Vietnam's southern revolution
Subtitle: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War
By: David Hunt.
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Amherst
Language: eng
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9781558496910; 9781558496927
Subjects: Vietnam War, 1961-1975 -- Social aspects; Peasantry -- Vietnam -- Mỹ Tho -- History -- 20th century; Peasantry -- Vietnam -- Mỹ Tho -- Interviews; War and society -- Vietnam -- History -- 20th century; Civil-military relations -- Vietnam -- History -- 20th century; Vietnam -- Social conditions -- 20th century; Mỹ Tho (Vietnam) -- Social conditions -- 20th century; Mỹ Tho (Vietnam) -- Biography; Vietnam -- Politics and government -- 1945-1975
Genres: Interviews.; Biography.
Description: In Vietnam, the American government vowed to win "hearts and minds" of the people. On the other side, among those who led and sympathized with insurgents, the term "people's war" gained a wide currency. While much has been written about those who professed to speak for Vietnamese population, we know little about everyday life of peasants who made up the bulk of the country's inhabitants. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including interviews conducted by Rand Corporation with informants from Mỹ Tho Province in Mekong Delta, David Hunt shows the daily experience of villagers in the midst of war and revolution. The peasants of southern Vietnam were neither onlookers nor mere victims as fighting raged through their country. From the "concerted uprising" in 1959-1960 to Tet Offensive of 1968, the revolutionary movement they created was the driving force within the war. Known as "Viet Cong" to their adversaries, the rebels called themselves the "Liberation Front." They demanded an end to landlordism and an egalitarian distribution of means of subsistence and a democratization of relations between town and countryside, parents and children, men and women. They hoped the Vietnamese people would achieve a fuller sense of their place in the world and power they possessed to fashion their own destinies. Hunt analyzes this cultural revolution. As fighting spread and became more destructive, especially after U.S. escalation in 1965, villagers were driven from their homes, rural infrastructure collapsed, and customary notions of space and time lost purchase on an increasingly chaotic world. Hunt also shows how peasants, who earlier had aspired to a kind of revolutionary modernism, now found themselves struggling to survive and cope with American intruders who poured into Mỹ Tho, and how they managed to regroup and spearhead Tet Offensive that altered the course of the war--Publisher's description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: A social history of the Vietnam War; title: An itinerant peasantry; title: The peasant revolt of 1959-1960; title: Contested unities of the golden period; title: The popular movement and the generational divide; title: Modern girls and new women; title: Escalation at ground level; title: Mapping the exodus; title: The American other; title: Fate of the liberated zone; title: The end of time; title: The Tet Offensive; title: Appendix: The uses of a source.