American Encounters Research Articles

The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion

The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion

Timothy Sweet, Extinction and the Human: Four American Encounters

Timothy Sweet, <i>Extinction and the Human: Four American Encounters</i>

Rachel Winchcombe. Encountering Early America.

At Elizabeth I’s death in 1603, an Atlantic English empire was still very much in doubt after a string of failed ventures in North America. Nevertheless, Rachel Winchcombe argues in Encountering Early America, sixteenth-century attempts at expansion were not mere precursors to permanent colonies, as many scholars suggest, but the foundation upon which they were built. Focusing on assumptions in promotional literature about life’s quotidian aspects (climate, dress, and food) and how they explicated cultural differences and a region’s commercial prospects—what she calls the “embodied nature of early colonization” (18)—Winchcombe amply demonstrates that English attitudes toward the New World were not static. Instead, from initial American encounters through translations of Spanish, French, and Portuguese chronicles and sporadic early voyages to more sustained Elizabethan efforts in the Arctic, Newfoundland, and Virginia, English ideas about the New World shifted and were reshaped, sometimes radically, to assess what had gone wrong and modify the approach in subsequent attempts. Adjustments in the imperial narrative were only partly consolatory; other factors like deteriorating Anglo-Spanish relations, metropolitan anxieties surrounding luxury, idleness, and the progress of reformed religion, and economic volatility in staple industries played a more significant role in its evolution. This process was “messy and unsuccessful, but also adaptive, dynamic, and crucial to later success” (6).

The Landscape of Prehistory: Mesa Verde and the Framing of the Past in American Archaeology

This paper is part of a larger project investigating how American archaeological work in the Southwest gradually elides ongoing acts of displacing native and Mexican peoples in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War. Some of the earliest American encounters with ruins and abandoned settlements belonging to Ancestral Puebloan civilizations occurred in the context of demarcating the new boundary between Mexico and the United States. For example, John Russell Bartlett’s Personal Narrative of the U.S.-Mexican Boundary Survey (1854) is noteworthy for the way such ruins are a major focus within it. However, Bartlett actively associates these ancient ruins with processes of forced removal that he can see happening right in front of him, which result in another, more recent kind of ruin. Over time, though, the recognition of a complex and often violent history of relocation that both shapes and continues into the present drops out of later archaeological work in the region. From the perspective of anachronism, this general change in how Southwest archaeology relates past and present involves superimposing a wished-for present, specifically one devoid of native inhabitants, onto the past ruin to the extent that that ruin is understood to be devoid of any relevance for contemporary indigenous peoples living in the region. Put another way, numerous critics of nineteenth-century European and American archaeological practice have pointed out how it “produces archaeological subjects by splitting contemporary non-European peoples off from their precolonial, and even their colonial past. To revive indigenous history and culture as archaeology is to revive them as dead” (Mary Louis Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 1992). This paper extends this critique further by exploring how such an operation is essentially a special form of anachronism and how it arises out of archaeological practices that, at least initially, are not.In particular, this paper tracks how this change in archaeological practice depends on a notion of prehistoric time which is developed by privileging certain kinds of archaeological evidence (especially pottery and architectural remains) and certain ways of presenting and interpreting that evidence, looking at the history of excavations at Mesa Verde at the turn of the century. Key texts include Gustaf Nordenskiöld’s Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde (1893), and Jesse Walter Fewkes’s Antiquities of the Mesa Verde National Park (1909 &amp; 1911). In reinforcing the perception of Mesa Verde as a historically-disconnected, prehistoric site, Fewkes’s report differs from its forerunner in several aspects, specifically its consolidation of distinct structures (namely, how many there are and which are noteworthy), its shift from an analytical to a descriptive mode of writing, and finally its cultivation of a photographic aesthetic that bolsters the sense of a timeless ruin.

Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication Among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas

In most narratives of contact between Native Americans and European newcomers, communication begins with gestures, pantomime, and rudimentary sign language before increased familiarity enabled speech. Céline Carayon's Eloquence Embodied shows how this familiar sequence of events oversimplifies—and often ignores—the rich variety of nonverbal communication that occurred in the early modern Americas, including signs, ceremonies, gestures, and performances. Instead, this study of the first two centuries of French colonization in the Americas from 1500 to 1700 argues that, rather than evolving from “basic” nonverbal to more “sophisticated” verbal communication, “colonial America was the site of rich intersections between effective traditions of embodied expressiveness” (6–7). Furthermore, far from fumbling from one misunderstanding to the next, French colonizers and the Native Americans they met generally managed to understand each other quite well.Carayon's chronological framing means that French encounters with Indigenous people in Florida, Brazil, Guiana, and the Caribbean receive significant attention alongside the more frequently studied St. Lawrence Valley and Illinois Country. As a result, Carayon's account of Indigenous experiences with French colonizers includes Beothuc, Guale, Yao, and Tupi-Guarani speakers as well as Iroquoians and Algonquians, a choice that greatly strengthens the book.Each chapter in Eloquence explores a different theme while also proceeding in chronological order. The first surveys the use of sign language in the Native America, using a vast array of imperfect French sources to detail “complex” nonverbal communications systems across the hemisphere, including “what might have been a full-fledged sign language system in the circum-Caribbean region” (104). The next chapter examines traditions of nonverbal communication in early modern France against the backdrop of elites’ interest in “civility” to achieve refinement and unity of a linguistically and culturally diverse kingdom and is followed with an exploration of how Indigenous people chose to greet and communicate with French newcomers, mediated through the Europeans’ depictions of these encounters. Chapter four shifts attention from expressions of friendship to cross-cultural expressions (and interpretations) of trustworthiness and deception in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and five probes French and Indigenous attitudes towards language learning and multilingualism, with knowledge of unspoken cultural values and taboos as valuable as spoken tongues. Chapter six argues for the ongoing importance of nonverbal communication as an accompaniment to diplomatic oratory in the late seventeenth century. Carayon's conclusion briefly compares seventeenth-century English nonverbal exchanges with Native Americans before suggesting avenues where other scholars might fruitfully use “nonverbal features of Early American encounters to shed light” on various aspects of colonization (433). While making clear that she views the French as more adept than their European rivals—especially the English—in nonverbal communications with Indigenous people, she rejects the idea that such skill “produced a uniquely benevolent style of colonialism” (433).Carayon draws on a broad tranche of evidence, and her choice to include French colonization efforts in Florida, the Caribbean, and South America in her analysis gives added weight to the book's contributions. Overall, Carayon's argument—that French colonizers and Native Americans drew upon deep traditions of nonverbal communications to bridge their linguistic divide with less trouble than previously thought—is persuasive. Eloquence Embodied makes clear that scholars should jettison the idea that spoken language obviated the importance of ritual, sensory, and other embodied communication in later colonial counters. For all these reasons it will be a standard work in the field for some time.

What the Field Stands to Lose

The pandemic of 2020 brings the field of American foreign relations, or the United States and the World, or the global history of international relations, to an important crossroads. The pandemic will have a direct impact on the ongoing trend in the field toward transnational (read: multilingual, multi-archival, globe-trotting) research. Closed borders and heightened tensions will limit access to archives, conference interactions, and routine scholarly exchanges. At the same time, caregiving responsibilities and challenging economic conditions for both universities and individual households will determine whose research is most detrimentally affected by COVID-19 shutdowns, and in many cases, limit participation by some of the very same groups whose voices SHAFR has been seeking to amplify in its push for diversity. Access to archives limited by closed borders, travel warnings, and rising international tensions has the potential to challenge the “transnational turn” in the history of international relations and American encounters with...

American Catholics: A History by Leslie Woodcock Tentler

Reviewed by: American Catholics: A History by Leslie Woodcock Tentler Michael Pasquier American Catholics: A History. By Leslie Woodcock Tentler. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. 416 pp. $30.00. There are many ways to tell the story of American Catholicism. And yet there are only a handful of scholars who, in recent times, have tried to craft grand narratives of American Catholic history. They include Jay Dolan, Patrick Carey, James Fisher, Chester Gillis, and James O'Toole. That's it! Enter Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Professor Emerita of History at the Catholic University of America and one of the most accomplished historians of American Catholicism in a generation. American Catholics: A History displays Tentler's knowledge and insight into the Catholic Church's position in American history from the colonial period to the present. She's guided by the obvious, but nonetheless notable fact that "[t]he United States would have been a different kind of country without its Catholic minority" (xii). What results is a book that captures the diversity of human experiences in the Catholic Church and illuminates how that diversity mapped onto American public life. Tentler divides American Catholics into five parts. She begins Part One, "On the Fringes of Empire," with a profile of Eusebio Kino, SJ, and his role as "an agent of empire" in New Spain (5). Missionary priests take center stage in Tentler's account of Spanish colonialism in North America. The same applies to her treatment of New France, usually with an eye toward Native American encounters with Catholicism. In the British colonies, Tentler tracks the impact of anti-Catholicism on the lives of English settlers in Maryland, followed by a description of Catholic involvement in the making of the United States as exemplified through the person of John Carroll. Part Two, "Growing with the Nation, 1815–1870," opens with Samuel Mazzuchelli, an Italian [End Page 97] Dominican missionary who demonstrates "that Catholic life varies in its rhythm, mood, and texture according to the environment in which a church takes root" (72). Chapters on "The Frontier Church," "An Urban Stronghold," and "Slavery and the Civil War" reinforce Tentler's attention to the peculiarities of place and the uneven development of the Catholic Church in different parts of the United States. Part Three, "A Turbulent Passage, 1871–1919," dives headlong into the "institutional growing pains" that European immigration brought to the Catholic Church in the United States (147). Irish, German, Italian, and Polish immigrants enlivened parishes and packed schools, though not without conflict, controversy, and compromise. Tentler turns to Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, MSC, as someone who modeled the tension between ethnic and national identities among Catholics, as well as the "woman problem" that simmered beneath the surface of a religious institution so defined by clericalism (146). Part Four, "Exuberant Maturity, 1920–1962," tracks the rise of a "confident church" in the twentieth century, one that permitted a Catholic convert like John Cort to leave Harvard and follow the life of a Catholic Worker (217). Through the events of the Great Depression and World War II, Tentler notices the Catholic Church shifting "from the margins to the center" of American society, epitomized in the election of a Catholic president (267). Part Five, "A World Unbound, 1963–2015," captures the "institutional crisis" that came with the Second Vatican Council and the cultural transformations of the 1960s (301). Tentler looks to Patricia Crowley's life as a "lay pioneer" in the sexual politics of the Catholic Church for insight into the "post-subcultural world" that Catholics made for themselves in the second half of the twentieth century (289, 343). "Two milestones"—the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 and Roe v. Wade in 1973—inform Tentler's characterization of the Catholic Church's "uncertain future" following the long tenure of Pope John Paul II and the ongoing consequences of the clerical sex abuse crisis (324, 327). Tentler ends American Catholics by reflecting on "the dwindling inheritance of a time when the church possessed far greater unity and spiritual élan than it does in the present" (351). Priest shortages, church closures, moral failures, demographic shifts—there is no shortage of worry at this moment in American...

Nuclear Reactions: Documenting American Encounters with Nuclear Energy. Edited by James W. Feldman. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. xix + 324 pp. Illustrations, maps, and index. Cloth $90.00, paper $20.00.

<i>Nuclear Reactions: Documenting American Encounters with Nuclear Energy</i>. Edited by James W. Feldman. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. xix + 324 pp. Illustrations, maps, and index. Cloth $90.00, paper $20.00.

Mobilizing Craft

Twenty-five years ago, American Studies scholar Amy Kaplan reminded us that “The study of American culture has traditionally been cut off from the study of foreign relations” (1993: 11). Since then, the fields of American Studies and the history of American art respectively have raised questions about the United States in the world. However, in studying American art, we have not fully explored how American encounters with what the nation considers foreign have mobilized craft through frameworks of diplomacy. In this paper, a black, lacquered wooden case with nacre, or mother or pearl, painted flowers and birds made by Thanh-Le alerts us to some of ways American diplomacy galvanized interest in Vietnamese craft among American designers, leaders in commerce and business, and the middle class during the late 1950s, the years immediately prior to what Americans call the Vietnam War.

A Review: Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and Nuclear Reactions: Documenting American Encounters with Nuclear Energy

An incomplete nuclear reactor project shut down after more than nine years of work and nine billion dollars invested. A war of words between Korean President Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump and the threat of nuclear war. These two seemingly disconnected events are linked by a common denominator—the ongoing fascination with the power of the atom. Two recently published books can help those not familiar with the history of commercial or military nuclear power in the USA make better sense of these current events as they explore the highs and lows of the nuclear industry. Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation by Melvin R. Adams captures personal insights into the waning years at Hanford, when plutonium production for the US weapons stockpile was giving way to environmental clean-up. James W. Feldman’s Nuclear Reactions: Documenting American Encounters with Nuclear Energy provides excerpts of 70 years of published documents to describe the ongoing hope in what nuclear energy might provide for society and intense fear of a nuclear melt down or all-out nuclear war. Together, the two books provide an interesting picture of nuclear industry in the USA.

About the Authors

About the Authors

“Ravishing Odors of Paradise”: Jesuits, Olfaction, and Seventeenth-Century North America

In seventeenth-century North America, efforts at cultural accommodation through similarities in olfactory inclusive spiritual sensoriums helped to create cross-cultural concordance between Jesuit Fathers and Native Americans in New France, the St. Lawrence Valley, and the Pays d'en Haut. Jesuits engaged Native Americans towards Catholic conversion by using scentful tactics and sensory rhetoric. Jesuits increased their own respect for the olfactory during their North American encounters due to a siege mentality born of the Counter-Reformation and from a forcefully influential Native American respect for multisensory forms of environmental and spiritual literacy which included a heightened reverence for odors.

“Shewing the difference betweene their conjuration, and our invocation on the name of God for rayne”: Weather, Prayer, and Magic in Early American Encounters

Agrowing body of scientific evidence details falling temperatures and unusually variable precipitation during the first European exploration and settlement of North America. Historians have just begun to seriously examine how adverse climate and weather affected early encounters with Native Americans. This article reconsiders this topic through a peculiar pattern of events found in nearly two dozen narratives from roughly the first century (1530s–1630s) of contacts, which was also one of the most difficult periods of the Little Ice Age: that is, the struggle of Christians and their native hosts for supernatural influence over the weather. From Spanish Florida and New Mexico, to English Virginia and New England, to French Canada, presumptive conquistadors, colonists, and missionaries described weather divination, weather magic, and weather prayer in the face of untimely rain or drought. Although varied in their details, many of the narratives include Indians supposedly entreating Europeans to pray for better weather, which delivered a miraculous intervention. Taken in isolation, any one or two of these episodes could be dismissed as a coincidence, a literary flourish, or a distorted rendering based on a European sense of moral and religious superiority. Considered all together, in the context of climatological and archaeological evidence, as well as European and Native American beliefs about weather and the supernatural, these encounters take on a much greater significance. The range and consistency of sources largely rule out the idea that the episodes were mere invention, and physical evidence provides specific support for their descriptions of adverse weather and food

Translating Events, Glossing Experience: European Texts and American Encounters

References to the romancero and other literary texts stemming from the medieval tradition in early Spanish American historical documents have been interpreted in two principal ways: one linguistic, the other socio-juridical. On the one hand, they are seen as evidence that the romancero was firmly rooted in popular language and culture, specifically in the colloquial usage of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, that allusions to ballads and other belletristic references in these works, which belong primarily to the textual universe of the relaciones de meritos y servicios (often composed as self-serving justifications for questionable actions), function as a means of self-engrandizement. In this way authors conformed to discursive requirements that compelled them to portray themselves as valiant, when not heroic, subjects of the Crown. The current article proposes a third alternative; namely, that the literary references in sixteenth-century chronicles operate at another deeper epistemological level, and constitute hermeneutical strategies rooted in medieval reading and writing practices. Specifically, that they operate as glosses which process and organize knowledge in a way that allows for the assimilation of new knowledge--especially knowledge of the unknown--into the broader cultural context of the author and the reader. In them, we are able to discover at the level of language and rhetoric one of the basic gestures of colonialism: the urge to appropriate, inhabit the territory of, and dominate the Other through the Other’s transformation into familiar images of the self.

Mongolia and the United States: a diplomatic history

Former U.S. ambassador Jonathan Addleton provides a pioneering firsthand look at the remarkable growth of civil society and diplomatic ties between two countries separated by vast distances yet sharing a growing list of strategic interests and values. While maintaining positive ties with Russia and China, its powerful and still-dominant trading partners, Mongolia has sought third neighbors to help provide balance, including Canada, Japan, Korea, European nations, and the United States. For its part, the United States has supported Mongolia as an emerging democracy while fostering development and commercial relations. People-to-people ties have significantly expanded in recent years, as has a security partnership that supports Mongolia's emergence as a provider of military peacekeepers under the U.N. flag in Sierra Leone, Chad, Kosovo, Darfur, South Sudan, and elsewhere. While focusing on diplomatic relations over the last quarter century, Addleton also briefly describes American encounters with Mongolia over the past 150 years. More recently, Mongolia has emerged as a magnet for foreign investment, making it one of the world's fastest growing economies.

Historical Knowledge of Sharks: Ancient Science, Earliest American Encounters and American Science, Fisheries, and Utilization

In western civilization, the knowledge of the elasmobranch or selachian fishes (sharks and rays) begins with Aristotle (384n322 B.C.). Two of his extant works, the lHistoria Animaliumr and the lGeneration of Animals,r both written about 330 B.C., demonstrate knowledge of elasmobranch fishes acquired by observation. Roman writers of works on natural history, such as Aelian and Pliny, who followed Aristotle, were compilers of available information. Their...

Italian American and African American Encounters in the City and in the Suburb

Italian American and African American relations have generally been characterized as hostile. The two groups are most often seen as encountering each other in urban centers of the Northeast. This article explores the sources of Italian American hostility against African Americans in the pre- and postwar era cities to better understand the underpinnings of racial conflict. At the same time, it highlights the complex relationship between the two groups that could include positive interaction as well as conflict and take place within the suburbs as well as within the cities. The article presents a preliminary case study of suburban Montclair, New Jersey, where from the early 1900s well into the postwar era, African Americans and Italian Americans shared neighborhoods, schools, and, to differing degrees, an outsider status that contributed to generally harmonious relations. The findings suggest that local studies that reveal specific sources of tension or peaceful coexistence can lead to a fuller understanding of relations between these two groups and interethnic/interracial relations in general.

African American Encounters with the Warfare-Welfare State

African American Encounters with the Warfare-Welfare State

The Deeper Meaning of Tupperware: Consumer Culture and the American Home

The Deeper Meaning of Tupperware:Consumer Culture and the American Home Liette Gidlow (bio) Kristin L. Hoganson . Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xiv + 402 pps.; ill.; ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-5793-9 (pb). Charles F. McGovern . Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xv + 536 pps.; ill.; ISBN 13: 978-0-8078-5676-5 (pb). Bob Kealing . Tupperware Unsealed: Brownie Wise, Earl Tupper, and the Home Party Pioneers. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. x + 250 pps.; ill.; ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-3227-6 (hb). There's no place like home. In our imagination if not in our experience, home is a place of warmth, security, and comfort. It is the place to which we return, and it is where we are supposed to belong. But it takes more than love to make a home. Apparently, it also takes a lot of stuff. Three recent contributions to the history of consumption in the United States after the Civil War explore how Americans used stuff—the amazing array of goods produced by the new consumer economy—to communicate belonging, affiliation, and other meanings of "home." That consumer economy grew out of an interlocking series of social and economic changes that made inexpensive manufactures more widely available, aggregated potential buyers into markets, and afforded workers more time for leisure. Between the 1870s and 1920s, migrants and immigrants congregated in cities, concentrating laborers and consumers into accessible workforces and markets. Businesses created new corporate structures and built mass production factories, turning out boxcars full of inexpensive goods. Railroads developed an increasingly complex national network, delivering products from greater distances and more cheaply than ever before. New techniques in photography and printing lowered publishing costs and spurred advertising. These developments and others created an expanded national marketplace in which mass-produced consumer goods, including automobiles, appliances, ready-made clothing, processed foods, leisure magazines, movies, recorded music, and more, became plentiful and increasingly affordable.1 Consumer goods mattered, then and now, and not [End Page 195] only because their production and use impacts the environment, changes standards of living, and stimulates the senses. According to the historian Gary Cross, they also perform important cultural work, for consumer goods "give meaning to individuals and their roles in society."2 The books under review document a range of ways in which Americans between the end of the Civil War and the early cold war used consumer culture to define their place in the world, construct cultural boundaries that distinguished their national home from others, and negotiate new roles for homemakers in public life. Kristin Hoganson's Consumers' Imperium uncovers how American homemakers' passion for imports made them important players in the politics of empire. Charles McGovern's Sold American explores how early twentieth-century advertisers and consumer advocates connected national feeling with consumer culture, helping to make consumption a key element of American identity and belonging. Bob Kealing's Tupperware Unsealed recounts the life of Brownie Wise, the marketing genius who made Tupperware a household name. Together, these works add complexity to scholarship on the interrelationship of consumer culture, gender, and home, a literature with roots in Elaine Tyler May's classic 1988 text on cold war domesticity, Homeward Bound.3 In Consumers' Imperium, Hoganson demonstrates the increasing maturity of historical approaches that situate the United States "in the world." She shatters what is left of the boundary between the foreign and the domestic, a boundary that once isolated the history of foreign relations from the histories of just about everything else, by locating American encounters with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century world in women's everyday activities of homemaking, shopping, and socializing. These ordinary pursuits regularly brought American women, especially those who were middle-class or elite and white, into contact with the "foreign," and many of these activities—interior decorating in the popular "Oriental" style of the period, cooking exotic dishes, entertaining guests with slide shows of travel abroad—took place in the most domestic of spaces, the home. No longer the Victorian haven from the outside world, home in...

Vietnam and the West: New Approaches (review)

Reviewed by: Vietnam and the West: New Approaches Shelton Woods Vietnam and the West: New Approaches. Edited by Wynn Wilcox. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2010. 224 pp. $46.95 (cloth); $23.95 (paper). "Scholars and journalists have published countless volumes on the actions of Western powers in Vietnam." This first sentence on the first page of Vietnam and the West: New Approaches acknowledges the vast material on the subject. Wynn Wilcox, the volume's editor, notes in the introduction that these essays represent a fresh approach to a well-worn subject. For the most part, however, the essays in Vietnam and the West do not break new ground. Some of the essays are quite weak in scholarship, analysis, and relevance to the book's thesis. [End Page 197] Vietnam and the West is a compilation of papers presented at a December 2005 conference at Western Connecticut State University. Contributors include professors of history, anthropology, and political science, as well as independent scholars. So there is a definite multidisciplinary approach to the subject of the West's interaction with Vietnam. The book is divided into three sections: "Precolonial Encounters (to 1862)," "French and American Encounters (1862-1975)," and "Recent Encounters (1975-Present)." As is the case in most books composed of a conference's proceedings, the quality of scholarship varies, and some of the essays seem forced into trying to fit the volume's subject. Some of the papers encompass more than thirty pages, whereas others are but a dozen pages in length. The three sections also widely differ in quality and relevance. So what is the new approach? After scores of volumes on the French and American experiences in Vietnam, does this volume represent something new? No, not really. Wilcox claims that the essays aim to "get beyond the idea that Vietnamese history can or should be viewed as 'autonomous'" and "to revise the chronologies associated with the Vietnam/West relationship" by focusing on individuals and their impact on Vietnam-West relations (p. 3). But there are other authors who have followed similar approaches to West-Vietnam relations. Some of these writers include Neil Jamieson, Paul Mus, and Oscar Chapuis, to name just a few. The first section of the book, "Precolonial Encounters (to 1862)," is by far the strongest portion of the work. Three essays make up this segment and touch on the disparate topics of: Christian Nôm literature; Jean Marie Despiau, the French doctor in the Nguyen imperial palace; and Dang Duc Tuan, the Vietnamese Catholic priest whose faith never clouded his nationalism. In all three essays the book's thesis shines through: the Vietnamese did not change their culture to imitate Western modernity; rather, the mutual give and take between Vietnamese and Westerners produced a localized-adopted norm that fit the indigenous culture. As Professor Wilcox writes, "these essays avoid the Eurocentric assumptions about the 'Vietnamese response' or 'Vietnamese modernization' heuristics, while still retaining a concern for the centrality of indigenous identities and culture" (p. 16). Squeezed between the book's strong opening and weak final segments is the mediocre section "French and American Encounters (1862-1975)." Its four essays discuss women in the Vietnamese resistance, propaganda directed toward colonial minority soldiers, South Vietnam's trade unions, and the elusive Holy Grail of a political third option (neither Communist nor an America-aligned government) [End Page 198] that never emerged during the war. The strength of these essays is in how the authors synthesize existing material on their topics. In that sense, they are not breaking any new ground; even in their analyses one comes away more convinced that there is nothing new under the sun. The final section, "Recent Encounters (1975-Present)," consists of two brief essays that seem out of place with the book's theme; the final essay, "Strategic Waters, Tragic Waters: Water Privatization in Vietnam," has little to do with the West in Vietnam. The other essay, "Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the United States: Blurring the Boundaries," is based on interviews with one family whose child was identified as "likely to have been affected by Agent Orange" (p. 177). To base an entire paper (and subsequently a...