Table of Contents

Mark Philip Bradley and Marilyn B. Young: Introduction: Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars
Part One: American Intervention and the Cold War Consensus
Mark Atwood Lawrence (University of Texas at Austin: Explaining the Early Decisions: The United States and the French War, 1945-1954
Seth Jacobs: "No Place to Fight a War:" Laos and the Evolution of U.S. Policy toward Vietnam, 1954-1963
Gareth Porter (independent scholar): Explaining the Vietnam War: dominant and Contending Paradigm
Fredrik Logevall (Cornell University): "There Ain't No Daylight:" Lyndon Johnson and the Politics of Escalation
Part Two: The Coming of War in Vietnam
Sophie Quinn-Judge (Temple University): Through a Glass Darkly: Reading the History of the Vietnamese Communist Part, 1945-1975
Edward Miller (Dartmouth University): Vision, Power and Agency: The Ascent of Ngo Dinh Diem, 1945-1954
David Hunt (University of Massachusetts, Boston): Taking Notice of the Everyday
Heonik Kwon (University of Edinburgh): Co So Cach Mang and the Social Network of War
Part Three: War's End and Endless Wars
Lien Hang T. Nguyen (University of Kentucky): Cold War Contradictions: Toward an International History of the Second Indochina War, 1969-1973
Michael J. Allen (North Carolina State University): "Help Us Tell the Truth about Vietnam:" POW/MIA Politics and the End of the American War
David W.P. Elliott (Pomona College): Official History, Revisionist History and Wild History
Suggested Readings

About the Author

Mark Philip Bradley is Associate Professor of History, University of Chicago.

Marilyn B. Young is Professor of History, New York University.

Reviews

"Many of the 11 articles in Making Sense present wide-ranging examples of new and less conventional approaches to examining the war, with a particular focus on Vietnamese and international perspectives...Essential."--K. Blaser, CHOICE
"This is a path-breaking, exceptionally well-researched book by both distinguished scholars who link and reinterpret the entire 1940s to 1970s series of conflicts, and leading scholars who have explored new archival sources for the first time--not least in Vietnam itself--to provide fresh, significant, and revealing insights into key aspects of a many-layered, and ever-haunting, war."--Walter LaFeber, author of America, Russia, and the Cold War,
1945-2006
"Examining the topic from local, national, and international perspectives, this important volume provides a superb introduction to the most recent scholarship on the Vietnam War."--George Herring, author of America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975
"The cutting-edge research in this volume constitutes a crucial addition to the library of anyone interested in the histories of the Vietnam Wars."--Patrick Hagopian, The Journal of American History
"There is little doubt that Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars will influence how future students of the war move forward in their efforts to understand the conflict."--James McAllister, History: Reviews of New Books
"Important and stimulating...succeeds splendidly in its goal of making sense of the various dimensions of the Vietnam War. Indeed, this is an excellent volume: a must read for first-year students and scholars alike."--The European Legacy
"Living up to its billing, the book offers a view of the Vietnam Wars from a very wide variety of perspectives with essays covering the more-or-less typical high politics, a variety of Vietnamese views, some microhistory of the revolution, and even offerings on international history and myth making."--James M. Carter, Journal of World History