America'S Lost War Vietnam: 1945-1975

In college and high school classrooms across the United States, students display a keen interest in knowing more about what they rightly sense was a pivotal event in the recent past, one that brought a sea change in the life of the nation.

In a long-awaited alternative to the lengthy and overly expensive texts on the Vietnam War, Charles Neu presents America’s Lost War, a balanced, lively narrative account of that tragic conflict, one that sweeps across the whole time-span of the war and explores American, Vietnamese, and international perspectives. Recreating the physical and psychological landscape of the war, Neu fluidly describes policy disputes—among leaders of both the United States and North Vietnam—as well as individual policy makers, battles, and military realities, tracing the legacy of the “Vietnam” phenomenon that shapes American domestic politics and elections, as well as foreign relations, to the present day.

Charles E. Neu received his B.A. from Northern University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He was Professor of History at Brown University from 1970 to 2003 and since 2004 has been Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Miami. He is the author of many articles, chapters, encyclopedia entries, and reviews, and has written, co-edited, or edited the following books: An Uncertain Friendship: Theodore Roosevelt and Japan, 1906-1909 (1967); The Troubled Encounter: The United States and Japan (1975); The Wilson Era: Essays in Honor of Arthur S. Link (1991); and After Vietnam: Legacies of a Lost War (2000). Over the years he has received grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Charles Warren Center For Studies in American History, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Howard Foundation, the national Endowment for the Humanities, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center For Scholars. He has directed six NEH Summer Seminars for school teachers and college teachers, and has also given the J. Milton Nance Lecture at Texas A&M University, the Michael H. Freedman History Lecture at Roger Williams University, and the Schouler Lecture and the Albert Shaw Memorial Lecture at the John Hopkins University. At Brown he chaired the Department of History for six years and for many years taught both a seminar and a lecture course on the Vietnam War. In 1998 he received the Barrett Hazeltine Citation For Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching.