Mark Philip Bradley

Brooke L. Blower

In The Familiar Made Strange, twelve distinguished historians offer original and playful readings of American icons and artifacts that cut across rather than stop at the nation’s borders to model new interpretive approaches to studying United States history. These leading practitioners of the "transnational turn" pause to consider such famous icons as John Singleton Copley’s painting Watson and the Shark, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph V-J Day, 1945, Times Square, and Alfred Kinsey’s reports on sexual behavior, as well as more surprising but revealing artifacts like Josephine Baker’s banana skirt and William Howard Taft’s underpants. Together, they present a road map to the varying scales, angles and methods of transnational analysis that shed light on American politics, empire, gender, and the operation of power in everyday life.

American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn

The Familiar Made Strange

One of the first books to look at how the Vietnamese themselves experienced the wars for Vietnam, including both the French and the American wars. Combining political, social, and cultural history, Bradley examines how the war was seen both by top policy makers and also everyday soldiers and civilians in both North and South Vietnam.

Vietnam at War

The Vietnam War tends to conjure up images of American soldiers battling an elusive enemy in thick jungle, the thudding of helicopters overhead. But there were in fact several Vietnam wars - an anticolonial war with France, a cold war turned hot with the United States, a civil war between North and South Vietnam and among the southern Vietnamese, a revolutionary war of ideas over what should guide Vietnamese society into its postcolonial future, and finally a war of memories after the official end of hostilities with the fall of Saigon in 1975. This book looks at how the Vietnamese themselves experienced all of these conflicts, showing how the wars for Vietnam were rooted in fundamentally conflicting visions of what an independent Vietnam should mean that in many ways remain unresolved to this day. Drawing upon twenty years of research, Mark Philip Bradley examines the thinking and the behaviour of the key wartime decision-makers in Hanoi and Saigon, while at the same time exploring how ordinary Vietnamese, northerners and southerners, men and women, soldiers and civilians, urban elites and rural peasants, radicals and conservatives, came to understand the thirty years of bloody warfare that unfolded around them - and how they made sense of its aftermath.

Mark Philip Bradley

Books

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