Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Charlie Maier Scare and the Historiography of American Foreign Relations, 1959–1980
- 3 Chaps Having Flaps: The Historiography of U.S. Foreign Relations, 1980–1995
- 4 Still Contested and Colonized Ground: Post–Cold War Interpretations of U.S. Foreign Relations during World War II
- 5 Recent Literature on Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision
- 6 The Cold War
- 7 Cold War Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon
- 8 The War that Never Ends: Historians and the Vietnam War
- 9 Culture and the Cold War: U.S.–Latin American Historiography since 1995
- 10 Impatient Crusaders: The Making of America’s Informal Empire in the Middle East
- 11 Explaining the Rise to Global Power
- 12 Bringing the Non-State Back In
- 13 Technology and the Environment in the Global Economy
- 14 U.S. Mass Consumerism in Transnational Perspective
- 15 A Worldly Tale
- Index
- References
8 - The War that Never Ends: Historians and the Vietnam War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Charlie Maier Scare and the Historiography of American Foreign Relations, 1959–1980
- 3 Chaps Having Flaps: The Historiography of U.S. Foreign Relations, 1980–1995
- 4 Still Contested and Colonized Ground: Post–Cold War Interpretations of U.S. Foreign Relations during World War II
- 5 Recent Literature on Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision
- 6 The Cold War
- 7 Cold War Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon
- 8 The War that Never Ends: Historians and the Vietnam War
- 9 Culture and the Cold War: U.S.–Latin American Historiography since 1995
- 10 Impatient Crusaders: The Making of America’s Informal Empire in the Middle East
- 11 Explaining the Rise to Global Power
- 12 Bringing the Non-State Back In
- 13 Technology and the Environment in the Global Economy
- 14 U.S. Mass Consumerism in Transnational Perspective
- 15 A Worldly Tale
- Index
- References
Summary
The Vietnam War remains the most significant political experience for an entire American generation. That same generation presided over two long and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and events there no doubt increased public interest and debate over the conduct, outcome, and meaning of the Vietnam War. The result has been a steady increase in the number of scholarly monographs published on Vietnam, making it the war that never ends. Some of this scholarship is simply an extension of the ideological debates that raged on during the conflict, but there has also been a number of recent studies that complicate the war and its meaning. It appears increasingly difficult for scholars to tell the entire story of the war. Its history is told more in fragments, and as a result, no overarching consensus on the contours of the war has developed. In addition, there are no easily discerned schools of thought – such as orthodox or revisionist – that help us parse out the vast literature on the war. It would be impossible, therefore, to review all the worthy scholarship on the Vietnam War or to place it neatly into “camps.” Instead, this essay attempts to survey representative works that point to larger trends in the intellectual landscape.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- America in the WorldThe Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941, pp. 167 - 187Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013
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