The Tet Offensive of 1968 was perhaps the key incident in the War for Vietnam. But the debate surrounding the offensive continues: Was it a failed last-gasp effort by the defeated North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies? Or was it part of a larger plan that led to victory for the North Vietnamese and their allies? The essays in this volume are among the very first to seek to dispel the wishful thinking, analytical dogmas, and political agendas that have obscured past efforts to master this key turning point in Vietnamese and American history. They reveal that we can look at the truth--and learn from it.

In many secondary schools, colleges, and universities across the country, the study of the Vietnam War has become a standard part of the curriculum. In this work, editor Marc Jason Gilbert has organized essays that are designed to serve the needs of the instructors currently teaching or planning to institute such courses. Each essay, written by a leading scholar in his or her field, addresses specific teaching strategies and resources, surveying approaches and providing a detailed examination of those issues that teachers have identified as the most useful or important. The book seeks to furnish instructors with the methods to present the war's broad perspective and complexity to a classroom. It begins with a discussion of some of the major interpretive stances, approaches, and issues that may be pursued in teaching about Vietnam. Subsequent chapters address the operational issues of the air war and misconceptions concerning guerilla war and counterinsurgency; the nature of "people's wars"; the effectiveness of decision-making and foreign policy-making analysis as classroom learning techniques; the need to place the war in the context of Indochinese, American, and world history; the use of teaching strategies and resources derived from literature, film, and the voice of the veteran; the use of Asian, European, and American literary sources to gain insight into the experience of the Vietnamese people; the anti-war movement; issues of peace, sex, and ethnicity; the integration of such approaches and issues into a course on the war; the use of materials drawn from the Vietnam War to further students' analytical skills; innovative ways of bringing primary printed sources into the classroom; and the strength and weaknesses of Vietnam War classroom texts and key monographs. The book concludes with a guide to further resources and a selection of Vietnam War course syllabi employed by scholars active in the field. This work will be a major resource for teachers and those studying to be teachers, as well as for courses on the Vietnam War, Southeast Asia, and U.S. History and Politics.

Previous analyses of the student antiwar movement during the Vietnam War have focussed almost exclusively on a few radical student leaders and upon events that occurred at a few elite East Coast universities. This volume breaks new ground in the treatment it affords critiques of the war offered by conservative students, in its assessment of antiwar sentiment among Midwestern and Southern college students, and in its invesitgation of antiwar protests in American high schools. It also provides fresh insight through a discussion of the ways in which American films depicted the student movements and an examination of the role of women and religion in the campus wars of the Sixties and Seventies.

The campus dimensions of the antiwar movement were more broad-based and more diverse in membership, roots, and strategy than is often assumed. Each essay in this collection strives not only to present a fair-minded picture of the impact of the Vietnam War on campus, but also to offer balanced reflections on its significance for today's body politic. Contributing authors conclude leading scholars on the war's impact on American society and two artists closely associated with that conflict, Vietnam veteran, writer, and poet W.D. Ehrhart and Country Joe McDonald, author of the antiwar era anthem, I Feel Like I'm Fixing to Die Rag.

The Tet Offensive of 1968 was perhaps the key incident in the War for Vietnam. But the debate surrounding the offensive continues: Was it a failed last-gasp effort by the defeated North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies? Or was it part of a larger plan that led to victory for the North Vietnamese and their allies? The essays in this volume are among the very first to seek to dispel the wishful thinking, analytical dogmas, and political agendas that have obscured past efforts to master this key turning point in Vietnamese and American history. They reveal that we can look at the truth--and learn from it.