On May 25, 2012, President Obama announced that the United States would spend the next thirteen years – through November 11, 2025 – commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War, and the American soldiers, “more than 58,000 patriots,” who died in Vietnam. The fact that at least 2.1 million Vietnamese – soldiers, parents, grandparents, children – also died in that war will be largely unknown and entirely uncommemorated. And 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 appalling disconnect of consciousness 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. It is a campaign of patriotic conceit superbly chronicled by John Marciano in The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?. A devastating follow-up to Marciano’s 1979 classic Teaching the Vietnam War (written with William L. Griffen), Marciano’s book seeks not to commemorate the Vietnam War, but 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. Marciano writes of the Noble Cause being invoked unsparingly by presidents – from Jimmy Carter, in his observation that, regarding Vietnam, “the destruction was mutual,” to Barack Obama, who continues the flow of romantic media propaganda: “The United States of America … will remain the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known.” The result is critical writing and teaching at its best. This book will find a home in classrooms where teachers seek to do more than repeat the trite glorifications of U.S. empire. It will provide students everywhere with insights that can prepare them to change the world.

Product Description: Playing trumpet in the 9th Infantry Division Band should have been a safe assignment but the Viet Cong swarmed throughout the Mekong Delta, and safety was nonexistent. The band's twofold mission--boosting morale and helping win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese--required them to leave their Dong Tam (a...read more

Product Description: More than forty years have passed since the official end of the Vietnam War, yet the war’s legacies endure. Its history and iconography still provide fodder for film and fiction, communities of war refugees have spawned a wide Vietnamese diaspora, and the United States military remains embroiled in unwinnable wars with eerie echoes of Vietnam...read more

Product Description: Is it possible that a president and his administration would purposefully mislead the American public so that they could commit the United States to a war that is not theirs to fight? Anyone with even a remote memory of the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” probably finds such a question naive...read more

Product Description: ABOUT THE BOOK In the early 1960s America became involved in a brutal, devastating war in Southeast Asia. The war polarized much of the nation and threatened to destabilize America's influence throughout the globe. The world was introduced to an entirely new kind of sports icon...read more

Product Description: In his 1967 megahit "San Francisco," Scott McKenzie sang of "people in motion" coming from all across the country to San Francisco, the white-hot center of rock music and anti-war protests. At the same time, another large group of young Americans was also in motion, less eagerly, heading for the jungles of Vietnam...read more

Product Description: In the aftermath of World War II, as longstanding empires collapsed and former colonies struggled for independence, the United States employed new diplomatic tools to counter unprecedented challenges to its interests across the globe...read more

Product Description: It was the conflict that shocked America and the world, but the struggle for peace is central to the history of the Vietnam War. Rejecting the idea that war between Hanoi and the US was inevitable, the author traces North Vietnam's programs for a peaceful reunification of their nation from the 1954 Geneva negotiations up to the final collapse of the Saigon government in 1975...read more

Product Description: In April of 1972, SEAL Lieutenant Tom Norris risked his life in an unprecedented ground rescue of two American airmen who were shot down behind enemy lines in North Vietnam, a feat for which he would be awarded the Medal of Honor--an award that represents the pinnacle of heroism and courage...read more

Product Description: Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea is the first comprehensive history of identity as the answer to the question, "who, or what, am I?" It covers the century from the end of World War I, when identity in this sense first became an issue for writers and philosophers, to 2010, when European political leaders declared multiculturalism a failure just as Canada, which pioneered it, was hailing its success...read more

Product Description: Included in this frequently inspiring and often poignant volume of plays, originally published in 1985, are works penned in the same era as the Vietnam War from some of the most revered playwrights in the national canon. The challenging work within—from playwrights like Terrence McNally, Emily Mann and David Rabe—reflects on the social and political ethos of this pivotal moment for America...read more