The Afterlife Of America S War In Vietnam

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The Afterlife of America's War in Vietnam

Author : Gordon Arnold
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2014-12-09
Category : History
ISBN : 9781476605111

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The Afterlife of America's War in Vietnam by Gordon Arnold Pdf

The fall of Saigon in 1975 signaled the end of America's longest war. Yet in many ways the conflict was far from over. Although the actual fighting ended, the struggle to find political justification and historical vindication for the Vietnam War still lingered in American consciousness. A plethora of images from America's first "televised war" has kept the conflict all too fresh in the memories of those who lived through it, while creating a confusing picture for a younger generation. The political process of attaching meaning to historical events has ultimately failed due to the lack of consensus--then and now--regarding events surrounding the Vietnam War. Reviewing the record of American politics, film, and television, this volume provides a brief overview of the war's appearance in American popular culture. It examines the ways in which this conflict has consistently resurfaced in social and political life, especially in the arena of contemporary world events such as the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan, the Gulf War and the 2004 presidential campaign. To this end, the work explores the contexts and uses of the Vietnam War as a recurring subject. The circumstances and symbolism used in the rhetoric of the political elite and the news media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek, are discussed. Emphasis is also placed on the role of film and television as the book examines movies such as The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now and TV series such as M*A*S*H. In weaving together the political and screen appearances of the Vietnam War, the book reexamines the influence of a major episode in American history.

Military Aspects of the Vietnam Conflict

Author : Walter L. Hixson
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2000
Category : History
ISBN : 0815335326

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Military Aspects of the Vietnam Conflict by Walter L. Hixson Pdf

The Vietnam War was, in the words of a preeminent scholar of the conflict (George C. Herring), "America's longest war." The Indochina conflict spanned the first generation of the larger Cold War and lasts to this day in American memory and cultural representation. Although the war remains a sensitive subject for many, a consensus exists that would echo the words of former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in his memoir, In Retrospect, "We were wrong, we were terribly wrong." The six volumes in this series pull together the best article literature on the History of American Involvement in Vietnam. The scholars writing in the first volume explore the roots of U.S. intervention, which followed in the wake of France's failed effort (supported and financed in Washington) to assert imperial control over Indochina. Volume II analyzed military aspects of the Vietnam War's history Volume V focuses on the lessons and legacies of the conflict, the source of a particularly sharp debate during the first administration of President Ronald W. Reagan. The final volume in the series analyzes the Vietnam War's extensive afterlife - in memory, film, literature, and popular discourse. Available individually by volume. Volume 1. The Origins of Intervention (0-8153-3531-8) Volume 2. Military Strategy and Escalation (0-8153-3532-6) Volume 3. Executive- Legislative Relations, Tracing the Impact of the War on U.S. Governmental Structures and Policies (0-8153-3533-4) Volume 4. The Diplomacy of War (0-8153-3534-2) Volume 5. The Anti-War Movement (0-8153-3535-0) Volume 6. Representation, Memories, and Legacies (0-8153-3536-9)

The American War in Viet Nam

Author : Susan Lyn Eastman
Publisher : Legacies of War
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2017
Category : History
ISBN : 1621902978

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The American War in Viet Nam by Susan Lyn Eastman Pdf

After more than four decades, the Vietnam War continues to haunt our national memory, culture, politics, and military actions. In this probing interdisciplinary study, Susan Lyn Eastman examines a range of cultural production that have tried to grapple with the psychic afterlife of traumatic violence resulting from the ill-fated conflict in Southeast Asia. Underpinning the book is the notion of "prosthetic memory," which involves memories acquired by those with no direct experience of the war, such as readers and filmgoers. Prosthetic memories, Eastman argues, refuse to relegate the war to the forgotten past and challenge the authenticity of experience, thus ensuring its continued relevance to debated over America's self-conception, specifically her coinage of the "New Vietnam Syndrome" and the country's role in world affairs when it comes to contemporary military interventions. With the notable expectation of the Veterans' memorial in Washington, Eastman's focus is on works produced from the Persian Gulf War (1990-91) through the post-9/11 "war on Terror." The experiences of women figure prominently in the book: Eastman devotes a chapter to the Vietnam Women's Memorial and another to Sandie Frazier's novel I Married Vietnam and Olive Stone's film Heaven and Earth. By examining Jessica Hagedorn's Dream Jungle, she considers how the war's repercussions were felt in other countries. Her investigation of Vietnamese American authors Lan Cao Andrew I am, and GB Tran adds a transnational dimension to the study. With its up-to-date perspective on recent works, this book offers new ways of thinking about one of the most polemic chapters in U.S. history. Book jacket.

M.I.A., Or, Mythmaking in America

Author : Howard Bruce Franklin
Publisher : Lawrence Hill Books
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 1992
Category : History
ISBN : UOM:39015022282480

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M.I.A., Or, Mythmaking in America by Howard Bruce Franklin Pdf

Almost two decades after the Vietnam War, most Americans remain convinced that U.S. prisoners are still being held captive in Southeast Asia, and many even accuse the government of concealing their existence. But as H. Bruce Franklin demonstrates in his startling investigation, there is no plausible basis for the belief in live POWs. Through scrupulous research, he shows for the first time how this illusion was fabricated and then converted into a powerful myth. Franklin reveals that in 1969 the Nixon administration, aided by militant pro-war forces, manufactured the POW/MIA issue to deflect attention from American atrocities in Vietnam, to undermine the burgeoning anti-war movement, and to stymie the Paris peace talks, resulting in the prolongation of the Vietnam War for another four years. Successive administrations, in an effort to mobilize public support for their continued economic and political warfare against Vietnam, asserted the possibility of live POWs at great emotional cost to both family members of the missing and countless Americans distressed about the fate of those supposedly left behind in Indochina. Born of political expediency, the POW/MIA issue was transformed in the 1980s into a potent myth. American culture was transfigured as movies and novels designed to reimage the Vietnam War turned the imagined post-war POWs into crucial symbols of betrayed American manhood and honor. Finally the myth began to turn against its creators when many Americans became convinced that the government itself was conspiring to betray the missing men. As he traces the evolution of the POW/MIA myth, Franklin not only exposes it as an elaborate hoax at the highest levels of government, butalso explains why the myth has penetrated to the heart of American life. By confronting the "true tragedy of the missing in Vietnam", Franklin helps us to understand how to heal the terrible psychological and spiritual wounds of the Vietnam War.

Returns of War

Author : Long T. Bui
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2018-11-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9781479817061

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Returns of War by Long T. Bui Pdf

The legacy and memory of wartime South Vietnam through the eyes of Vietnamese refugees In 1975, South Vietnam fell to communism, marking a stunning conclusion to the Vietnam War. Although this former ally of the United States has vanished from the world map, Long T. Bui maintains that its memory endures for refugees with a strong attachment to this ghost country. Blending ethnography with oral history, archival research, and cultural analysis, Returns of War considers Returns of War argues that Vietnamization--as Richard Nixon termed it in 1969--and the end of South Vietnam signals more than an example of flawed American military strategy, but a larger allegory of power, providing cover for U.S. imperial losses while denoting the inability of the (South) Vietnamese and other colonized nations to become independent, modern liberal subjects. Bui argues that the collapse of South Vietnam under Vietnamization complicates the already difficult memory of the Vietnam War, pushing for a critical understanding of South Vietnamese agency beyond their status as the war’s ultimate “losers.” Examining the lasting impact of Cold War military policy and culture upon the “Vietnamized” afterlife of war, this book weaves questions of national identity, sovereignty, and self-determination to consider the generative possibilities of theorizing South Vietnam as an incomplete, ongoing search for political and personal freedom.

Flavors of Empire

Author : Mark Padoongpatt
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2017-09-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9780520966925

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Flavors of Empire by Mark Padoongpatt Pdf

With a uniquely balanced combination of salty, sweet, sour, and spicy flavors, Thai food burst onto Los Angeles’s and America’s culinary scene in the 1980s. Flavors of Empire examines the rise of Thai food and the way it shaped the racial and ethnic contours of Thai American identity and community. Full of vivid oral histories and new archival material, this book explores the factors that made foodways central to the Thai American experience. Starting with American Cold War intervention in Thailand, Mark Padoongpatt traces how informal empire allowed U.S. citizens to discover Thai cuisine abroad and introduce it inside the United States. When Thais arrived in Los Angeles, they reinvented and repackaged Thai food in various ways to meet the rising popularity of the cuisine in urban and suburban spaces. Padoongpatt opens up the history and politics of Thai food for the first time, all while demonstrating how race emerges in seemingly mundane and unexpected places.

Looking Back on the Vietnam War

Author : Brenda M. Boyle,Jeehyun Lim
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2016-06-17
Category : History
ISBN : 9780813579955

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Looking Back on the Vietnam War by Brenda M. Boyle,Jeehyun Lim Pdf

More than forty years have passed since the official end of the Vietnam War, yet the war’s legacies endure. Its history and iconography still provide fodder for film and fiction, communities of war refugees have spawned a wide Vietnamese diaspora, and the United States military remains embroiled in unwinnable wars with eerie echoes of Vietnam. Looking Back on the Vietnam War brings together scholars from a broad variety of disciplines, who offer fresh insights on the war’s psychological, economic, artistic, political, and environmental impacts. Each essay examines a different facet of the war, from its representation in Marvel comic books to the experiences of Vietnamese soldiers exposed to Agent Orange. By putting these pieces together, the contributors assemble an expansive yet nuanced composite portrait of the war and its global legacies. Though they come from diverse scholarly backgrounds, ranging from anthropology to film studies, the contributors are united in their commitment to original research. Whether exploring rare archives or engaging in extensive interviews, they voice perspectives that have been excluded from standard historical accounts. Looking Back on the Vietnam War thus embarks on an interdisciplinary and international investigation to discover what we remember about the war, how we remember it, and why.

Nothing Ever Dies

Author : Viet Thanh Nguyen
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2016-04-11
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780674660342

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Nothing Ever Dies by Viet Thanh Nguyen Pdf

Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, National Book Award in Nonfiction A New York Times Book Review “The Year in Reading” Selection All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War—a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both nations. “[A] gorgeous, multifaceted examination of the war Americans call the Vietnam War—and which Vietnamese call the American War...As a writer, [Nguyen] brings every conceivable gift—wisdom, wit, compassion, curiosity—to the impossible yet crucial work of arriving at what he calls ‘a just memory’ of this war.” —Kate Tuttle, Los Angeles Times “In Nothing Ever Dies, his unusually thoughtful consideration of war, self-deception and forgiveness, Viet Thanh Nguyen penetrates deeply into memories of the Vietnamese war...[An] important book, which hits hard at self-serving myths.” —Jonathan Mirsky, Literary Review “Ultimately, Nguyen’s lucid, arresting, and richly sourced inquiry, in the mode of Susan Sontag and W. G. Sebald, is a call for true and just stories of war and its perpetual legacy.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

Building Socialism

Author : Christina Schwenkel
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2020-09-21
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781478012603

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Building Socialism by Christina Schwenkel Pdf

Following a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Germany with architects, engineers, construction workers, and tenants in Vinh’s mass housing complex, Schwenkel explores the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility and the quick fall of Vinh’s new built environment into unplanned obsolescence. She analyzes the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty to show how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics and ideas about urban futurity. By documenting the building of Vietnam’s first planned city and its aftermath of decay and repurposing, Schwenkel argues that underlying the ambivalent and often unpredictable responses to modernist architectural forms were anxieties about modernity and the future of socialism itself.

Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics

Author : Gordon B. Arnold
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2008-09-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781567207224

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Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics by Gordon B. Arnold Pdf

Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, motion pictures and television productions-some based on historical fact and conjecture, others clearly fanciful-have embraced the idea that conspiracies shape many events, hide others, and generally dictate much of the course of modern life, often to the disadvantage of the average person. As a result, conspiracy theories have developed into a potent undercurrent in American politics. By the 1990s, it was not unusual to find conspiracies used as explanations for a wide range of political events that would otherwise seem to have quite ordinary explanations. Thus, a vast right-wing conspiracy was suggested as the source of Bill Clinton's troubles, just as conspiracy-like machinations of the liberal media were used to explain why the picture of world events did not coincide with conservative views. And this is to say nothing of the bitter arguments that still erupt over varying explanations for the attacks of 9/11. Regardless of a person's opinion about such claims, what these and many other examples clearly show is that conspiracy-theory explanations have penetrated mainstream American thought. Here, author Gordon Arnold examines the evolution of this cultural climate in the United States. Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics examines the intersection of various film and television productions in the context of unfolding political developments. The chapters follow this story chronologically, showing how screen media have both reflected and shaped the cultural milieu in which traumatic events and political controversies have been interpreted with increasing cynicism. The work also reviews the original contexts in which film, television, and political manifestations of conspiracy ideas first appeared.

Projecting the End of the American Dream

Author : Gordon B. Arnold
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2013-04-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780313385643

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Projecting the End of the American Dream by Gordon B. Arnold Pdf

This provocative book reveals how Hollywood films reflect our deepest fears and anxieties as a country, often recording our political beliefs and cultural conditions while underscoring the darker side of the American way of life. Long before the war in Iraq and the economic crises of the early 21st century, Hollywood has depicted a grim view of life in the United States, one that belies the prosperity and abundance of the so-called American Dream. While the country emerged from World War II as a world power, collectively our sense of security had been threatened. The result is a cinematic body of work that has America's decline and ruin as a central theme. The author draws from popular films across all genres and six decades to illustrate how the political climate of the times influenced their creation. Projecting the End of the American Dream: Hollywood's Visions of U.S. Decline combines film history, social history, and political history to reveal important themes in the unfolding American narrative. Discussions focus on a wide variety of films, including Rambo, Planet of the Apes, and Easy Rider.

Experiments in Skin

Author : Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 154 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2021-02-22
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781478013136

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Experiments in Skin by Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu Pdf

In Experiments in Skin Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu examines the ongoing influence of the Vietnam War on contemporary ideas about race and beauty. Framing skin as the site around which these ideas have been formed, Tu foregrounds the histories of militarism in the production of US biomedical knowledge and commercial cosmetics. She uncovers the efforts of wartime scientists in the US Military Dermatology Research Program to alleviate the environmental and chemical risks to soldiers' skin. These dermatologists sought relief for white soldiers while denying that African American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians were also vulnerable to harm. Their experiments led to the development of pharmaceutical cosmetics, now used by women in Ho Chi Minh City to tend to their skin, and to grapple with the damage caused by the war's lingering toxicity. In showing how the US military laid the foundations for contemporary Vietnamese consumption of cosmetics and practices of beauty, Tu shows how the intersecting histories of militarism, biomedicine, race, and aesthetics become materially and metaphorically visible on skin.

Comic Drunks, Crazy Cults, and Lovable Monsters

Author : David Scott Diffrient
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
Page : 378 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2022-12-01
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780815655695

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Comic Drunks, Crazy Cults, and Lovable Monsters by David Scott Diffrient Pdf

Contradictory to its core, the sitcom—an ostensibly conservative, tranquilizing genre—has a long track record in the United States of tackling controversial subjects with a fearlessness not often found in other types of programming. But the sitcom also conceals as much as it reveals, masking the rationale for socially deviant or deleterious behavior behind figures of ridicule whose motives are rarely disclosed fully over the course of a thirty-minute episode. Examining a broad range of network and cable TV shows across the history of the medium, from classic, working-class comedies such as The Honeymooners, All in the Family, and Roseanne to several contemporary cult series, animated programs, and online hits that have yet to attract much scholarly attention, this book explores the ways in which social imaginaries related to “bad behavior” have been humorously exploited over the years. The repeated appearance of socially wayward figures on the small screen—from raging alcoholics to brainwashed cult members to actual monsters who are merely exaggerated versions of our own inner demons—has the dual effect of reducing complex individuals to recognizable “types” while neutralizing the presumed threats that they pose. Such representations not only provide strangely comforting reminders that “badness” is a cultural construct, but also prompt audiences to reflect on their own unspoken proclivities for antisocial behavior, if only in passing.

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World

Author : John Corrigan
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 299 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2020-04-07
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780226313931

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Religious Intolerance, America, and the World by John Corrigan Pdf

As the news shows us every day, contemporary American culture and politics are rife with people who demonize their enemies by projecting their own failings and flaws onto them. But this is no recent development. Rather, as John Corrigan argues here, it’s an expression of a trauma endemic to America’s history, particularly involving our long domestic record of religious conflict and violence. Religious Intolerance, America, and the World spans from Christian colonists’ intolerance of Native Americans and the role of religion in the new republic’s foreign-policy crises to Cold War witch hunts and the persecution complexes that entangle Christians and Muslims today. Corrigan reveals how US churches and institutions have continuously campaigned against intolerance overseas even as they’ve abetted or performed it at home. This selective condemnation of intolerance, he shows, created a legacy of foreign policy interventions promoting religious freedom and human rights that was not reflected within America’s own borders. This timely, captivating book forces America to confront its claims of exceptionalism based on religious liberty—and perhaps begin to break the grotesque cycle of projection and oppression.

This Republic of Suffering

Author : Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2009-01-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9780375703836

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This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust Pdf

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.