Understanding Vietnam

Understanding Vietnam PDF Author: Neil L. Jamieson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520916581
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
The American experience in Vietnam divided us as a nation and eroded our confidence in both the morality and the effectiveness of our foreign policy. Yet our understanding of this tragic episode remains superficial because, then and now, we have never grasped the passionate commitment with which the Vietnamese clung to and fought over their own competing visions of what Vietnam was and what it might become. To understand the war, we must understand the Vietnamese, their culture, and their ways of looking at the world. Neil L. Jamieson, after many years of living and working in Vietnam, has written the book that provides this understanding. Jamieson paints a portrait of twentieth-century Vietnam. Against the background of traditional Vietnamese culture, he takes us through the saga of modern Vietnamese history and Western involvement in the country, from the coming of the French in 1858 through the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Throughout his analysis, he allows the Vietnamese—both our friends and foes, and those who wished to be neither—to speak for themselves through poetry, fiction, essays, newspaper editorials and reports of interviews and personal experiences. By putting our old and partial perceptions into this new and broader context, Jamieson provides positive insights that may perhaps ease the lingering pain and doubt resulting from our involvement in Vietnam. As the United States and Vietnam appear poised to embark on a new phase in their relationship, Jamieson's book is particularly timely.

Understanding Vietnam

Understanding Vietnam PDF Author: Neil L. Jamieson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520916581
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 447

Get Book Here

Book Description
The American experience in Vietnam divided us as a nation and eroded our confidence in both the morality and the effectiveness of our foreign policy. Yet our understanding of this tragic episode remains superficial because, then and now, we have never grasped the passionate commitment with which the Vietnamese clung to and fought over their own competing visions of what Vietnam was and what it might become. To understand the war, we must understand the Vietnamese, their culture, and their ways of looking at the world. Neil L. Jamieson, after many years of living and working in Vietnam, has written the book that provides this understanding. Jamieson paints a portrait of twentieth-century Vietnam. Against the background of traditional Vietnamese culture, he takes us through the saga of modern Vietnamese history and Western involvement in the country, from the coming of the French in 1858 through the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Throughout his analysis, he allows the Vietnamese—both our friends and foes, and those who wished to be neither—to speak for themselves through poetry, fiction, essays, newspaper editorials and reports of interviews and personal experiences. By putting our old and partial perceptions into this new and broader context, Jamieson provides positive insights that may perhaps ease the lingering pain and doubt resulting from our involvement in Vietnam. As the United States and Vietnam appear poised to embark on a new phase in their relationship, Jamieson's book is particularly timely.

The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975

The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975 PDF Author: Tuong Vu
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501745158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Through the voices of senior officials, teachers, soldiers, journalists, and artists, The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975, presents us with an interpretation of "South Vietnam" as a passionately imagined nation in the minds of ordinary Vietnamese, rather than merely as an expeditious political construct of the United States government. The moving and honest memoirs collected, translated, and edited here by Tuong Vu and Sean Fear describe the experiences of war, politics, and everyday life for people from many walks of life during the fraught years of Vietnam's Second Republic, leading up to and encompassing what Americans generally call the "Vietnam War." The voices gift the reader a sense of the authors' experiences in the Republic and their ideas about the nation during that time. The light and careful editing hand of Vu and Fear reveals that far from a Cold War proxy struggle, the conflict in Vietnam featured a true ideological divide between the communist North and the non-communist South.

Speaking Out in Vietnam

Speaking Out in Vietnam PDF Author: Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150173640X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
Since 1990 public political criticism has evolved into a prominent feature of Vietnam's political landscape. So argues Benedict Kerkvliet in his analysis of Communist Party–ruled Vietnam. Speaking Out in Vietnam assesses the rise and diversity of these public displays of disagreement, showing that it has morphed from family whispers to large-scale use of electronic media. In discussing how such criticism has become widespread over the last three decades, Kerkvliet focuses on four clusters of critics: factory workers demanding better wages and living standards; villagers demonstrating and petitioning against corruption and land confiscations; citizens opposing China's encroachment into Vietnam and criticizing China-Vietnam relations; and dissidents objecting to the party-state regime and pressing for democratization. He finds that public political criticism ranges from lambasting corrupt authorities to condemning repression of bloggers to protesting about working conditions. Speaking Out in Vietnam shows that although we may think that the party-state represses public criticism, in fact Vietnamese authorities often tolerate and respond positively to such public and open protests.

Vietnam

Vietnam PDF Author: Christopher Goscha
Publisher:
ISBN: 0465094368
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
The definitive history of modern Vietnam and its diverse and divided past

Rubber and the Making of Vietnam

Rubber and the Making of Vietnam PDF Author: Michitake Aso
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781469637143
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Civilizing latex -- Cultivating science -- Managing disease -- Turning tropical -- Maintaining modernity -- Decolonizing plantations -- Militarizing rubber

A Story of Việt Nam

A Story of Việt Nam PDF Author: Truong Buu Lâm
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781432750206
Category : Vietnam
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
As a specialist of Southeast Asian History, I am often asked to introduce a book that would relate the history of Vietnam, from its beginnings to the present. As often, I am embarrassed to answer that there is no such book written in English. In effect, although we have many publications that deal competently with particular periods or systematically with different topics of its past, a comprehensive history of Vietnam is still lacking. That is the reason I am happy and humbled to introduce here A Story of Vietnam. A Story of Vietnam treats evenly all the periods and also gives equal importance to the culture and the arts as to the political or military events of Vietnam's past. I call it a story and not a history, because I do not want my book to be the usual conventional textbook, overburdened with interminable academic, historical and bibliographic references. While not a conventional textbook, A Story of Vietnam can, nonetheless, provide a substantial reading material to students interested in Asia. To the hyphenated Vietnamese, it can serve as a convenient reference tool to the historical allusions, cultural insinuations, mythical hints, literary suggestions, ethnic idiosyncrasies they encounter every day at home. This book may also be sought after by the people who know so much already about Vietnam as a War but who still would like to know more about Vietnam as a culture. I have narrated my story with the greatest impartiality I am capable of. I have no theory that needs to be proven nor do I have any assumption to be verified. But I do come to history with emotion, even with passion. Sometimes, my sympathies surged to the surface or my distastes became apparent, though at no time, have I consciously distorted the facts or altered the documents in order to validate my feelings. The ten chapters of this book are naturally of unequal length. They adhere strictly to the chronological order, meaning that Chapter One deals, among others, with the legendary origins of the Vietnamese people and the last chapter, Chapter Ten, recounts the social traumas, the economic hardships, and the political isolation the country experienced after reunification in 1975 to the remarkable recovery effected since 1986 and culminating in October of 2007 when Vietnam was elected as a non-permanent member of the Security Council of the United Nations. Truong Buu Lam is a retired professor of History from the University of Hawaii.

Vietnam: A Natural History

Vietnam: A Natural History PDF Author: Eleanor Jane Sterling
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300128215
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 443

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Book Description
A country uncommonly rich in plants, animals, and natural habitats, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam shelters a significant portion of the world’s biological diversity, including rare and unique organisms and an unusual mixture of tropical and temperate species. This book is the first comprehensive account of Vietnam’s natural history in English. Illustrated with maps, photographs, and thirty-five original watercolor illustrations, the book offers a complete tour of the country’s plants and animals along with a full discussion of the factors shaping their evolution and distribution. Separate chapters focus on northern, central, and southern Vietnam, regions that encompass tropics, subtropics, mountains, lowlands, wetland and river regions, delta and coastal areas, and offshore islands. The authors provide detailed descriptions of key natural areas to visit, where a traveler might explore limestone caves or glimpse some of the country’s twenty-seven monkey and ape species and more than 850 bird species. The book also explores the long history of humans in the country, including the impact of the Vietnam-American War on plants and animals, and describes current efforts to conserve Vietnam’s complex, fragile, and widely threatened biodiversity.

Tours of Vietnam

Tours of Vietnam PDF Author: Scott Laderman
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392356
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
In Tours of Vietnam, Scott Laderman demonstrates how tourist literature has shaped Americans’ understanding of Vietnam and projections of United States power since the mid-twentieth century. Laderman analyzes portrayals of Vietnam’s land, history, culture, economy, and people in travel narratives, U.S. military guides, and tourist guidebooks, pamphlets, and brochures. Whether implying that Vietnamese women were in need of saving by “manly” American military power or celebrating the neoliberal reforms Vietnam implemented in the 1980s, ostensibly neutral guides have repeatedly represented events, particularly those related to the Vietnam War, in ways that favor the global ambitions of the United States. Tracing a history of ideological assertions embedded in travel discourse, Laderman analyzes the use of tourism in the Republic of Vietnam as a form of Cold War cultural diplomacy by a fledgling state that, according to one pamphlet published by the Vietnamese tourism authorities, was joining the “family of free nations.” He chronicles the evolution of the Defense Department pocket guides to Vietnam, the first of which, published in 1963, promoted military service in Southeast Asia by touting the exciting opportunities offered by Vietnam to sightsee, swim, hunt, and water-ski. Laderman points out that, despite historians’ ongoing and well-documented uncertainty about the facts of the 1968 “Hue Massacre” during the National Liberation Front’s occupation of the former imperial capital, the incident often appears in English-language guidebooks as a settled narrative of revolutionary Vietnamese atrocity. And turning to the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, he notes that, while most contemporary accounts concede that the United States perpetrated gruesome acts of violence in Vietnam, many tourists and travel writers still dismiss the museum’s display of that record as little more than “propaganda.”

Our Year of War

Our Year of War PDF Author: Daniel P. Bolger
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0306903245
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Two brothers -- Chuck and Tom Hagel -- who went to war in Vietnam, fought in the same unit, and saved each other's life. They disagreed about the war, but they fought it together. 1968. America was divided. Flag-draped caskets came home by the thousands. Riots ravaged our cities. Assassins shot our political leaders. Black fought white, young fought old, fathers fought sons. And it was the year that two brothers from Nebraska went to war. In Vietnam, Chuck and Tom Hagel served side by side in the same rifle platoon. Together they fought in the Mekong Delta, battled snipers in Saigon, chased the enemy through the jungle, and each saved the other's life under fire. But when their one-year tour was over, these two brothers came home side-by-side but no longer in step -- one supporting the war, the other hating it. Former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and his brother Tom epitomized the best, and withstood the worst, of the most tumultuous, shocking, and consequential year in the last half-century. Following the brothers' paths from the prairie heartland through a war on the far side of the world and back to a divided America, Our Year of War tells the story of two brothers at war -- a gritty, poignant, and resonant story of a family and a nation divided yet still united.

The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam

The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam PDF Author: Christopher Goscha
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141946652
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 725

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Book Description
WINNER OF THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION'S JOHN K. FAIRBANK PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE CUNDHILL HISTORY PRIZE 2017 'This is the finest single-volume history of Vietnam in English. It challenges myths, and raises questions about the socialist republic's political future' Guardian 'Powerful and compelling. Vietnam will be of growing importance in the twenty-first-century world, particularly as China and the US rethink their roles in Asia. Christopher Goscha's book is a brilliant account of that country's history.' - Rana Mitter 'A vigorous, eye-opening account of a country of great importance to the world, past and future' - Kirkus Reviews Over the centuries the Vietnamese have beenboth colonizers themselves and the victims of colonization by others. Their country expanded, shrunk, split and sometimes disappeared, often under circumstances far beyond their control. Despite these often overwhelming pressures, Vietnam has survived as one of Asia's most striking and complex cultures. As more and more visitors come to this extraordinary country, there has been for some years a need for a major history - a book which allows the outsider to understand the many layers left by earlier emperors, rebels, priests and colonizers. Christopher Goscha's new work amply fills this role. Drawing on a lifetime of thinking about Indo-China, he has created a narrative which is consistently seen from 'inside' Vietnam but never loses sight of the connections to the 'outside'. As wave after wave of invaders - whether Chinese, French, Japanese or American - have been ultimately expelled, we see the terrible cost to the Vietnamese themselves. Vietnam's role in one of the Cold War's longest conflicts has meant that its past has been endlessly abused for propaganda purposes and it is perhaps only now that the events which created the modern state can be seen from a truly historical perspective. Christopher Goscha draws on the latest research and discoveries in Vietnamese, French and English. His book is a major achievement, describing both the grand narrative of Vietnam's story but also the byways, curiosities, differences, cultures and peoples that have done so much over the centuries to define the many versions of Vietnam.