Vietnam: Explaining America'S Lost War

The year 2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the Americanization of the Vietnam War, a subject that has sparked intense and enduring debate. Now available in a revised and updated second edition, Vietnam: Explaining America's Lost War is an award-winning historiography of this seminal conflict of the twentieth century. This textbook brings together description and analysis of the most important issues in the field as put forth by scholars, participants, and journalists over the last half century. It addresses key questions about the war.

Written by a well-respected scholar who has spent decades studying the consequences of the Vietnam War, this text presents the issues in a clear and compelling style that encourages straightforward understanding of complex issues and allows readers to draw their own conclusions about the reasons for America's failure in the war. A final chapter assesses the competing "lessons" of the war as drawn from orthodox and revisionist histories and the extent to which they have influenced American national security policy over the last 40 years.

Gary R. Hess is Distinguished Research Professor of History at Bowling Green State University, where he taught for forty-five years. His publications includeThe United States at War, 1941–1945 (Wiley, 3^rd edition, 2010),Presidential Decisions for War: Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and Iraq (rev. ed., 2009),Vietnam and the United States: Origins and Legacy of War 1941–1945 (1998), andThe United States’ Emergence as a Southeast Asian Power (1987).