In great depth, Volume II examines the escalation of the Vietnam War and its development into a violent stalemate, beginning with the overthrow of the Ngô Đình Diệm in 1963 to the aftermath of the 1968 Tết Offensive. This five-year period was, for the most part, the fulcrum of a three-decades-long struggle to determine the future of Vietnam and was marked by rival spirals of escalation generated by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the United States. The volume explores the war's military aspects on all sides, the politics of war in the two Vietnams and the United States, and the war's international and transnational dimensions in politics, protest, diplomacy, and economics, while also paying close attention to the agency of historical actors on both sides of the conflict in South Vietnam.
Introduction Andrew Preston; Part I. Battlefields: 1. Reconsidering American strategy in Vietnam Gregory A. Daddis; 2. The air wars in Vietnam Mark Clodfelter; 3. US combat soldiers in Vietnam Ron Milam; 4. American women and the Vietnam War Heather Marie Stur; 5. The conundrum of Pacification John Prados; 6. The US military presence in South Vietnam Meredith Lair; 7. The ARVN experience Andrew Wiest; 8. The National Liberation Front Robert K. Brigham; 9. The people's army of Vietnam Hai Thanh Nguyen; 10. Vietnamese women and the war Amanda Boczar; 11. Vietnam's ethnic minorities at war Oscar Salemink; 12. The war in numbers Edwin Moïse; 13. The Tet Offensive James H. Willbanks; Part II. Homefronts: 14. Dominoes abroad and at home Fredrik Logevall; 15. LBJ, the great society, and Vietnam Julian E. Zelizer; 16. Politics in South Vietnam, 1963 –68 Simon Toner; 17. Politics in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1963 –68 Martin Grossheim; 18. The antiwar movement in the United States Simon Hall; 19. Vietnam and American race relations Brenda Gayle Plummer; 20. Prowar sentiment in the United States Sandra Scanlon; 21. The US news media and Vietnam Chester Pach; 22. The South Vietnamese Homefront Mai Elliott; 23. The North Vietnamese Homefront Pham Quang Minh; Part III. Global Vietnam: 24. International radicalism and antiwar protest Judy Tzu-Chun Wu; 25. The Vietnam war and the Sino-Soviet Split Sergey Radchenko; 26. Western Europe and the Vietnam war Christian Ostermann; 27. International peace initiatives James G. Hershberg; 28. Japan and the Vietnam war Jennifer M. Miller; 29. The economics of the Vietnam War Daniel Sargent; 30. The Global 1968 Adrienne Minh-Chau Le.
Lien-Hang T. Nguyen holds the Dorothy Borg Chair in the History of the United States and East Asia at Columbia University. She is the author of Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace (2012), which won prizes from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Society for Military History. She is the co-founder of Vietnamese Studies at Columbia and serves on the Board of Trustees of Fulbright University Vietnam. Andrew Preston is Professor of American History at Clare College, University of Cambridge. A specialist in the history of US foreign relations, he is the author or editor of nine books, including American Foreign Relations: A Very Short Introduction (2019) and Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (2012). In 2020–21, he was President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR).
