Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars : Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives

The inaugural volume in the OUP/National History Centre series, MAKING SENSE OF THE VIETNAM WARS promises to be the most up-to-date book on the changing interpretations of the wars in Vietnam. Marilyn Young and Mark Bradley have assembled a superb cast of twelve scholars and writers, spanning the generations from those who were active during the Vietnam period through younger scholars who have been doing on-the-ground research in Vietnamese sources, as well as uncovering new sources from the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, and Western Europe.

Making sense of the wars for Vietnam has had a long history. The question why Vietnam? dominated American and Vietnamese political life for much of length of the Vietnam wars and has continued to be asked in the three decades since they ended. The essays in this inaugural volume of the National History Centres book series Reinterpreting History examine the conceptual and methodological shifts that mark the contested terrain of Vietnam war scholarship. They range from top-down reconsiderations of critical decision-making moments in Washington, Hanoi, and Saigon to microhistories of the war that explore its meanings from the bottom up. Some draw on recently available Vietnamese-language archival materials. Others mine new primary sources in the United States or from France, Great Britain, the former Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. Collectively, these essays map the interpretative histories of the Vietnam wars: past, present, and future. They also raise questions about larger meanings and the ongoing relevance of the wars for Vietnam in American, Vietnamese, and international histories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.