Overview

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and while any comprehensive reckoning must include the role of the US, it was not an 'American War'. This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and larger interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and complex war.

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9781107105089

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Lien-Hang T. Nguyen holds the Dorothy Borg Chair in the History of the United States and East Asia at Columbia University. She is the author of Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace (2012), which won prizes from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Society for Military History. She is the co-founder of Vietnamese Studies at Columbia and serves on the Board of Trustees of Fulbright University Vietnam. Edward Miller is Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies, and Chair of the Department of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (2013) and The Vietnam War: A Documentary Reader (2015). He is the founding director of the Dartmouth Vietnam Project, a student-driven oral history program which documents the memories and experiences of members of the Dartmouth community who lived through the Vietnam War era.

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