This book provides a richer and more nuanced analysis of the origins of the Vietnam War in which internal struggles over national identity, self-determination, and even modernity itself are central.
Of all of the wars in which the U.S. has been engaged, none has been as divisive as the conflict in Vietnam. The repercussions of this unsettling episode in American history still resonate in our ...society. Although it ended more than 30 years ago, the Vietnam War continues to fascinate and trouble Americans. The third edition of Light at the End of the Tunnel gives a full overview of the conflict. Starting with Ho Chi Minh's revolt against the French, editor Andrew J. Rotter takes the reader through the succeeding years as scholars, government officials, journalists, and others recount the important events in the conflict and examine issues that developed during this tumultuous time. This book is essential reading for anyone who has an interest in understanding the Vietnam War. The readings in it will enlighten students about this turning point in the history of the United States and the world. The third edition includes greater coverage of the Vietnamese experience of the war and reflects the growing interest in understanding the war as an international event, not just a bilateral or trilateral conflict.
Henry Cabot Lodge became United States ambassador to South Vietnam in August 1963, a critical period in the evolution of American policy there. During the first of Lodge's two embassies in Saigon, a ...U.S. government-approved coup overthrew President Diem of South Vietnam and another U.S.-inspired coup brought to power a Vietnamese general trained in America. This book focuses on Lodge's ambassadorship from 1963 to June 1964, examining the constraints and possibilities inherent in the Vietnam situation at that time and revealing the role Lodge played in shaping President Lyndon Johnson's 1965 decision to commit U.S. troops to the war.Anne Blair is the first to draw on Lodge's collected papers, including an unpublished memoir, as well as on previously unavailable U.S. Saigon Embassy reports and on interviews with former U.S. officials and others who served with Lodge in Vietnam and Washington. According to Blair, Lodge felt strongly that U.S. troops should not be involved in the war, but his sense of the proper conduct of foreign affairs prevented him from opening a public debate on the matter. In addition, after the coup against Diem, Lodge regarded his mission in Saigon as completed and was disengaged in the vital 1964 period when the U.S. government should have reviewed its aims and vital stakes in South Vietnam. Lodge took up the Saigon mission and stayed with it because he was a patriot. But, Blair concludes, his good intentions were not coupled with effective policymaking, and the results proved disastrous for the future.
Modern transparency dates to the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—well before the Internet. Michael Schudson shows how the “right to know" has defined a new era for democracy—less focus on parties and ...elections, more pluralism and more players, year-round monitoring of government, and a blurring line between politics and society, public and private.
In Vietnam, the American government vowed to win the “hearts and minds” of the people. On the other side, among those who led and sympathized with the insurgents, the term “people’s war” gained a ...wide currency. Yet while much has been written about those who professed to speak for the Vietnamese population, we know surprisingly little about the everyday life of the peasants who made up the bulk of the country’s inhabitants. This book illuminates that subject. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including interviews conducted by the Rand Corporation with informants from My Tho Province in the Mekong Delta, David Hunt brings to light the daily experience of villagers in the midst of war and revolution.The peasants of southern Vietnam were neither onlookers nor mere victims as fighting raged throughout their country. From the “concerted uprising” in 1959–1960 to the Tet Offensive of 1968, the revolutionary movement they created was in fact the driving force within the war. Known as the “Viet Cong” to their adversaries, the rebels called themselves the “Liberation Front.” They demanded an end to landlordism and an egalitarian distribution of the means of subsistence as well as a democratization of relations between town and countryside, parents and children, men and women. They hoped the Vietnamese people would achieve a fuller sense of their place in the world and of the power they possessed to fashion their own destinies, without reliance on supernatural forces.In the first half of the book, Hunt analyzes this cultural revolution. As fighting spread and became more destructive, especially after the U.S. escalation in 1965, villagers were driven from their homes, the rural infrastructure collapsed, and customary notions of space and time lost purchase on an increasingly chaotic world. In the second half of the book, Hunt shows how peasants, who earlier had aspired to a kind of revolutionary modernism, now found themselves struggling to survive and to cope with the American intruders who poured into My Tho, and how they managed to regroup and spearhead the Tet Offensive that irrevocably altered the course of the war.
Like the widely praised original, this new edition is compact, clearly written, and accessible to the nonspecialist. First, the book chronicles and analyzes the twenty-year struggle to maintain South ...Vietnamese independence. Joes tells the story with a sympathetic focus on South Viet Nam and is highly critical of U.S. military strategy and tactics in fighting this war. He claims that the fall of South Viet Nam was not inevitable, that an abrupt and public termination of U.S. aid provoked a crisis of confidence inside South Viet Nam that led to the debacle. Students and scholars of military studies, South East Asia, U.S. foreign policy, or the general reader interested in this fascinating period in 20th century history, will find this new edition to be invaluable reading.After discussing the principal American mistakes in the conflict, Joes outlines a workable alternative strategy that would have saved South Viet Nam while minimizing U.S. involvement and casualties. He documents the enormous sacrifices made by the South Vietnamese allies, who in proportion to population suffered forty times the casualties the Americans did. He concludes by linking the final conquest of South Viet Nam to an increased level of Soviet adventurism which resulted in the invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. military build-up under Presidents Carter and Reagan, and the eventual collapse of the USSR. The complicated factors involved in the war are here offered in a consolidated, objective form, enabling the reader to consider the implications of U.S. experiences in South Viet Nam for future policy in other world areas.
