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.

Vietnam and Other American Fantasies

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

Get Book Here

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.

The Oriental Obscene

The Oriental Obscene PDF Author: Sylvia Shin Huey Chong
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822348543
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
This book explores the impact of media representations of violence during the Vietnam War on people in the U.S., specifically how images of violence done to and by the Vietnamese were traumatic in ways that deeply affected the American psyche.

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

M.I.A., Or, Mythmaking in America PDF Author: Howard Bruce Franklin
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
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.

War Stars

War Stars PDF Author: Howard Bruce Franklin
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
ISBN: 9781558496514
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
In this new and expanded edition of an already classic work, H. Bruce Franklin brings the epic story of the superweapon and the American imagination into the ominous twenty-first century, demonstrating its continuing importance both to comprehending our current predicament and to finding ways to escape from it. Sweeping through two centuries of American culture and military history, Franklin traces the evolution of superweapons from Robert Fulton's eighteenth-century submarine through the strategic bomber, atomic bomb, and Star Wars to a twenty-first century dominated by "weapons of mass destruction," real and imagined. Interweaving culture, science, technology, and history, he shows how and why the American pursuit of the ultimate defensive weapon -- guaranteed to end all war and bring universal triumph to American ideals -- has led our nation and the world into an epoch of terror and endless war.

Vietnam and the United States

Vietnam and the United States PDF Author: Gary R. Hess
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Discusses the origins and legacy of the Vietnam War and its impact on the United States.

Hanoi Jane

Hanoi Jane PDF Author: Jerry Lembcke
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
ISBN: 9781558498150
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
A provocative analysis of how and why Jane Fonda the person became Hanoi Jane the myth

Peace Corps Fantasies

Peace Corps Fantasies PDF Author: Molly Geidel
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452945268
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
To tens of thousands of volunteers in its first decade, the Peace Corps was “the toughest job you’ll ever love.” In the United States’ popular imagination to this day, it is a symbol of selfless altruism and the most successful program of John F. Kennedy’s presidency. But in her provocative new cultural history of the 1960s Peace Corps, Molly Geidel argues that the agency’s representative development ventures also legitimated the violent exercise of American power around the world and the destruction of indigenous ways of life. In the 1960s, the practice of development work, embodied by iconic Peace Corps volunteers, allowed U.S. policy makers to manage global inequality while assuaging their own gendered anxieties about postwar affluence. Geidel traces how modernization theorists used the Peace Corps to craft the archetype of the heroic development worker: a ruggedly masculine figure who would inspire individuals and communities to abandon traditional lifestyles and seek integration into the global capitalist system. Drawing on original archival and ethnographic research, Geidel analyzes how Peace Corps volunteers struggled to apply these ideals. The book focuses on the case of Bolivia, where indigenous nationalist movements dramatically expelled the Peace Corps in 1971. She also shows how Peace Corps development ideology shaped domestic and transnational social protest, including U.S. civil rights, black nationalist, and antiwar movements.

Pulp Vietnam

Pulp Vietnam PDF Author: Gregory A. Daddis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108493505
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Explores how Cold War men's magazines idealized warrior-heroes and sexual-conquerors and normalized conceptions of martial masculinity.

A Bitter Peace

A Bitter Peace PDF Author: Pierre Asselin
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807861235
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Demonstrating the centrality of diplomacy in the Vietnam War, Pierre Asselin traces the secret negotiations that led up to the Paris Agreement of 1973, which ended America's involvement but failed to bring peace in Vietnam. Because the two sides signed the agreement under duress, he argues, the peace it promised was doomed to unravel. By January of 1973, the continuing military stalemate and mounting difficulties on the domestic front forced both Washington and Hanoi to conclude that signing a vague and largely unworkable peace agreement was the most expedient way to achieve their most pressing objectives. For Washington, those objectives included the release of American prisoners, military withdrawal without formal capitulation, and preservation of American credibility in the Cold War. Hanoi, on the other hand, sought to secure the removal of American forces, protect the socialist revolution in the North, and improve the prospects for reunification with the South. Using newly available archival sources from Vietnam, the United States, and Canada, Asselin reconstructs the secret negotiations, highlighting the creative roles of Hanoi, the National Liberation Front, and Saigon in constructing the final settlement.

A Bright Shining Lie

A Bright Shining Lie PDF Author: Neil Sheehan
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679603808
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 898

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Book Description
One of the most acclaimed books of our time—the definitive Vietnam War exposé and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. When he came to Vietnam in 1962, Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann was the one clear-sighted participant in an enterprise riddled with arrogance and self-deception, a charismatic soldier who put his life and career on the line in an attempt to convince his superiors that the war should be fought another way. By the time he died in 1972, Vann had embraced the follies he once decried. He died believing that the war had been won. In this magisterial book, a monument of history and biography that was awarded the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, a renowned journalist tells the story of John Vann—"the one irreplaceable American in Vietnam"—and of the tragedy that destroyed a country and squandered so much of America's young manhood and resources.