Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 328
Trim: 6 x 9
978-0-7425-5914-1 • Paperback • May 2007 • $58.00 • (£45.00)
Mary Susannah Robbins, Ph.D., has taught English literature at Vassar College and runs her own editorial services company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her poems, stories, and prints have appeared in various magazines including Ploughshares and Confrontation, and she is the editor of the forthcoming book Peace Not Terror: Leading Thinkers Show the Way Out of Perpetual War.
Foreword: Vietnam and Iraq
Introduction
Part I: Beginnings
Chapter 1: The Need to Remember
Chapter 2: The Impossible Victory:Vietnam
Part II: The War at Home
Chapter 3: From Ha Ha McNamara
Chapter 4: My Vietnam
Chapter 5: Burning Illusions:The Napalm Campaign
Chapter 6: The Responsibility of Intellectuals
Chapter 7: Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam
Chapter 8: Why I Joined the Resistance
Chapter 9: A Time to Say No
Chapter 10: Poems
Chapter 11: Chicago 1968: Street-Fighten' Man
Chapter 12: From the Suburbs to Saigon
Chapter 13: Vietnam Comes to Lexington: Memorial Day 1971
Part III: Soldiers against the War
Chapter 14: What Did You Do In the Class War, Daddy?
Chapter 15: War Memorial: Staying Close to a Buddy Twenty-five Years after His Death
Chapter 16: American War Crimes and Vietnam Veterans
Chapter 17: The War against the War
Part IV: Consequences
Chapter 18: Consequences of the Vietnam War and Government Policies of the Seventies
Chapter 19: Passing It On: The Movement for Teaching the Vietnam War in Schools
Chapter 20: Visiting Vietnam
Chapter 21: Chicago 1996: Despite Corporate Media Silence Many Powerful Protests
Part V: Conclusions
Chapter 22: What I Got Out of the War
Chapter 23: Cherishing Vistas, Embracing Human Beings: Toward Peace and Freedom
Chapter 24: Deja Vu All Over Again
This is an outstanding collection of writings by anti-Vietnam war activists that gives a vivid sense of the range of principles and passions that motivated one of the largest and most influential social movements in American history. We hear from scholars and soldiers, senators and students, clergy, journalists, conscientious objectors, grassroots organizers and national mobilizers, some well-known and others from the rank-and-file of the movement. The result is a powerful compilation that should find a place on the reading lists for many courses on the Vietnam War, peace and justice, or the United States in the 1960s.
— William A. Joseph, Wellesley College, editor of Introduction to Comparative Politics, 4th Ed.
Invaluable for reminding readers of the complexity within the antiwar movement. Robbins has composed an anthology with remarkable diversity in points of view, with due attention to resistance to the Vietnam War within the military and by veterans, and with respect for the political capacities of everyday citizens.
— H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Reviews Online
In its balance between famous and grassroots activists, Against the War offers a wealth of valuable insights into why Americans opposed the Vietnam War and how their opposition took form—and colored their lives forever.
— Peace & Change
There is no other book quite like this one and its importance has only grown over the years. We need to listen to these voices for they mirror a huge number of American lives. One is grateful for this sorrowful and wonderful record.
— Gloria Emerson, foreign correspondent for The New York Times in Vietnam from 1969 to 1972 and the author of Winners