Rice Wars in Colonial Vietnam

Rice Wars in Colonial Vietnam PDF Author: Geoffrey C. Gunn
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442223030
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
This book offers the first detailed English-language examination of the Great Vietnamese Famine of 1945, which left at least a million dead, and links it persuasively to the largely unexpected Viet Minh seizure of power only months later. Drawing on extensive research in French archives, Geoffrey C. Gunn offers an important new interpretation of Japanese–Vichy French wartime economic exploitation of Vietnam’s agricultural potential. He analyzes successes and failures of French colonial rice programs and policies from the early 1900s to 1945, drawing clear connections between colonialism and agrarian unrest in the 1930s and the rise of the Viet Minh in the 1940s. Gunn asks whether the famine signaled a loss of the French administration’s “mandate of heaven,” or whether the overall dire human condition was the determining factor in facilitating communist victory in August 1945. In the broader sweep of Vietnamese history, including the rise of the communist party, the picture that emerges is not only one of local victimhood at the hands of outsiders—French and, in turn, Japanese— but the enormous agency on the part of the Vietnamese themselves to achieve moral victory over injustice against all odds, no matter how controversial, tragic, and contested the outcome. As the author clearly demonstrates, colonial-era development strategies and contests also had their postwar sequels in the “American war,” just as land, land reform, and subsistence-sustainable development issues persist into the present.

Rice Wars in Colonial Vietnam

Rice Wars in Colonial Vietnam PDF Author: Geoffrey C. Gunn
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442223030
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers the first detailed English-language examination of the Great Vietnamese Famine of 1945, which left at least a million dead, and links it persuasively to the largely unexpected Viet Minh seizure of power only months later. Drawing on extensive research in French archives, Geoffrey C. Gunn offers an important new interpretation of Japanese–Vichy French wartime economic exploitation of Vietnam’s agricultural potential. He analyzes successes and failures of French colonial rice programs and policies from the early 1900s to 1945, drawing clear connections between colonialism and agrarian unrest in the 1930s and the rise of the Viet Minh in the 1940s. Gunn asks whether the famine signaled a loss of the French administration’s “mandate of heaven,” or whether the overall dire human condition was the determining factor in facilitating communist victory in August 1945. In the broader sweep of Vietnamese history, including the rise of the communist party, the picture that emerges is not only one of local victimhood at the hands of outsiders—French and, in turn, Japanese— but the enormous agency on the part of the Vietnamese themselves to achieve moral victory over injustice against all odds, no matter how controversial, tragic, and contested the outcome. As the author clearly demonstrates, colonial-era development strategies and contests also had their postwar sequels in the “American war,” just as land, land reform, and subsistence-sustainable development issues persist into the present.

Footprints of War

Footprints of War PDF Author: David Andrew Biggs
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295743875
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
When American forces arrived in Vietnam, they found themselves embedded in historic village and frontier spaces already shaped by many past conflicts. American bases and bombing targets followed spatial and political logics influenced by the footprints of past wars in central Vietnam. The militarized landscapes here, like many in the world�s historic conflict zones, continue to shape post-war land-use politics. Footprints of War traces the long history of conflict-produced spaces in Vietnam, beginning with early modern wars and the French colonial invasion in 1885 and continuing through the collapse of the Saigon government in 1975. The result is a richly textured history of militarized landscapes that reveals the spatial logic of key battles such as the Tet Offensive. Drawing on extensive archival work and years of interviews and fieldwork in the hills and villages around the city of Hue to illuminate war�s footprints, David Biggs also integrates historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data, using aerial, high-altitude, and satellite imagery to render otherwise placeless sites into living, multidimensional spaces. This personal and multilayered approach yields an innovative history of the lasting traces of war in Vietnam and a model for understanding other militarized landscapes.

The Road to Dien Bien Phu

The Road to Dien Bien Phu PDF Author: Christopher Goscha
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691228647
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 568

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Book Description
A multifaceted history of Ho Chi Minh’s climactic victory over French colonial might that foreshadowed America’s experience in Vietnam On May 7, 1954, when the bullets stopped and the air stilled in Dien Bien Phu, there was no doubt that Vietnam could fight a mighty colonial power and win. After nearly a decade of struggle, a nation forged in the crucible of war had achieved a victory undreamed of by any other national liberation movement. The Road to Dien Bien Phu tells the story of how Ho Chi Minh turned a ragtag guerrilla army into a modern fighting force capable of bringing down the formidable French army. Taking readers from the outbreak of fighting in 1945 to the epic battle at Dien Bien Phu, Christopher Goscha shows how Ho transformed Vietnam from a decentralized guerrilla state based in the countryside to a single-party communist state shaped by a specific form of “War Communism.” Goscha discusses how the Vietnamese operated both states through economics, trade, policing, information gathering, and communications technology. He challenges the wisdom of counterinsurgency methods developed by the French and still used by the Americans today, and explains why the First Indochina War was arguably the most brutal war of decolonization in the twentieth century, killing a million Vietnamese, most of them civilians. Panoramic in scope, The Road to Dien Bien Phu transforms our understanding of this conflict and the one the United States would later enter, and sheds new light on communist warfare and statecraft in East Asia today.

Vietnam's American War

Vietnam's American War PDF Author: Pierre Asselin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100922932X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
This new edition masterfully explains the origins and outcome of America's war in Vietnam by focusing on its local dimensions.

Valley of Death

Valley of Death PDF Author: Ted Morgan
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588369803
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 769

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Book Description
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ted Morgan has now written a rich and definitive account of the fateful battle that ended French rule in Indochina—and led inexorably to America’s Vietnam War. Dien Bien Phu was a remote valley on the border of Laos along a simple rural trade route. But it would also be where a great European power fell to an underestimated insurgent army and lost control of a crucial colony. Valley of Death is the untold story of the 1954 battle that, in six weeks, changed the course of history. A veteran of the French Army, Ted Morgan has made use of exclusive firsthand reports to create the most complete and dramatic telling of the conflict ever written. Here is the history of the Vietminh liberation movement’s rebellion against French occupation after World War II and its growth as an adversary, eventually backed by Communist China. Here too is the ill-fated French plan to build a base in Dien Bien Phu and draw the Vietminh into a debilitating defeat—which instead led to the Europeans being encircled in the surrounding hills, besieged by heavy artillery, overrun, and defeated. Making expert use of recently unearthed or released information, Morgan reveals the inner workings of the American effort to aid France, with Eisenhower secretly disdainful of the French effort and prophetically worried that “no military victory was possible in that type of theater.” Morgan paints indelible portraits of all the major players, from Henri Navarre, head of the French Union forces, a rigid professional unprepared for an enemy fortified by rice carried on bicycles, to his commander, General Christian de Castries, a privileged, miscast cavalry officer, and General Vo Nguyen Giap, a master of guerrilla warfare working out of a one-room hut on the side of a hill. Most devastatingly, Morgan sets the stage for the Vietnam quagmire that was to come. Superbly researched and powerfully written, Valley of Death is the crowning achievement of an author whose work has always been as compulsively readable as it is important.

Rice Wars in Colonial Vietnam

Rice Wars in Colonial Vietnam PDF Author: Geoffrey C. Gunn
Publisher: Asia/Pacific/Perspectives
ISBN: 9781442223028
Category : Famines
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book offers the first detailed English-language examination of the Great Vietnamese Famine of 1945, which left at least a million dead, and links it persuasively to the largely unexpected Viet Minh seizure of power only months later. Drawing on extensive research in French archives, Geoffrey C. Gunn offers an important new interpretation of Japanese-Vichy French wartime economic exploitation of Vietnam's agricultural potential. Gunn asks whether the famine signaled a loss of the French administration's "mandate of heaven," or whether the overall dire human condition was the determining factor in facilitating communist victory in August 1945. In the broader sweep of Vietnamese history, including the rise of the communist party, the picture that emerges is not only one of local victimhood at the hands of outsiders but the enormous agency on the part of the Vietnamese themselves to achieve moral victory, no matter how controversial, tragic, and contested the outcome. As the author clearly demonstrates, colonial-era development strategies and contests also had their postwar sequels in the "American war," just as land, land reform, and subsistence-sustainable development issues persist into the present.

The American War in Vietnam

The American War in Vietnam PDF Author: John Marciano
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 158367585X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
On May 25, 2012, President Obama announced that the United States would spend the next thirteen years commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War and the "more than 58,000 patriots" who died there. The fact that 3 million Vietnamese--soldiers, parents, grandparents, children--also died will be largely unknown and entirely un-commemorated. U.S. history barely stops to record the millions of Vietnamese who lived on after being displaced, tortured, maimed, raped, or born with birth defects, the result of devastating chemicals wreaked on the land by the U.S. military. The reason for this disconnect lies in an unremitting public relations campaign waged by top American politicians, military leaders, business people, and scholars who have spent the last sixty years justifying the U.S. presence in Vietnam. The American War in Vietnam challenges all of us to stop the ongoing U.S. war on actual history. Marciano reveals the grandiose flag-waving that stems from the "Noble cause principle," the notion that America is "chosen by God" to bring democracy to the world. The result is critical writing and teaching at its best. This book will provide students everywhere with insights that can prepare them to change the world. --Cover.

Vietnam

Vietnam PDF Author: Ronald J. Cima
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780788118760
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Describes and analyzes Vietnam1s political, economic, social and national security systems and institutions and the interrelationships of those systems and the ways they are shaped by cultural factors. Also covers people1s origins, dominant beliefs and values, their common interests and issues on which they are divided, the nature and extent of their involvement with national institutions and their attitudes toward each other and toward their social system and political order. 19 maps and photos.

Down and Out in Saigon

Down and Out in Saigon PDF Author: Haydon Cherry
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300218257
Category : Social Science
Languages : vi
Pages : 280

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Book Description
A moving portrait of the lives of six poor city-dwellers, set in early twentieth century colonial Saigon Historian Haydon Cherry offers the first comprehensive social history of the urban poor of colonial French Saigon by following the lives of six individuals--a prostitute, a Chinese laborer, a rickshaw puller, an orphan, an incurable invalid, and a destitute Frenchman--and how they navigated the ups and downs of the regional rice trade and the institutions of French colonial rule in the first half of the twentieth century. "Down and Out in Saigon is marked by three qualities that endow it with unusual value: the originality of its subject matter, as the first and only history of colonial Saigon's poor population, the excellence of its research, and Cherry's elegant prose."--Peter B. Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley "This is more than a corrective of revolutionary historiography--it is a tour de force that brings marginal and forgotten lives into the story of modern Vietnamese history."--Charles Keith, author of Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation

Embers of War

Embers of War PDF Author: Fredrik Logevall
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
ISBN: 0375504427
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 866

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Book Description
A history of the four decades leading up to the Vietnam War offers insights into how the U.S. became involved, identifying commonalities between the campaigns of French and American forces while discussing relevant political factors.