American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam

American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam PDF Author: John Hellmann
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231515382
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam

American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam

American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam PDF Author: John Hellmann
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231515382
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam

The Spitting Image

The Spitting Image PDF Author: Jerry Lembcke
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814751473
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
How the startling image of an anti-war protested spitting on a uniformed veteran misrepresented the narrative of Vietnam War political debate One of the most resilient images of the Vietnam era is that of the anti-war protester — often a woman — spitting on the uniformed veteran just off the plane. The lingering potency of this icon was evident during the Gulf War, when war supporters invoked it to discredit their opposition. In this startling book, Jerry Lembcke demonstrates that not a single incident of this sort has been convincingly documented. Rather, the anti-war Left saw in veterans a natural ally, and the relationship between anti-war forces and most veterans was defined by mutual support. Indeed one soldier wrote angrily to Vice President Spiro Agnew that the only Americans who seemed concerned about the soldier's welfare were the anti-war activists. While the veterans were sometimes made to feel uncomfortable about their service, this sense of unease was, Lembcke argues, more often rooted in the political practices of the Right. Tracing a range of conflicts in the twentieth century, the book illustrates how regimes engaged in unpopular conflicts often vilify their domestic opponents for "stabbing the boys in the back." Concluding with an account of the powerful role played by Hollywood in cementing the myth of the betrayed veteran through such films as Coming Home, Taxi Driver, and Rambo, Jerry Lembcke's book stands as one of the most important, original, and controversial works of cultural history in recent years.

Legacy

Legacy PDF Author: D. Michael Shafer
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807054017
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
"Fourteen essays documenting the Vietnam War's impact and continuing influence on American life, particularly on cinema, literature, the black community, and the combat veteran." --Booklist

The Wars We Took to Vietnam

The Wars We Took to Vietnam PDF Author: Milton J. Bates
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520917521
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
What Americans refer to as the Vietnam War embraces much more than the conflict with North Vietnam. Milton J. Bates considers the other conflicts that Americans brought to that war: the divisions stemming from differences in race, class, sex, generation, and frontier ideology. In exploring the rich vein of writing and film that emerged from the Vietnam War era, he strikingly illuminates how these stories reflect American social crises of the period. Some material examined here is familiar, including the work of Michael Herr, Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, Susan Sontag, Francis Ford Coppola, and Oliver Stone. Other material is less well known—Neverlight by Donald Pfarrer and De Mojo Blues by A. R. Flowers, for example. Bates also draws upon an impressive range of secondary readings, from Freud and Marx to Geertz and Jameson. As the products of a culture in conflict, Vietnam memoirs, novels, films, plays, and poems embody a range of political perspectives, not only in their content but also in their structure and rhetoric. In his final chapter Bates outlines a "politico-poetics" of the war story as a genre. Here he gives special attention to our motives—from the deeply personal to the broadly cultural—for telling war stories.

Vietnam Shadows

Vietnam Shadows PDF Author: Arnold R. Isaacs
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801863448
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Isaacs talks to the veterans unable to forget the war no one wanted to talk about. He explores the class divisions deepened by a conflict in which the privileged avoided service that an earlier generation had embraced as a duty. And he shows how the "Vietnam Syndrome" continues to affect nearly every major U.S. foreign policy decision, from the Persion Gulf to Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti.

The Legacy

The Legacy PDF Author: D. Michael Shafer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description


Vietnam and Other American Fantasies

Vietnam and Other American Fantasies PDF Author: Howard Bruce Franklin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Written by a cultural historian, this text offers a wide-ranging exploration of the causes, meaning and continuing significance of the American war in Vietnam, arguing that the war was not a mistake, or a quagmire but a defining event in global history.

Hollywood's Imperial Wars

Hollywood's Imperial Wars PDF Author: Armando Jose Prats
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806194448
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
When the Vietnam War punctured the myth of American military invincibility, Hollywood needed a new kind of war movie. The familiar triumphal narrative was relegated to history and, with it, the heroic legacy that had passed from one generation to the next for more than two hundred years. How Hollywood helped create and instill the American myth of heroic continuity, and how films revised that myth after the Vietnam War, is what Armando José Prats explores in Hollywood’s Imperial Wars. The book offers a new way of understanding the cultural and historical significance of Vietnam in relation to Hollywood’s earlier representations of Americans at war, from the mythic heroism of a film like Sands of Iwo Jima to the rupture of that myth in films such as The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and Platoon. As early as the mid-1940s, Prats suggests, fears aroused by the Cold War were stirring anxieties about sustaining the heroic myth—anxieties reflected in the insistent, aggressive patriotism in films of the period. In this context, Prats considers the immeasurable cultural importance of John Wayne, the cinematic apotheosis of wartime valor and righteousness, whose patriotism was nonetheless deeply compromised by his not having served in World War II. Prats reveals how historical and cultural anxieties emerge in well-known Vietnam movies, in which characters inspired by the heroes of the Second World War are denied the heroic legacy of their fathers. American war movies, in Prats’s analysis, were forever altered by the loss in Vietnam. Even movies like American Sniper that exalt war heroes are marked as much by the failure of the heroic tropes of old Hollywood war movies as by the tragic turn of actual historical events. Tracing what Prats calls the “anxiety of legacy” through the films of the World War II and post–Vietnam War periods, this book offers a new way of looking at both the Hollywood war movie and the profound cultural shifts it reflects and refracts.

American Myth, American Ideology and the Vietnam War

American Myth, American Ideology and the Vietnam War PDF Author: William R. Merriman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description


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

M.I.A., Or, Mythmaking in America PDF Author: Howard Bruce Franklin
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813520018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This paperback edition of M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America adds major new material about Ross Perot's role, the 1991-1992 Senate investigation, and illegal operations authorized by Ronald Reagan. "An important and compelling book. . . . Franklin raises and answers all of the hardest questions about an enduring piece of political mythology."--The Philadelphia Inquirer "A calm and thoughtful book on a firestorm of a subject. . . . Intelligent, provocative, and courageous."--Kirkus Reviews