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).