Vietnam Series Reading List

General histories of modern Vietnam:

• Christopher Goscha, Vietnam: A New History (Basic Books, 2017). 

• Duong Van Mai Elliott, Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family (Oxford, 2019). 

On North Vietnam:

• Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

• Pierre Asselin, Vietnam's American War: A History (Cambridge, 2017).

On South Vietnamese Communism:

• David Elliott, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-1975 (M.E. Sharp, 2003). 

• David Hunt, Vietnam’s Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War  (Massachusetts, 2008).

On South Vietnam:

• Edward Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Harvard, 2013).

• Jessica Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and 1950s Southern Vietnam (Cornell, 2013).

On the French War:

• Shawn McHale, The First Vietnam War: Violence, Sovereignty, and the Fracture of the South, 1945-1956 (Cambridge, 2021).

• Christian Lentz, Contested Territory: Ðien Biên Phu and the Making of Northwest Vietnam (Yale, 2019) .

On the French colonial era:

• Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Harvard, 1992).

• Peter Zinoman, Vietnamese Colonial Republican The Political Vision of Vu Trong Phung (University of California, 2013).

• Martina Nguyen, On Our Own Strength: The Self-Reliant Literary Group and Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Late Colonial Vietnam (University of Hawaii, 2020).