Podcasts about our national identity

Donald Yacovone, lifetime associate at Harvard University's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, discusses his book, “Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity.” He talks about the evidence of white supremacy's deep-seeded roots in our nation's educational system by looking at nearly 100 years of school textbooks. […]

Donald Yacovone joins us this morning to discuss the paperback release of his latest book “Teaching White Supremacy: America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity.” The book shows us the clear and damming evidence of white supremacy's deep seeded roots in our nations educational system through in-depth examination of America's wide assortment of texts.

Tratamos da Guerra do Vietnã como uma catástrofe diplomática protagonizada por 5 administrações dos Estados Unidos, de Eisenhower a Nixon, até a fundação da República Socialista do Vietnã. Trilha sonora: Bartók, Shostakovich. Música de desfecho: Khánh Ly - Ru Ta Ngậm Ngùi (1975). Bibliografia (em ordem de sobrenome) Christian Appy. American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. Penguin Books, 2016. Lê Duẩn. Nhà xuất bản Sự thật.; Hà Nội. 1965, p. 120 [Letters to the South, trad. Robert K. Brigham and Le Phuong Anh]. In: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/le-duan/works/1965/10/x01.htm William J. Duiker. Ho Chi Minh: A Life. Hyperion, 2000. Christopher Goscha. The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam. ‎ Princeton University Press, 2022. Max Hastings. Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975. Harper, 2018. Michael H. Hunt. A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives. The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. T. Morgan. Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War. Random House, 2010. Luna Nguyễn. he Worldview and Philosophical Methodology of Marxism-Leninism: Curriculum of the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism Part 1. Banyan House, 2023. Andrew Rotter (ed.). Light at the End of the Tunnel; a Vietnam War Anthology, 3 volumes. Sr Books, 1999. Alessandro Visacro. Guerra irregular: terrorismo, guerrilha e movimentos de resistência ao longo da história. Editora Contexto, 2009. Paulo Fagundes Visentini. A Revolução Vietnamita. Editora da UNESP, 2007. Như Tảng Trương; A Vietcong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath. Vintage Books, 1986. Andrew Wiest. The Vietnam War: 1956-1975. Osprey Publishing, 2003. James Willbanks. Abandoning Vietnam; How America Left and South Vietnam Lost the War. University Press of Kansas, 2008. Leah Zani. Bomb Children; Life in the Former Battlefields of Laos. Duke UP, 2019. Louis B. Zimmer. The Vietnam War Debate. Hans J. Morgenthau and the Attempt to Halt the Drift into Disaster. Lexington Books, 2011. Documentários e vídeos “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara” (dir. Errol Morris, 2003) "Vietnam: A Television History" (13 episódios, dir. Judith Vecchione, Austin Hoyt, Martin Smith e Bruce Palling, 1983) "The Vietnam War" (10 episódios, dir. Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, 2017) Canal Luna Oi!: https://www.youtube.com/@Lunaoi Texto, pesquisa e narração: Felipe Vale da Silva. Uma versão deste texto foi apresentada no 21º encontro do SASTRA (Grupo de Estudos do Sudeste Asiático) em 26/05/2023; visite e participe do grupo em https://sastrasa.wixsite.com/index

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I'm Paul Jay. In his book American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and American Identity, Christian Appy writes: the need to demonstrate presidential balls has been an under-acknowledged but enduring staple of American foreign policy. Aggressive masculinity shaped American Cold War policy and still does. Deep-seated ideas about gender and sexuality cannot be dismissed as mere talk–they have explanatory value. U.S. policy in Vietnam was driven by men who were intensely concerned about demonstrating their own and the nation's toughness. As every other justification of the war grew threadbare, it became increasingly important to appear firm. Now joining us in the studio is Christian Appy. Thanks for joining us again.  CHRISTIAN G. APPY, AUTHOR, AMERICAN RECKONING: You're welcome.  JAY: So one more time, his latest book is American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. And Christian teaches history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. So this has always seemed to me, this need to develop, portray firmness and strength and so on, you know, it's akin to, like, a loan shark, and it's actually a lot akin to a loan shark, given how much of American commerce is based on lending people money–and I shouldn't say people; lending countries money, and assuming they're going to pay back. And for most loan sharks, you've got to break some knees once in a while to make sure people pay you the exorbitant interest you're trying to collect. Talk about this need to projected toughness, and start with Kennedy in Vietnam.  APPY: Well, Kennedy early on in his presidency suffered a couple of real blows to his reputation, most obviously when he supported the–orchestrated the invasion of Cuba in an effort to overthrow Castro at the Bay of Pigs. And it was a debacle, and it failed. Every one of the Cuban exiles that was trained to carry out the operation was either killed or captured. And Kennedy was forced to actually pay ransom to get the prisoners back. So what was to be a secret operation was quickly exposed, and it was felt that he felt it as deeply humiliating. And then later that same year he met for the first time with Khrushchev, and Khrushchev effectively kind of bullied him, and once again Kennedy felt that he had not demonstrated his presidential gravitas and was already beginning to look at foreign-policy interventions.  JAY: Can I just add one thing?  APPY: Sure. Yeah.  JAY: And internally taking tremendous flack from some sections of the military and certainly the whole conservative /pʌndərˈæpɨs/–can't say it, but you know what I mean–about being weak.  APPY: Yes.  JAY: I mean, why didn't he go in with a full-fledged invasion of Cuba?  APPY: Right. That, and he was already beginning to sort of move toward a neutralist solution to the communist insurgency in Laos, so he was beginning to think that maybe Vietnam would be the place to assert American credibility and power. But before that really began to develop, we had the Cuban missile crisis, and this for him was a great boost to his reputation and to his reputation for strength and steely resolve.  JAY: Again, really quickly–some of our viewers don't know that what that is.  APPY: Yeah. Well, the United States discovered, through U-2 reconnaissance photographs, that the Soviet Union–  JAY: That was the spy plane. APPY: –the spy plane–that the Soviet Union was beginning to install medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba–in response, actually, to the U.S.-backed invasion. They were put there as a kind of deterrent, really defensive, though of course all nuclear weapons are almost by definition dangerous.  JAY: And also there were nuclear–United States had weapons in Turkey which were awfully close to Russia.  APPY: We had–exactly. And indeed you speak to the exact resolution of the missile crisis. Kennedy made clear on television that it would not be tolerated. Interestingly enough, he couldn't tolerate it because he had made a speech a couple of months earlier saying that if offensive weapons were put on Cuba by the Soviet Union, he would not allow that. And once it happened, he asked some advisers, does this really change the balance of power in the world? And Kennedy said–McNamara said, no–this is Secretary of Defense McNamara. And Kennedy agreed. He said, I wish I had never said that. I wish I had never drawn that line.  JAY: Yeah, 'cause what could they do with them?  APPY: Yeah. So he had–but now he felt he had to do something. And what he did, thankfully, was to be a little patient and to say no to those of his advisers that immediately wanted to launch airstrikes and take a more aggressive response. They negotiated a settlement. So it really was diplomacy, not bluster or militarism, that solved the crisis. They were willing to say to the Soviets, okay, we will publicly promise never to invade Cuba, and privately we'll agree to remove our missiles from Turkey that are threatening very close to your borders. But the narrative that they wanted to go out to the public was a tougher narrative, that we stared them eyeball to eyeball and the other fellow blinked–that was attributed to–.  JAY: Yeah, 'cause America set up all these military ships, Navy ships as a blockade around Cuba.  APPY: Yes, the sort of the–yes, the quarantine. And Kennedy even went so far as to suggest that Adlai Stevenson, who was representing us at the United Nations, had wanted to sell us out, had wanted to, quote-unquote, Munich, because he had advised that we remove our missiles from Turkey to solve the crisis. And that's exactly what did solve the crisis. But Kennedy didn't want anybody to know that, so he actually threw Stephenson under the bus as a weakling. Anyway, privately he told people that–Kennedy bragged in private to friends that he had cut off Khrushchev's balls. So that really is deeply embedded in the American foreign policy of the period. And it becomes more important, as I write, as the other justifications for the war are no longer believed even by the policymakers. By 1965 or 1966, I believe, Johnson was not convinced that the war in Vietnam posed any threat to national security.  JAY: I want to get to Johnson, but I just want to stay on Kennedy for a minute.  APPY: Okay. Sure.  JAY: You know, there's a lot of debate about the Kennedy assassination. That's whether or not he was really going to pursue Vietnam or not. What's your take?  APPY: Well, I waffle on this issue. As I tell students, it's hard enough as a historian to figure out what actually happens, and nearly impossible to figure out what might've happened if x or y or z had been different. So really these are interesting speculations, but really impossible to nail down. The truth is there's documentary evidence that would support both positions. I mean, those who would like to believe that Kennedy would have pulled us out of Vietnam can cite documents where they're talking about withdrawing 1,000 troops at a time and slowly drawing down our presence. But Kennedy was pretty clear in a lot of that planning that those withdrawals had to be contingent on success. And there was some hope at the time that maybe success was coming, but it needs to be remembered that Kennedy, although he never put more than 16,000 troops into Vietnam, which seems quite a small number when you compare it to the 540,000 that finally ended up there under Johnson, those 16,000 troops had already put into place many brutal practices that would only get expanded. We were–by 1962 we were already using chemical defoliants on South Vietnam. We were using napalm. We were engaged in aerial bombing of South Vietnam, the very land we claimed to be defending. And we were already beginning the forced relocation of people from the rural countryside into what were then called strategic hamlets.  JAY: Concentration camps.  APPY: Effectively concentration camps. So all of that had begun. And even on the last day of his life, he gave a speech that morning–or maybe it was the night before; I think it was that morning–in which he reaffirmed the necessity of America's standing against communist aggression in South Vietnam. That was to a Texas audience, but he did tick off all the ways in which we had built up the military and were–.  JAY: I interviewed Gore Vidal a few times and got to know him fairly well, and he knew Jack Kennedy, President Kennedy, fairly well. I think he was a stepbrother to Jackie Kennedy. And he was quite convinced that Jack–and this goes back to you've got to have balls theme–he was quite convinced that Jack wanted to pursue the war in Vietnam, and to a large extent to prove he could be a wartime president, and maybe that he had the balls to go to war in Vietnam. But as you say, this becomes a much even bigger issue for Johnson. In fact, I'm going to read a quote from your book.  APPY: Sure.  JAY: By 1966, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton concluded that avoiding humiliation had moved from 70 percent of America's goal in Vietnam to 100 percent. Quote, the reasons why we went into Vietnam to the present depth are varied, but they are now largely academic. Why we have not withdrawn is by all odds one reason: to preserve our reputation. We have not hung on to save a friend or to deny the communists the added acres and heads. Christian writes, to preserve an image of strength, LBJ systematically escalated the war. Perhaps the most shocking moment in Robert Dallek's biography of Johnson comes when a group of reporters, pressed by LBJ to explain why he continued to wage war in spite of so many difficulties and so much opposition, the president, quote, unzipped his fly, drew out his substantial organ, and declared, quote, this is why. Other key policymakers may not have displayed their genitals, but all the men who sent America to Vietnam felt a deep connection between their own masculinity and national power. Expand a bit.  APPY: Well, it's true. I mean, the group of policymakers did not share Johnson's crudity, at least, or his poorer background from the hill countries of Texas–they came from, really, a different class background, many of them very privileged private schools, Ivy League colleges, elite military service, all-men's Metropolitan Club, secret societies. That whole world inbred a kind of code of masculinity that made personal toughness inseparable from the toughness of the state. And so they really did own that idea that it was their mission, kind of a Spartan mission, to uphold American strength, and that anybody who questioned that could not really be part of that team.  JAY: It goes back a little bit, I think, to what I was talking about as the loan sharks having to prove–someone has to be the test case, the model of getting their knees broken so everyone else will pay. I mean, it's in prison too. You know, you're not shown–if you show weakness, then someone will take advantage of you. This mentality that if America shows any weakness, then other powers are going to take advantage of that weakness, it seems to be almost at the core of U.S. policy, because it keeps ending in debacle.  APPY: Yes. And it needn't be that way. I mean, at this precise time that they're digging their heels in, grounds of toughness, a whole new countercultural and antiwar movement is developing that is challenging this idea of masculinity and rejecting sort of the John Wayne image that they had grown up with, and coming to the conclusion that maybe it's really braver and tougher to express a kind of moral courage that can say, no, this is wrong, and we really need to withdraw. And there were occasionally some people close to power who were starting to say that, and they would immediately get sort of shut out. I mean, they were saying, for example, that, you know, yes, it might be–as George Kennan, one of the great architects of the policy of containment, said when he was called before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to testify–William Fulbright was the chair at the time, and it was widely televised. So George Kennan was asked, what do you think would happen if we withdrew from Vietnam? This is 1966 again. He said, well, honestly, I think it would be a six-month sensation, but it would blow away, it wouldn't really have any fundamental effect on our national security, and it actually, in terms of our international reputation, might improve it. So one of the ironies of this period for me is that Johnson, who was always credited as being the master politician who could read the tea leaves and count every vote, completely miscalculated the direction of the American public, because had he withdrawn early in his presidency, before the massive escalation, I think he might well have been reelected. I think he could have made the case that this really was not in our interest and not so much a sign of weakness but of really pragmatic realism. And another irony: all these guys prided themselves on being hard-headed realists who could see the world with steely eyes and unaffected by sentimentality or namby-pamby moralism, and yet in the face of the evidence that they were receiving on a daily basis, that the war was going poorly, that they had privately very little optimism that they could achieve their objectives–certainly not in any time soon, maybe five, ten, 15 years down the road–those same pragmatists were willing to continue a war they knew they weren't winning, because they didn't want to be seen as weak, didn't want to be the first president to lose a war.  JAY: But then doesn't Johnson at the end–near the end of his presidency he does come to the conclusion to try to end it and negotiate in secret a ceasefire that might lead to a final settlement that gets torpedoed by Nixon.  APPY: Yeah, he does make some small steps it that direction, though the ceasefire over the bombing in the North, first, it's only above the 20th parallel, and then just days before he leaves office it's all the way down to the 17th parallel, but he never stops the bombing of the South. And one thing that Americans to this day don't quite realize is that our bombing of South Vietnam was far more intense and unconstrained than the bombing of the North. We dropped 4 million tons of bombs on the South, 1 million tons of bombs on the north. That's a lot. But South Vietnam became by far the most bombed country in world history. We were using B-52 bombers that could hold, each one of these planes, 30 tons of bombs. They, of course, had been designed to drop nuclear weapons, but were retooled to be used in Vietnam. But, again, on the South, within 25 miles of Saigon.  JAY: But doesn't Johnson–Johnson does negotiate a ceasefire, right, I mean, a full-scale ceasefire that never takes place 'cause Nixon talks the North Vietnamese into withdrawing.  APPY: Well, no, he continues the war. What I think maybe you're alluding to is he does initiate peace discussions, the sort of those Paris peace talks, which do slowly begin in the last year of his presidency, though the South Vietnamese president, Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, wanted nothing to do with them.  JAY: But this idea of having balls and showing American power, in spite of the war starting to unravel–but there's also economic interest here. I mean, there's a lot of people making a lot of money out of the war.  APPY: It's true. Certainly defense contractors are making bushels of money. But one of the interesting things is that over time, by the late '60s, high-level executives are beginning to believe that the war is actually hurting the economy, because it's–.  JAY: Or hurting them.  APPY: Yeah. Well, they see [crosstalk]  JAY: Their section of the economy.  APPY: Yeah. And defense industry aside, there's a moment in which the CEO of the Bank of America, no less, goes before Congress and makes the case that the war is bad for business, that corporate profits have actually peaked in '65 just as the massive escalation began and had declined steadily since then and that inflation was ticking up. And so he really is calling for an end to the war.  JAY: Yeah, it was an interesting part of your book. You talk about how–'cause unemployment gets so low,–  APPY: Right.  JAY: –inflation starts to go up, corporate profits start to go down.  APPY: Right.  JAY: So you have a real division, I guess, within the American elites about those who are still making money out of the war and those who aren't making as much money as they want to be.  APPY: Right, or people who are ideologically committed to the war, even if it doesn't necessarily support business. So it is an interesting period. But it does suggest how broad-based opposition to the war was by 1970 and '71.  JAY: And for some of our younger viewers or people that forget, let's just remind people this isn't just when someone wants to continue a war because they want to pull their organ out of their pants, they want to prove how tough they are, prove how tough America is, was. Just remind us again how many people suffered and were killed in the war.  APPY: Well, now the best estimate for the number of Vietnamese–the Vietnamese say that 3.8 million were killed during the American phase of the war. And former secretary of defense McNamara, before he died, said he has every reason to believe that they were correct. American historians tend to say that it was at least 2 million. Sort of that's the conservative estimate. So we don't actually know the proper figure. But when you include the fact that we were also bombing Laos very heavily and Cambodia, you can add roughly another at least a million and a half to that total. So this is a real bloodbath. And for the United States, certainly more troops were lost than at any time after World War II–more than 58,000. And, of course, hundreds of thousands wounded, and many more who suffered psychological casualties from that experience. One further cost of the war that is not always noted is that after the war ended in 1975, many Vietnamese and Cambodians and Laotians have died from unexploded ordnance. Roughly 2 percent of every American bomb that was dropped, or even artillery shell, doesn't explode. So ten, 20, even 30 years later, a farmer can be plowing his field and hit one of those things and it can go off. Or a child can pick up–they had these really small baseball-size bombs that were called cluster bombs that–they would come inside a large conventional bomb, and then, when they exploded, they would send out these smaller bombs, and inside each one of these small bombs were hundreds of little steel pellets or dart-like–they were called flechettes that would go in every possible direction, designed as the classic antipersonnel weapon that would kill people but not structures and that would burrow into your body and not necessarily kill you but require other people to take care of you or lead to a slow and horrible death. And as I say, a kid could pick up one of these little baseball bombs and it could go off again. So the estimate now is that some 40,000, anyway, Vietnamese have died from that cause since the war, which is extraordinary, and many more wounded.  JAY: And when you look at American media and this narrative of American exceptionalism, the real victim of the Vietnam War was America.  APPY: Right.  JAY: And we're going to get into the America-as-victim narrative in the next segment of our interview with the Christian Appy on Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network. Select one or choose any amount to donate whatever you like any amount $5 $15 $25 $50 $100 $500 $1,000 Custom Amount $ Make this donation each month (optional) Donate with Credit Card var gform;gform||(document.addEventListener("gform_main_scripts_loaded",function(){gform.scriptsLoaded=!0}),window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",function(){gform.domLoaded=!0}),gform={domLoaded:!1,scriptsLoaded:!1,initializeOnLoaded:function(o){gform.domLoaded&&gform.scriptsLoaded?o():!gform.domLoaded&&gform.scriptsLoaded?window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",o):document.addEventListener("gform_main_scripts_loaded",o)},hooks:{action:{},filter:{}},addAction:function(o,n,r,t){gform.addHook("action",o,n,r,t)},addFilter:function(o,n,r,t){gform.addHook("filter",o,n,r,t)},doAction:function(o){gform.doHook("action",o,arguments)},applyFilters:function(o){return gform.doHook("filter",o,arguments)},removeAction:function(o,n){gform.removeHook("action",o,n)},removeFilter:function(o,n,r){gform.removeHook("filter",o,n,r)},addHook:function(o,n,r,t,i){null==gform.hooks[o][n]&&(gform.hooks[o][n]=[]);var e=gform.hooks[o][n];null==i&&(i=n+"_"+e.length),gform.hooks[o][n].push({tag:i,callable:r,priority:t=null==t?10:t})},doHook:function(n,o,r){var t;if(r=Array.prototype.slice.call(r,1),null!=gform.hooks[n][o]&&((o=gform.hooks[n][o]).sort(function(o,n){return o.priority-n.priority}),o.forEach(function(o){"function"!=typeof(t=o.callable)&&(t=window[t]),"action"==n?t.apply(null,r):r[0]=t.apply(null,r)})),"filter"==n)return r[0]},removeHook:function(o,n,t,i){var r;null!=gform.hooks[o][n]&&(r=(r=gform.hooks[o][n]).filter(function(o,n,r){return!!(null!=i&&i!=o.tag||null!=t&&t!=o.priority)}),gform.hooks[o][n]=r)}}); Never miss another story Subscribe to theAnalysis.news - Newsletter Email(Required) Name(Required) First Last Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); “Christian Gerard Appy is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is widely known as a leading expert on the Vietnam War experience. The most recent of his three books on the subject is American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity.” theAnalysis.news theme music written by Slim Williams for Paul Jay's documentary film “Never-Endum-Referendum“.   Never-Endum-Referendum Artist Website Paul Jay's Documentaries

Sam and Emma host Donald Yacovone, Associate at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, to discuss his recent book Teaching White Supremacy: America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity. First Emma dives into Lula taking a lead in the Brazilian Presidential election heading into the Runoffs, SCOTUS starting up a new term, and details emerging about the “Perla” character who led DeSantis' human trafficking stunt apparently working as a Counter Intelligence agent for the US army, before diving deeper into the massive movement that has brought Lula to this moment in Brazilian history. Donald Yacovone then joins as he dives right into the history of American erasure of African (and African-American) History all the way up to the recent Christian Right's struggle against “Critical Race Theory.” He and Emma begin by exploring the election of Obama as a clear marker of how far we have come in race relations in the US, and how little has changed within the forces of White Supremacy, before jumping back to explore how an entire American identity came to be founded on a fictitious creation (race). Yacovone then explores how, despite slavery largely being an institution of the Southern US, the ideology of White Supremacy was born in the North, with abolitionist activists grounding their personal beliefs in the fact that Black people are of a lower level of human, while some of the most innovative New York City capitalists capitalized on the belief that Black folks were designed by nature and god to do white man's work. They then dive into how the post-reconstruction era cemented the role of White Supremacist ideology in United States' education, as a reactionary impulse to seeing Black folks integrate into society and become successful led to the White Elite in the US pushing textbooks that espoused the “Lost Cause” ideology (yes, coined in the North) and denounced integration, before they wrap up the interview by exploring how this element of American education continues to this day – with makeshift “slave auctions” still occurring as part of “lesson plans,” – and the importance of addressing this corruption in one of our most integral institution on a national level. And in the Fun Half: Emma takes a call with Jesse from the Hudson Valley on the Right's exploitation of certain insecurities, explores DeSantis' takes on the non-existent looking occurring in Florida as he attempts to turn ire away from natural disasters and towards Black and poor people, and dives deeper into the story of DeSantis' “Perla.” A caller discusses meeting the GOP at their Bad Faith, Candace Owens says all gay people were abused, just like furries, and the crew explores Marjorie Taylor Greene's role in pushing the fake story on the murder of a conservative teen, plus, your calls and IMs! Check out Donald's book here: https://www.harvard.com/book/teaching_white_supremacy/ Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: http://majority.fm/app Check out today's sponsors: Ritual: We deserve to know what we're putting in our bodies and why. Ritual's clean, vegan-friendly multivitamin is formulated with high-quality nutrients in bioavailable forms your body can actually use. Get key nutrients without the B.S. Ritual is offering my listeners ten percent off during your first three months. Visit https://ritual.com/majority to start your Ritual today. Tushy: Hello Tushy cleans your butt with a precise stream of fresh water for just $79. 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In this episode, the team discusses the Vietnam War with professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of "American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity", Christian Appy (@ChristianGAppy). Follow Christian on Twitter at @ChristianGAppy. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Christian Appy, professor of history and leading expert on the Vietnam War’s impact on American politics, culture, and foreign policy. The author of three books about the war, most recently American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity.

RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube|Patreon|Square Cash (Share code: Send $5, get $5!) David Waldman doesn’t just “talk” today, he chats! And, there’s a lot to chat about: You could leaf through your dog-eared copy of Obama's America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity this weekend, but why not give The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump  a shot? That’s KITM’s New Friday regular Ian Reifowitz's latest tome. Ian’s here to explain how Jared Kushner rode Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s pocket to diplomatic victory yesterday, and why Benjamin Netanyahu just dropped his annexation dream for a reelection photo-op… and the rebirth of enduring Middle East peace. So, Donald Trump has a success story about 4 years in, and a few months away from reelection. But, he isn’t tired of winning yet. Donald is delighted to take part in the destruction of democracy and the post office. Any and all consequences are “unintended” by Trump, so any path to destruction is ok with him as long as there’s fool coverage.  For Donald Trump, any feces is fine feces to throw. A Kamala Harris birther conspiracy would be pretty much expected from his campaign, but particularly chafed Armando’s chaps, spurring him to call in today. Armando sees citizenship questions not so much as an attack on Harris, but a strategy to eventually take the rights from millions. The GAO determined that Chad Wolf was not lawfully named the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, and that Ken Cucinelli wasn't lawfully appointed even to his proper position at DHS, thus cementing their careers for the duration of the Trump administration. The White House noticed that Georgia is in danger of being wiped out by COVID-19, but are confident that Gov. Brian Kemp is Trump enough to take it all the way.

When Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States, pundits and leading news outlets heralded the arrival of a “post-racial America.”  Some Americans, however, didn’t see it that way.  Ian Reifowitz discusses the exploitation of race in the Obama years by one of America’s prominent conservative opinion makers, Rush Limbaugh, in his latest book, The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump. Reifowitz is professor of Historical Studies at Empire State College of the State University of New York.  He is a Contributing Editor at Daily Kos and his articles have appeared in numerous outlets, including Daily News, Newsday, and the New Republic. In addition to his latest book, Reifowitz has also authored Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity and Imagining an Austrian Nation: Joseph Samuel Bloch and the Search for a Multiethnic Austrian Identity, 1846–1919. 

On Reality Asserts Itself, Mr. Appy, author of "American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity", discusses how before direct American military involvement in Vietnam, the US financed almost 80 percent of the cost, so, in effect, France was serving almost as an American mercenary

On Reality Asserts Itself, Mr. Appy, author of "American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity", discusses how before direct American military involvement in Vietnam, the US financed almost 80 percent of the cost, so, in effect, France was serving almost as an American mercenary

Last week, March 16, marked a tragic milestone – the 50th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre, the mass murder of unarmed people in two small villages in Vietnam. It has been called one of the most shocking events of the entire war. My Lai was one of the two villages. The exact number of deaths has never been definitively established, with estimates ranging from 170 to over 500. Many of the people killed were women and children who were also mutilated and raped by American soldiers. The massacre escalated global outrage and opposition to the war and back home in the United States. In the end, only one of the 26 soldiers criminally charged for their part in the massacre was convicted. That one lone soldier spent three and a half years under house arrest. He never went to jail. This grim anniversary is cause for reflection not just on that incident, but the entirety of the war and its aftermath. This next interview is excerpted from The Global Research News Hour, a podcast and radio program by the Centre for Research on Globalization and CKUW Radio in Winnipeg. You'll hear show host Michael Welch talking to Christian Appy, a leading American historian and expert on the Vietnam War. Appy is professor of history at University of Massachusetts and the author of American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (2015). This interview was excerpted from a longer program focusing on various aspects of the United States and the Vietnam War. You can listen to the whole show and past podcasts here.   Image: Wikimedia: My Lai Memorial Site Like this podcast? rabble is reader/listener supported journalism.

Lawrence O’Donnell, author of Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics and host of MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell; Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam; and Christian Appy, professor of history at UMass Amherst and author of American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity discuss the critical events of 1968 in Vietnam and in American politics with Ellen Fitzpatrick, professor of history at the University of New Hampshire.

Sep. 5, 2015. Christian G. Appy discusses "American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity" as part of a special presentation on the human side of war at the 2015 Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Speaker Biography: Christian G. Appy is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of three books on the Vietnam War, including “Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam” and “Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides,” which won the Massachusetts Book Award for nonfiction. Appy has also written the book “Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945-1966.” His most recent work is “American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity." For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7019

We are back at the Bryant Corner Cafe with a tough task from Nancy Pearl. What has been the best book of 2015. Some of us chose books published this year- which is what Nancy was aiming for, in fiction and non-fiction. Others just mentioned their best read so far. In addition, we offer an excerpt from Steve's interview with Patrick Kennedy about his book "A Common Struggle." We will post the entire interview in a That Stack of Books extra soon.   Here is the list of The Best Book(s) We Have Read (So Far This Year) Nancy was aiming towards best books of the year so far in fiction. Non-FictionChristian Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity.  (Nancy’s Pick) Other books we liked this year. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin ( Katy’s Pick)Nathaniel Philbrick, The Last Stand: Custer Sitting Bull and The Battle of the Little Big Horn (Tom Bird’s Pick)William Maxwell, FB Eye’s: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Robin’s Pick)Denise Kieman, The Girl’s of Atomic City (Ros’s Pick)Claude Steele, Whistling Vivialdi ( Steve’s Pick)Randy Spelling, Unlimited You: Step Out of Your Past and Into Your Purpose (Jenny’s Pick)Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat ( Keith’s Pick)Patrick Kennedy, A Common Struggle ( Steve’s choice for getting on more lists soon.) Fiction Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer ( Nancy’s Pick) Other books we liked reading this year. Jonas Jonasson, The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window And Disappeared (Becky’ s Pick)Black Hills, Dan SimmonsLou Berney, The Long and Faraway Gone ( Katy’s Pick)Lucia Berlin, A Manual For Cleaning Women: Selected Stories Betsey’s Pick) 

Nancy Pearl, Steve Scher and Katy Sewall nibble at the Bryant Corner Cafe while talking about two books that offer different approaches to the same overarching theme- how empire builders move across the landscape into history. The first is an historical account of the American Vietnam War.  Christian Appy, “American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity” connects our current foreign policy actions to the attitudes that were revealed during our long war against Vietnam. "The Strangler Vine" is a classically styled mystery set in the British Raj. Though lighter and more of a swashbuckler, the actions of the British colonialists are on full display. We also touched on a couple of American crime writers, Ross Macdonald and Ross Thomas.  Both worth a look and worth a whole show. That is coming soon.We won't be at the Bryant Corner Cafe for a few weeks. We will be back with the live taping April 21st, 3:15. Love to see you there with books to share while we explore what books to add to our growing stack.