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6 books match the query 'Vietnam (Republic)'

cover of America's Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia

America's Miracle Man in Vietnam

Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia

Seth Jacobs

Duke University Press, 2004

America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam rethinks the motivations behind one of the most ruinous foreign-policy decisions of the postwar era: America’s commitment to preserve an independent South Vietnam under the premiership of Ngo Dinh Diem. The so-called Diem experiment is usually ascribed to U.S. anticommunism and an absence of other candidates for South Vietnam’s highest office. Challenging those explanations, Seth Jacobs utilizes religion and race as categories of analysis to argue that the alliance with Diem cannot be understood apart from America’s mid-century religious revival and policymakers’ perceptions of Asians. Jacobs contends that Diem’s Catholicism and the extent to which he violated American notions of “Oriental” passivity and moral laxity made him a more attractive ally to Washington than many non-Christian South Vietnamese with greater administrative experience and popular support.

A diplomatic and cultural history, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam draws on government archives, presidential libraries, private papers, novels, newspapers, magazines, movies, and television and radio broadcasts. Jacobs shows in detail how, in the 1950s, U.S. policymakers conceived of Cold War anticommunism as a crusade in which Americans needed to combine with fellow Judeo-Christians against an adversary dangerous as much for its atheism as for its military might. He describes how racist assumptions that Asians were culturally unready for democratic self-government predisposed Americans to excuse Diem’s dictatorship as necessary in “the Orient.” By focusing attention on the role of American religious and racial ideologies, Jacobs makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of the disastrous commitment of the United States to “sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.”

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cover of Ground Pounder: A Marine’s Journey through South Vietnam, 1968-1969

Ground Pounder

A Marine’s Journey through South Vietnam, 1968-1969

Gregory V. Short

University of North Texas Press, 2012

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cover of Hell in An Loc: The 1972 Easter Invasion and the Battle That Saved South Viet Nam

Hell in An Loc

The 1972 Easter Invasion and the Battle That Saved South Viet Nam

Quang Thi Lam

University of North Texas Press, 2009

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cover of The Spy Who Loved Us: The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game

The Spy Who Loved Us

The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game

Thomas A. Bass

University of Massachusetts Press, 2018

Pham Xuan An was one of the twentieth century's greatest spies. While working as a correspondent for Time during the Vietnam War, he sent intelligence reports—written in invisible ink or hidden inside spring rolls in film canisters—to Ho Chi Minh and his generals in North Vietnam.

Only after Saigon fell in 1975 did An's colleagues learn that the affable raconteur in their midst, acclaimed as "dean of the Vietnamese press corps," was actually a general in the North Vietnamese Army. In recognition of his tradecraft and his ability to spin military losses—such as the Têt Offensive of 1968—­into psychological gains, An was awarded sixteen military medals.

After the book's original publication, WikiLeaks revealed that Thomas A. Bass's account of An's career was distributed to CIA agents as a primer in espionage. Now available in paper with a new preface, An's story remains one of the most gripping to emerge from the era.
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cover of The Twenty-five Year Century: A South Vietnamese General Remembers the Indochina War to the Fall of Saigon

The Twenty-five Year Century

A South Vietnamese General Remembers the Indochina War to the Fall of Saigon

Quang Thi Lam

University of North Texas Press, 2001

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cover of Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies: History, Community, and Memory

Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies

History, Community, and Memory

Edited by Linda Ho Peché, Alex-Thai Dinh Vo, and Tuong Vu

Temple University Press, 2023

The large number of Vietnamese refugees that resettled in the United States since the fall of Saigon have become America’s fastest growing immigrant group. Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies traces the ideologies, networks, and cultural sensibilities that have long influenced and continue to transform social, political, and economic developments in Vietnam and the U.S.

Moving beyond existing approaches, the editors and contributors to this volume—the first to craft a working framework for researching, teaching, and learning about this dynamic community—present a new Vietnamese American historiography that began in South Vietnam. They provide deep-dive explorations into community development, political activism, civic participation and engagement, as well as entrepreneurial endeavors. Chapters offer new concepts and epistemological approaches to how legacy and memory is nurtured, produced and circulated in the Vietnamese diaspora.

Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies seeks to better understand the rapidly changing landscape of Vietnamese American diaspora.

Contributors: Duyen Bui, Christian Collet, Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox, Elwing Suong Gonzalez, Tuan Hoang, Jennifer A. Huynh, Y Thien Nguyen, Nguyen Vu Hoang, Van Nguyen-Marshall, Thien-Huong Ninh, Hai-Dang Phan, Ivan V. Small, Quan Tue Tran, Thuy Vo Dang, and the editors

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