Christian G. Appy

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Professor Appy received his BA at Amherst College and his PhD at Harvard University (both in American Studies). He is best known for his books on the Vietnam War: a social history of American combat soldiers; a wide-ranging oral history from multiple perspectives (including accounts of Vietnamese and Americans combatants, policymakers, antiwar activists, journalists, etc.); and a history of the war’s impact on American national identity, culture, and foreign policy from the 1950s through the Obama administration. He is currently working on a book about Daniel Ellsberg based largely on his papers, recently acquired by Special Collections & University Archives at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library. The working title is “Ellsberg’s Mutiny: War and Resistance in the Age of Vietnam, The Pentagon Papers, and Nuclear Terror.”  

Books

• American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (Viking, 2015)
• Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (Viking, 2003).
• Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945-1966 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000). Editor
• Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

Selected Articles and Chapters

• “‘A Pervasive and Insistent Disquiet:’ Amherst College in the 1960s,” in Martha Saxton, ed., Amherst in the World (Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 2020)
• “Empire Lite,” Catalyst, Volume 3, No. 3, Fall 1919
• “The Tainted Memory of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement,” Temas: Cultura, Ideologia Sociedad, Fall, 2018
• “What Was the Vietnam War About?” New York Times, March 26, 2018
• “Exceptional Victims,” Boston Review, January 26, 2018
• “The Contested Origins of the Atomic Age and the Cold War,” in Christopher Vials, ed., American Literature in Transition: 1940-1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 
• “Vietnam Redux: The Pitfalls of American Exceptionalism,” Oklahoma Humanities Magazine, Fall/Winter 2017
• “The Vietnam War, a documentary,” Seven-part, thirty-five page review of the film by Ken Burns/Lynn Novick, Process, blog site of the Organization of American Historians, 2017.
• “Our ‘Merciful’ Ending to the ‘Good War’: America’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 Years Later,” TomDispatch, August 4, 2015. 
• “From the Fall of Saigon to Our Fallen Empire,” TomDispatch, April 26, 2015
• “‘Honor’ the Vietnam Veteran, Forget the War,” TomDispatch, February 8, 2015 
• “None of Us Belonged There,” Massachusetts Review, Vol. 52, Nos. 03 & 04, 2011 
• “Class Wars: The American Military in Vietnam and Iraq,” in Marilyn Young and Lloyd Gardner, eds., Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam (The New Press, 2007)
• “The Ghosts of War,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 9, 2004
• "Vietnam War Mythology and the Rise of Public Cynicism," in Alexander Bloom, ed., Long Time Gone:  Sixties America Then and Now (Oxford University Press, 2001).
• "'We'll Follow the Old Man':  The Strains of Sentimental Militarism in Popular Films of the Fifties," in Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert, eds., Rethinking Cold War Culture (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001).
• "Eisenhower's Guatemalan Doodle or:  How to Draw, Deny, and Take Credit For a Third World Coup" in Christian G. Appy, ed. Cold War Constructions (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).