Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 150-168
Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier

This chapter explores the transformed religious, economic, and political landscapes in Europe and the United States at the time of Graham’s return to Berlin and London in 1966. It explains why Graham was now facing sharper criticism: the theological climate had shifted even further away from Graham’s rather fundamentalist theology, which now appeared outdated. The 1960s counterculture articulated an increasing consumer critique that zoomed in on Graham’s unconditional support for American business culture and the American way of life. And the Vietnam War, from which Graham never really distanced himself, loomed large over his revival meetings, where he now faced open political protest. But even more so, the increasing secularization of crusade cities such as London and Berlin made it significantly harder to rally support for Graham’s revival work at the same time when Graham’s highly professionalized revivalism was increasingly perceived as secular and formulaic.

1976 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 293-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank E. Rogers

Perceptions as well as realities have always played an important role in international politics and it is frequently difficult to separate the two. By the 1960s the realities of increased American involvement in South east Asia and a more militarily and politically influential China heightened the possibility of a Sino-American confrontation. It is the thesis of this study that the United States and the People's Republic of China, both fearful of that possibility as a spill-over from the conflict in Indochina, reached a tacit understanding limiting their involvement. This understanding was transmitted through a series of subtle public signals and, quite possibly, by a number of confidential communications. The primary motive was to prevent an unwanted Sino-American con frontation which could have resulted from a misperception of intentions. As will be demonstrated in this study both Peking and Washington sought, on a number of occasions, to transmit their intentions in order to prevent misperceptions and possible over-reactions.


1981 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-50
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Rips

What was known in the United States as the ‘underground press’ – self-published newspapers of the youth counterculture sold at street corners and around campuses in American cities during the 1960s and early 70 s – was once a significant network estimated at over 400 publications. Their hallmark was opposition to US involvement in the Vietnam War, criticism of the authorities, of uncontrolled technology and big business, advocacy of sexual freedom and artistic experimentation and, frequently, the advocacy of marijuana, LSD and other psychedelic drugs. Few of these publications have survived the past ten years, and their disappearance has been variously attributed to the cooling of radical interest after the American withdrawal from Vietnam, as well as to the vague and shifting nature of the ‘hippie’ scene. Complaints by their publishers during the early and mid-seventies that printers refused their business, that office rents suddenly doubled, that advertising was cancelled, that papers were lost – these were seen as local accidents and were rarely reported by the established media. Claims of official or officially-sanctioned harassment were dismissed – even by fellow radicals – as paranoid. Recent research by Geoffrey Rips of the PEN American Center has revealed the extent and variety of official pressure exerted against alternative publications during the Vietnam War period. Using evidence from government hearings like the Church Committee, which reported in 1976, actual FBI documents released to American PEN under the Freedom of Information Act, and other sources, Mr Rips argues that such harassment contributed materially to the closure of certain publications and in general terms constituted a gross infringement on the protection afforded to dissenting opinion and to a free press under the US constitution. We publish edited extracts here from Geoffrey Rips' report which will be published in full by the PEN American Center and the City Lights Press.


1992 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric T. Dean

In the United States since the conclusion of the Vietnam War, the Vietnam veteran has become known as a neglected, troubled, and even scorned individual. According to this view, the Vietnam veteran's problems began in Vietnam where he was forced to participate in a brutal and disturbing war in which he was under fire twenty-four hours a day. The enemy, the wily and tenacious Vietcong and North Vietnamese regulars, were not always clearly defined nor were they above hiding behind or using civilians, leading to the unintentional – and sometimes intentional – killing by American forces of noncombatants, including women and children. Due to the military's policy of limiting the tour of duty in the war zone to one year, combat groups lacked cohesion and suffered from low morale, resulting in the excessive use of marijuana and heroin and an eventual breakdown of discipline, leading to the “fragging” of officers who attempted to reimpose order.


PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1700-1702
Author(s):  
Yen Le Espiritu

In her book Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination, avery gordon writes that “to study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it”—the experiential realities of social and political life that have been systematically hidden or erased. To confront the ghostly aspects of social life is to tell ghost stories: to pay attention to what modern history has rendered ghostly and to write into being the seething presence of the things that appear to be not there (Gordon 7–8). By most accounts, Vietnam was the site of one of the most brutal and destructive of the wars between Western imperial powers and the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Yet public discussions and commemorations of the Vietnam War in the United States often skip over this devastating history, thereby ignoring the war's costs borne by the Vietnamese—the lifelong costs that turn the 1975 “fall of Saigon” and the exodus from Vietnam into “the endings that are not over” (Gordon 195). Without creating an opening for a Vietnamese perspective of the war, these public deliberations refuse to remember Vietnam as a historical site, Vietnamese people as genuine subjects, and the Vietnam War as having any kind of integrity of its own (Desser).


2021 ◽  
pp. 143-148
Author(s):  
Trevor Davis Lipscombe

I’m sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It’s just been too intelligent to come here. ARTHUR C. CLARKE (reproduced from an interview http://www.scifi.com/transcripts/aclarke.txt) The Vietnam War, during which American casualties ran extremely high, remains controversial in the United States. During the conflict, US forces estimated the strength of enemy forces based on the “SWAG” principle. At the war’s end, in a legal case, Colonel John Stewart took the stand. Lawyers grilled him, asking what, exactly, SWAG stood for. His reply, generating much amusement in the courtroom, was “Scientific Wild-Ass Guess.”...


Author(s):  
Christine Sylvester

This chapter begins the book by considering the knowledge on war that a seemingly unrelated abstract painting can harbor. That relationship introduces readers to the major theme of war authority as a decentralized and multilocated phenomenon. Background overviews provide information on America’s two wars studied here—in Vietnam and Iraq—the rise of militarism in the United States after the Vietnam War, and the heroization of soldiers today. The research sites for the study come into view along with the concepts that frame the study, including war as experience, memory, curation, and material objects as bearers of curator-coordinated war knowledge. The key argument to be sustained throughout the book is: war is experiential injurious politics that produces numerous sites of war expertise, many of which are overpowered by stories that gain truth through technical dominance, repetition and practice.


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tuan Hoang

This article re-examines Vietnamese diasporic anticommunism in the context of twentieth-century Vietnamese history. It offers an overview of the Vietnamese anticommunist tradition from colonialism to the end of the Vietnam War, and interprets the effects of national loss and incarceration on South Vietnamese anticommunists. These experiences contributed to an essentialization of anticommunism among the prisoners, who eventually provided a critical mass for anticommunist activism in the United States since the early 1990s.


Author(s):  
Chia Youyee Vang

The Vietnam War is the subject of hundreds of scholarly studies, policy reports, memoirs, and literary titles. As America’s longest and most controversial war, it coincided with domestic turmoil in the United States and in Southeast Asia, led to the displacement of large numbers of people, and strained the social fabric of Cambodian, Lao, and Vietnamese societies. The complex nature of the war means that despite the many books that have been written about it, much remains to unfold, in particular the experiences of ethnic minorities in Laos who became entangled in Cold War politics during the 1960s and 1970s. This book fills the gap by exploring the dramatic forces of history that drew several dozen young Hmong men to become fighter pilots in the United States’ Secret War in Laos, which was in direct support of the larger war in Vietnam. They transformed from ethnic minorities who mostly lived on the margins of Lao society to daring airmen working alongside American pilots. After four decades in exile, surviving pilots, families of those killed in action, and American veterans who worked with them collectively narrated their version of the historical events that resulted in the forced migration of nearly 150,000 Hmong to the United States. By privileging Hmong knowledge, this book begs us to reconsider the war from overlooked perspectives and to engage in the ongoing construction of meanings of war and postwar memories in shaping ethnic and national identities.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document