A Companion to the Vietnam War

A Companion to the Vietnam War contains twenty-four definitive essays on America's longest and most divisive foreign conflict. These historiographical and narrative essays by leading historians examine the war in its most important contexts. The broad thematic coverage of the book includes the political strategy of three American presidents, the American military tactics and their consequences, the adjoining wars in Laos and Cambodia, the American home front and antiwar movement, and the intersections of race, class, and gender in both America and Vietnam. This volume represents the best current scholarship on one of the most controversial and influential episodes in modern American history. It also contains an expanded bibliography of hundreds of secondary sources to guide further research. For students, scholars, and general readers of Vietnam War studies, this Companion is a vital resource.

Marilyn B. Young is Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy (1969) and The Vietnam Wars (1991), winner of the Berkshire Women’s History Prize. She is the co-author of Transforming Russia and China: Revolutionary Struggle in the 20th Century (with William Rosenberg, 1980), Promissory Notes: Women and the Transition to Socialism (with Rayna Rapp and Sonia Kruks, 1983), and Vietnam and America (with Marvin Gettleman, Jane Franklin, and Bruce Franklin, 1995), and is the co-editor of Human Rights and Revolutions (with Lynn Hunt and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, 2000).

Robert Buzzanco is Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston. He is the author of Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era (1996), winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Prize, and Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life (Blackwell, 1999).