“Red, White and Blues”

2019 ◽  
pp. 185-216
Author(s):  
Katherine Baber
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Developmental Process ◽  
Social Injustice ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Rhetorical Authority ◽  
Persistent Violence

Chapter 6 reveals how Bernstein used the blues to parse intertwined issues of race, faith, and national identity in the developmental process of Mass and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As the opening rite for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Mass questioned the notion of faith in the face of persistent violence and social injustice, from the Vietnam War to the ongoing civil rights struggle. As another politically charged work, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue drew heavily on the blues as a part of its historical pastiche. In the year of the bicentennial, Lerner and Bernstein wanted to call America to account for its ongoing failure to truly address the question of civil rights, but they were depending on a frayed black-Jewish relation for their rhetorical authority.

“Fuck Him, He Wasn’t With Us”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Bussel
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Urban Revitalization ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Political Expression ◽  
Direct Involvement ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines the convergence of events that thrust Harold Gibbons into the maelstrom of national politics and led to his estrangement from the Teamsters's hierarchy. It first considers how Gibbons's rifts with Teamsters played out among Local 688's membership in St. Louis, which helped oust Gibbons in the summer of 1973, terminated his political partnership with Ernest Calloway, and signaled the demise of their quest for total person unionism and working-class citizenship. It then discusses Calloway's gradual withdrawal from direct involvement in civil rights activism and union affairs by the end of the 1960s, assuming instead the role of respected community elder. It also describes Gibbons's opposition to the Vietnam War and his difficulty in finding outlets for political expression during the last years of his career, even as he continued with his advocacy of interracial politics and comprehensive strategies for urban revitalization. Finally, it reflects on Calloway's death on December 31, 1989.

scholarly journals THE 1966 WHITE HOUSE CONFERENCE ON CIVIL RIGHTS

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 259-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
KEVIN L. YUILL
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
White House ◽  
High Point ◽  
Howard University ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
American Creed ◽  
Governmental Institutions

Lyndon B. Johnson fails to mention the 1966 White House Conference on Civil Rights in his autobiography and the conference has been equally ignored by historians. Yet this conference, promised in Johnson's famous Howard University speech in 1965, was to be the high point of Johnson's already considerable efforts on civil rights. Underlying the confusion and rancour that characterized the conference held in June 1966 (but more especially the ‘planning conference’, held in November 1965) was a struggle to maintain the integrative impetus of the ‘American Creed’ against the realization that integration was unlikely to take place except in the very long term. The conference transcripts, recorded verbatim, provide a useful reminder of the very different mood of the mid-1960s, suggesting that the extent of panic after the Watts riot went beyond racial issues into fears for the survival of political and governmental institutions. Especially evident is the fragmentation of Johnson's liberal civil rights coalition before dissent on the Vietnam War ensured his downfall.

China and the Escalation of the Vietnam War: The First Years of the Johnson Administration

2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mao Lin
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Johnson Administration ◽  
National Liberation ◽  
Peaceful Coexistence ◽  
The West ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Vietnam War

This article reexamines how concerns about China contributed to the escalation of the Vietnam War during the first years of Lyndon Johnson's administration. Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam to protect America's global credibility as the leader and defender of the non-Communist world in the face of the threat posed by China's “wars of national liberation” strategy in Vietnam. U.S. officials evaluated this threat in the context of the broadening Sino-Soviet split. The concern in Washington was that if Hanoi, a regime openly supported by Beijing as a star in the “wars of national liberation,” were to take over South Vietnam, the Soviet Union might then be forced to discard the “peaceful coexistence” principle and the incipient détente with the West. The escalation in Vietnam was spurred largely by apprehension that a failure to contain China in Vietnam might prompt the Soviet Union to shift back to a hard line toward the West.

Refugee Assets

2018 ◽  
pp. 57-86
Author(s):  
Long T. Bui
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Political Prisoners ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Past Wrongs

This chapter explores the challenges of memory work for Vietnamese diasporic subjects in the face of postwar historical amnesia and trauma. It analyzes Aimee Phan’s The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, which tells the story of two families that fled from the Vietnam War still grappling with the messiness of their war-torn past. Offering a powerful analytic for situating gendered practices of remembering and forgetting by mostly women, the term “reeducation” suggests that refugee memory work never simply takes the form of nostalgia or denial of the past but is a constant negotiation of history as interpreted through past wrongs or obligations. As a hermeneutic for critically reading the refugee as a figure of debt, “reeducation” links the programmatic indoctrination of South Vietnamese political prisoners by communists to the Western pedagogical program to civilize refugees from South Vietnam, recognizing the psychic and material debt survivors of war owe to the sacrifices and suffering of others, and the political agency found in that recognition.

Reclaiming the Heroes and Heroic Attitudes of Classic Westerns: Open Range (2003)

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
John White
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Way

This chapter discusses the way in which the cinematography in Open Range (2003) reveres and mythologises both the rolling prairie landscape and the cowboy on horseback. What is on offer is the American idyll, the environmental embodiment of the quintessence of Americanism, a mythic space offering the promise of individual fulfilment guaranteed to U.S. citizens within the country’s shared national identity. Open Range is an attempt to return to the surface certainties of Westerns made prior to heavy U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. When the idyll is threatened good men – and one man in particular who understands the necessity of the unavoidable brutality required in these situations – need to step up to restore order and re-establish a space within which civilised values can be restored.

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