Synopses & Reviews
In this study of the encounter between Vietnam and the United States from 1919 to 1950, Mark Bradley fundamentally reconceptualizes the origins of the Cold War in Vietnam and the place of postcolonial Vietnam in the history of the twentieth century. Among the first Americans granted a visa to undertake research in Vietnam since the war, Bradley draws on newly available Vietnamese-language primary sources and interviews as well as archival materials from France, Great Britain, and the United States.
Bradley uses these sources to reveal an imagined America that occupied a central place in Vietnamese political discourse, symbolizing the qualities that revolutionaries believed were critical for reshaping their society. American policymakers, he argues, articulated their own imagined Vietnam, a deprecating vision informed by the conviction that the country should be remade in America's image.
Contrary to other historians, who focus on the Soviet-American rivalry and ignore the policies and perceptions of Vietnamese actors, Bradley contends that the global discourse and practices of colonialism, race, modernism, and postcolonial state-making were profoundly implicated inand ultimately transcendedthe dynamics of the Cold War in shaping Vietnamese-American relations.
Review
Bradley's effort to place American?Vietnamese relations in a broader context is welcome.
New York Times Book Review
Review
A pioneering effort.
Reviews in American History
Review
Recommended reading for any serious student of culture, diplomacy, intellectual history, and the making of the postcolonial world.
Journal of Military History
Review
Review
Bradley scrupulously analyzes the scholarship of the postcolonial period of Vietnam's turbulent history and the cataclysmic events that followed.
Library Journal
Synopsis
In this study of the encounter between Vietnam and the United States from 1919 to 1950, Mark Bradley fundamentally reconceptualizes the origins of the Cold War in Vietnam and the place of postcolonial Vietnam in the history of the twentieth century. Bradley draws on newly available Vietnamese-language primary sources and interviews as well as archival materials from France, Great Britain, and the United States.
Synopsis
A pioneering effort.
Reviews in American History Recommended reading for any serious student of culture, diplomacy, intellectual history, and the making of the postcolonial world.
Journal of Military History Splendid book.
Choice Bradley's effort to place American?Vietnamese relations in a broader context is welcome.
New York Times Book Review Bradley scrupulously analyzes the scholarship of the postcolonial period of Vietnam's turbulent history and the cataclysmic events that followed.
Library Journal
Table of Contents
Foreword by John Lewis Gaddis
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Liberty and the Making of Postcolonial Order
Chapter 1. European Wind, American Rain: The United States in Vietnamese Anticolonial Discourse
Chapter 2. Representing Vietnam: The Interwar American Construction of French Indochina
Chapter 3. Trusteeship and the American Vision of Postcolonial Vietnam
Chapter 4. Self-Evident Truths? Vietnam, America, and the August Revolution of 1945
Chapter 5. Improbable Opportunities: Vietnamese and American Diplomacy in the Postcolonial Moment
Conclusion: Becoming Postcolonial in a Cold War World
Notes
Bibliography
Index