Preserving Canada’s ‘honour’

2010 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Heffernan ◽  
Alison J. Borden ◽  
Alexandra C. Erath ◽  
Julie-Lynn Yang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Canadian English ◽  
Diachronic Change ◽  
Spelling Variant ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Diachronic Changes

Recent studies of orthographic variation have demonstrated that ideology plays a central role in determining which spelling variants are adopted by a community. This study examines the role of ideology in diachronic changes in spelling variant usage in Canadian English. Previous research has shown that patriotic Canadians are opposed to American spelling variants. We hypothesized that American spelling variant usage decreased during periods in which the United States was viewed negatively in Canada, such as the Vietnam War era. Furthermore, we also hypothesized that trends set during periods of anti-American sentiment have resulted in an overall decrease in American spelling variant usage in Canada over the last century. We gathered over 30,000 tokens of spelling variants spanning a period of approximately 100 years. Our results corroborate the first hypothesis but reject the second hypothesis, leading to a complex view of the role of ideology in diachronic change in Canadian English.

Provoking America: Le Duan and the Origins of the Vietnam War

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 86-108
Author(s):  
Zachary Shore
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
Strategic Thinking ◽  
The North ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The 1950S

This article concentrates on the North Vietnamese official who became the driving force within the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP) and was crucial in shaping the Vietnamese Communists’ protracted war strategy. A great deal has been written about the personality and policies of Ho Chi Minh, but Le Duan's powerful influence on strategy has been largely overlooked. The article covers Le Duan's background and rise to power as the VWP First Secretary, as well as his strategic thinking about the United States from the 1950s through the deployment of U.S. ground troops in 1965. Although other VWP leaders influenced wartime strategy, Le Duan as First Secretary carried the greatest weight within the Politburo and exerted the strongest influence over the southern Communists, who were pivotal in fighting both U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. In his role as head of the southern Communists Le Duan developed strategies for defeating the United States and then implemented them as his power grew. The article spotlights several recurrent themes in his thinking: the nature of a protracted war, the role of casualties, and U.S. global standing. Each of these subjects influenced how the North Vietnamese intended to defeat the United States over the long term and offers insights into how Hanoi understood its enemy.

Nation Building and the Vietnam War

2005 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 441-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER T. FISHER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
The South ◽  
Quiet Revolution ◽  
The Vietnam War

The literature on U.S. participation in the Vietnam War has recently undergone a quiet revolution due to use of the concept of nation building. Since the early 1950s nation building has been the subtext, if not the excuse, for U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, but in the last ten years it has also become useful as a method of inquiry. This article contends that new insights regarding the signi�cance of ideologies and paradigms, particularly modernization theory, enabled the transformation. Understanding modernization theory as an ideology broke with the tradition among diplomatic historians that minimized the role of ideas in policy decisions. It also settled longstanding questions about the nature of paci�cation as either development or counterinsurgency: Counterinsurgency and development were simply different expressions of the same impulse for the United States and the South Vietnamese.

The Myth of the Troubled and Scorned Vietnam Veteran

1992 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric T. Dean
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Vietnam Veteran ◽  
War Zone ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
One Year

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.

About Ghost Stories: The Vietnam War and “Rememoration”

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1700-1702
Author(s):  
Yen Le Espiritu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sociological Imagination ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Ghost Stories ◽  
The People ◽  
The Vietnam War

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).

Interlude V

2021 ◽  
pp. 143-148
Author(s):  
Trevor Davis Lipscombe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Case ◽  
Wild Ass ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Intelligent Life

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.”...

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Christine Sylvester
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
Abstract Painting ◽  
The Vietnam War

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.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 150-168
Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Culture ◽  
American Business ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Political Landscapes ◽  
The 1960S

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.

From Reeducation Camps to Little Saigons

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tuan Hoang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Critical Mass ◽  
The United States ◽  
Vietnamese History ◽  
The Vietnam War

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.

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