In Selma to Saigon Daniel S. Lucks explores the impact of the Vietnam War on the national civil rights movement. Through detailed research and a powerful narrative, Lucks illuminates the effects of the Vietnam War on leaders such as Whitney Young Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as lesser-known Americans in the movement who faced the threat of the military draft as well as racial discrimination and violence.

Immediately after its founding by Hồ Chí Minh in September 1945, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) faced challenges from rival Vietnamese political organizations and from a France determined to rebuild her empire after the humiliations of WWII. Hồ, with strategic genius, courageous maneuver, and good fortune, was able to delay full-scale war with France for sixteen months in the northern half of the country. This was enough time for his Communist Party, under the cover of its Vietminh front organization, to neutralize domestic rivals and install the rough framework of an independent state. That fledgling state became a weapon of war when the DRV and France finally came to blows in Hanoi during December of 1946, marking the official beginning of the First Indochina War. With few economic resources at their disposal, Hồ and his comrades needed to mobilize an enormous and free contribution in manpower and rice from DRV-controlled regions. Extracting that contribution during the war’s early days was primarily a matter of patriotic exhortation. By the early 1950s, however, the infusion of weapons from the United States, the Soviet Union, and China had turned the Indochina conflict into a “total war.” Hunger, exhaustion, and violence, along with the conflict’s growing political complexity, challenged the DRV leaders’ mobilization efforts, forcing patriotic appeals to be supplemented with coercion and terror. This trend reached its revolutionary climax in late 1952 when Hồ, under strong pressure from Stalin and Mao, agreed to carry out radical land reform in DRV-controlled areas of northern Vietnam. The regime’s 1954 victory over the French at Điện Biên Phủ, the return of peace, and the division of the country into North and South did not slow this process of socialist transformation. Over the next six years (1954–1960), the DRV’s Communist leaders raced through land reform and agricultural collectivization with a relentless sense of urgency. Mass Mobilization in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1945–1960 explores the way the exigencies of war, the dreams of Marxist-Leninist ideology, and the pressures of the Cold War environment combined with pride and patriotism to drive totalitarian state formation in northern Vietnam.

How did the conflict between Vietnamese nationalists and French colonial rulers erupt into a major Cold War struggle between communism and Western liberalism? To understand the course of the Vietnam wars, it is essential to explore the connections between events within Vietnam and global geopolitical currents in the decade after the Second World War. In this illuminating work, leading scholars examine various dimensions of the struggle between France and Vietnamese revolutionaries that began in 1945 and reached its climax at Dien Bien Phu. Several essays break new ground in the study of the Vietnamese revolution and the establishment of the political and military apparatus that successfully challenged both France and the United States. Other essays explore the roles of China, France, Great Britain, and the United States, all of which contributed to the transformation of the conflict from a colonial skirmish to a Cold War crisis. Taken together, the essays enable us to understand the origins of the later American war in Indochina by positioning Vietnam at the center of the grand clash between East and West and North and South in the middle years of the twentieth century.

When Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces on April 30, 1975, the communist victory sent shockwaves around the world. Using ingenious strategy and tactics, Hồ Chi Minh had shown it was possible for a tiny nation to defeat a mighty Western power. The same tactics have been studied and replicated by revolutionary forces and terrorist organizations across the globe. Drawing on recently declassified documents and rare interviews with Hồ Chi Minh's strategists and operatives, this book offers fresh perspective on his blueprint and the reasons behind both the French (1945-1954) and the American (1959-1975) failures in Vietnam, concluding with an analysis of the threat this model poses today.

The dictionary consists of an alphabetical index to over 10,000 ship histories documenting nearly every ship that the US Navy has put to sea. Continental and Confederate vessels are also included. Entries include physical information, commissioning, service record, notable actions, and decommissioning. Drawings, photographs, and documents are also included. The Web site is an electronic version of the previously published dictionary series. Web entries may be corrected and updated from those that appeared in the printed series.

Includes entries for maps and atlases.