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This work is a comparative study of the three'great'American wars of the 20th century: World War I, World War II and Vietnam. The book explores several aspects of American popular culture, like fashion, film and societal mores. While a number of books have covered fashion during individual wars, this is the first study to compare several major conflicts, drawing some conclusions regarding the lasting influences of wardrobe over an entire century. This book provides short background information for each war, briefly covering earlier conflicts that shaped the hostilities of the 20th century. Although the emphasis is on women's clothing, participation and service, men are not ignored. Their fashions not only speak to the times, but the enormity of their sacrifices.

As the ground war in Vietnam escalated in the late 1960s, the US government leveraged the so-called doctor draft to secure adequate numbers of medical personnel in the armed forces. Among newly minted physicians'few alternatives to military service was the Clinical Associate Training Program at the National Institutes of Health. Though only a small percentage of applicants were accepted, the elite program launched an unprecedented number of remarkable scientific careers that would revolutionize medicine at the end of the twentieth century. Medal Winners recounts this overlooked chapter and unforeseen byproduct of the Vietnam War through the lives of four former NIH clinical associates who would go on to become Nobel laureates. Raymond S. Greenberg traces their stories from their pre-NIH years and apprenticeships through their subsequent Nobel Prize–winning work, which transformed treatment of heart disease, cancer, and other diseases. Greenberg shows how the Vietnam draft unintentionally ushered in a golden era of research by bringing talented young physicians under the tutelage of leading scientists and offers a lesson in what it may take to replicate such a towering center of scientific innovation as the NIH in the 1960s and 1970s.

When he took office in 1969, the term that Richard Nixon embraced to describe his plan for ending the American war in Vietnam was “Vietnamization,” the process of withdrawing US troops and turning over responsibility for the war to the South Vietnamese government. The concept had far reaching implications, both for understanding Nixon's actions and for shaping U.S. military thinking years after Washington's failure to ensure the survival of its client state in South Vietnam. In this book, Vietnam War expert David L. Anderson explores the political and strategic implications and assesses its continuing, significant impact on American post-Vietnam foreign policy.