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Author: John A. Wood
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821445626
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
In the decades since the Vietnam War, veteran memoirs have influenced Americans’ understanding of the conflict. Yet few historians or literary scholars have scrutinized how the genre has shaped the nation’s collective memory of the war and its aftermath. Instead, veterans’ accounts are mined for colorful quotes and then dropped from public discourse; are accepted as factual sources with little attention to how memory, no matter how authentic, can diverge from events; or are not contextualized in terms of the race, gender, or class of the narrators. Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War is a landmark study of the cultural heritage of the war in Vietnam as presented through the experience of its American participants. Crossing disciplinary borders in ways rarely attempted by historians, John A. Wood unearths truths embedded in the memoirists’ treatments of combat, the Vietnamese people, race relations in the United States military, male-female relationships in the war zone, and veterans’ postwar troubles. He also examines the publishing industry’s influence on collective memory, discussing, for example, the tendency of publishers and reviewers to privilege memoirs critical of the war. Veteran Narratives is a significant and original addition to the literature on Vietnam veterans and the conflict as a whole.
Author: John A. Wood
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821445626
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the decades since the Vietnam War, veteran memoirs have influenced Americans’ understanding of the conflict. Yet few historians or literary scholars have scrutinized how the genre has shaped the nation’s collective memory of the war and its aftermath. Instead, veterans’ accounts are mined for colorful quotes and then dropped from public discourse; are accepted as factual sources with little attention to how memory, no matter how authentic, can diverge from events; or are not contextualized in terms of the race, gender, or class of the narrators. Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War is a landmark study of the cultural heritage of the war in Vietnam as presented through the experience of its American participants. Crossing disciplinary borders in ways rarely attempted by historians, John A. Wood unearths truths embedded in the memoirists’ treatments of combat, the Vietnamese people, race relations in the United States military, male-female relationships in the war zone, and veterans’ postwar troubles. He also examines the publishing industry’s influence on collective memory, discussing, for example, the tendency of publishers and reviewers to privilege memoirs critical of the war. Veteran Narratives is a significant and original addition to the literature on Vietnam veterans and the conflict as a whole.
Author: Hue-Tam Ho Tai
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520222670
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
"Hue-Tam Ho Tai's masterful collection of essays that explore how the past is being remade in contemporary Vietnam constitutes a welcome addition to the study of the larger problem of engineering memory, especially in political cultures where the identity of the nation-state is in a considerable state of flux . . .. This book also suggests that the 'commemorative fever' that is sweeping Vietnam is about more than Vietnam's history. It also has a great deal to do with the problems premodern cultures presented to those who promoted the creation of contemporary states. In this regard both Vietnam and this book offer all scholars of nationalism and remembering in the West a fascinating perspective on their own nations."—John Bodnar, Chancellors' Professor of History at Indiana University, from the Foreword
Author: Aimee Phan
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429941987
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
Compelling, moving, and beautifully written, the interlinked stories that make up We Should Never Meet alternate between Saigon before the city's fall in 1975 and present-day "Little Saigon" in Southern California---exploring the reverberations of the Vietnam War in a completely new light. Intersecting the lives of eight characters across three decades and two continents, these stories dramatize the events of Operation Babylift, the U.S.-led evacuation of thousands of Vietnamese orphans to America just weeks before the fall of Saigon. Unwitting reminders of the war, these children were considered bui doi, the dust of life, and faced an uncertain, dangerous existence if left behind in Vietnam. Four of the stories follow the saga of one orphan's journey from the points-of-view of a teenage mother, a duck farmer and a Catholic nun from the Mekong Delta, a social worker in Saigon, and a volunteer doctor from America. The other four take place twenty years later and chronicle the lives of four Vietnamese orphans now living in America: Kim, an embittered Amerasian searching for her unknown mother; Vinh, her gang member ex-boyfriend who preys on Vietnamese families; Mai, an ambitious orphan who faces her emancipation from the American foster-care system; and Huan, an Amerasian adopted by a white family, who returns to Vietnam with his adoptive mother. We Should Never Meet is one of those rare books that truly takes an original look at the human condition---and marks the exciting debut of a major new writer for our time.
Author: Mark Atwood Lawrence
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199793158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
The Vietnam War remains a topic of extraordinary interest, not least because of striking parallels between that conflict and more recent fighting in the Middle East. In The Vietnam War, Mark Atwood Lawrence draws upon the latest research in archives around the world to offer readers a superb account of a key moment in U.S. as well as global history. While focusing on American involvement between 1965 and 1975, Lawrence offers an unprecedentedly complete picture of all sides of the war, notably by examining the motives that drove the Vietnamese communists and their foreign allies. Moreover, the book carefully considers both the long- and short-term origins of the war. Lawrence examines the rise of Vietnamese communism in the early twentieth century and reveals how Cold War anxieties of the 1940s and 1950s set the United States on the road to intervention. Of course, the heart of the book covers the "American war," ranging from the overthrow of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem to the impact of the Tet Offensive on American public opinion, Lyndon Johnson's withdrawal from the 1968 presidential race, Richard Nixon's expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos, and the problematic peace agreement of 1973, which ended American military involvement. Finally, the book explores the complex aftermath of the war--its enduring legacy in American books, film, and political debate, as well as Vietnam's struggles with severe social and economic problems. A compact and authoritative primer on an intensely relevant topic, this well-researched and engaging volume offers an invaluable overview of the Vietnam War.
Author: Marita Sturken
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520918122
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 374
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Book Description
Analyzing the ways U.S. culture has been formed and transformed in the 80s and 90s by its response to the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic, Marita Sturken argues that each has disrupted our conventional notions of community, nation, consensus, and "American culture." She examines the relationship of camera images to the production of cultural memory, the mixing of fantasy and reenactment in memory, the role of trauma and survivors in creating cultural comfort, and how discourses of healing can smooth over the tensions of political events. Sturken's discussion encompasses a brilliant comparison of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the AIDS Quilt; her profound reading of the Memorial as a national wailing wall—one whose emphasis on the veterans and war dead has allowed the discourse of heroes, sacrifice, and honor to resurface at the same time that it is an implicit condemnation of war—is particularly compelling. The book also includes discussions of the Kennedy assassination, the Persian Gulf War, the Challenger explosion, and the Rodney King beating. While debunking the image of the United States as a culture of amnesia, Sturken also shows how remembering itself is a form of forgetting, and how exclusion is a vital part of memory formation.
Author: Penny Lewis
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801467802
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
In the popular imagination, opposition to the Vietnam War was driven largely by college students and elite intellectuals, while supposedly reactionary blue-collar workers largely supported the war effort. In Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, Penny Lewis challenges this collective memory of class polarization. Through close readings of archival documents, popular culture, and media accounts at the time, she offers a more accurate "counter-memory" of a diverse, cross-class opposition to the war in Southeast Asia that included the labor movement, working-class students, soldiers and veterans, and Black Power, civil rights, and Chicano activists.Lewis investigates why the image of antiwar class division gained such traction at the time and has maintained such a hold on popular memory since. Identifying the primarily middle-class culture of the early antiwar movement, she traces how the class interests of its first organizers were reflected in its subsequent forms. The founding narratives of class-based political behavior, Lewis shows, were amplified in the late 1960s and early 1970s because the working class, in particular, lacked a voice in the public sphere, a problem that only increased in the subsequent period, even as working-class opposition to the war grew. By exposing as false the popular image of conservative workers and liberal elites separated by an unbridgeable gulf, Lewis suggests that shared political attitudes and actions are, in fact, possible between these two groups.
Author: Iwona Irwin-Zarecka
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351519255
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
What is the symbolic impact of the Vietnam War Memorial? How does television change our engagement with the past? Can the efforts to wipe out Communist legacies succeed? Should victims of the Holocaust be celebrated as heroes or as martyrs? These questions have a great deal in common, yet they are typically asked separately by people working in distinct research areas in different disciplines. Frames of Remembrance shares ideas and concerns across such divides.
Author: Rachel Woodward
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137570105
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
This book explores how military memoirs come to be written and published. Looking at the journeys through which soldiers and other military personnel become writers, the authors draw on over 250 military memoirs published since 1980 about service with the British armed forces, and on interviews with published military memoirists who talk in detail about the writing and production of their books. A range of themes are explored including: the nature of the military memoir; motivations for writing; authors’ reflections on their readerships; inclusions and exclusions within the text; the memories and materials that authors draw on; the collaborations that make the production and publication of military memoirs possible; and the issues around the design of military memoirs' distinctive covers. Written by two leading commentators on the sociology of the military, Bringing War to Book offers a new and original argument about the representations of war and the military experience as a process of social production. The book will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including sociology, history, and cultural studies.
Author: Janet D. Tanner
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030696170
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
This book provides an oral history of women who served in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps during the Vietnam War. It follows the trajectory of eight women’s lives from their decision to become nurses, to surgical and evacuation hospitals in Vietnam, and then home to face the consequences of war on their personal and professional lives. It documents their lived experience in Vietnam and explores the memories and personal stories of nurses who treated injured American soldiers, Vietnamese civilians, and the enemy. Their voices reveal the physical and emotional challenges, trauma, contradictions, and lingering effects of war on their lives. Women in the U.S. Army in Vietnam feared the enemy but also sexual violence and harassment: the experiences this book documents also shed light on the extent of historical sexual abuse in the military.
Author: Susan L. Carruthers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108915728
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339
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Book Description
Are 'Dear John' letters lethal weapons in the hands of men at war? Many US officers, servicemen, veterans, and civilians would say yes. Drawing on personal letters, oral histories, and psychiatric reports, as well as popular music and movies, Susan L. Carruthers shows how the armed forces and civilian society have attempted to weaponize romantic love in pursuit of martial ends, from World War II to today. Yet efforts to discipline feeling have frequently failed. And women have often borne the blame. This sweeping history of emotional life in wartime explores the interplay between letter-writing and storytelling, breakups and breakdowns, and between imploded intimacy and boosted camaraderie. Incorporating vivid personal experiences in lively and engaging prose – variously tragic, comic, and everything in between – this compelling study will change the way we think about wartime relationships.
