Berkeley Book List: History

Robert M. Berdahl, chancellor, UC Berkeley They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967, David Maraniss, Simon & Schuster, 2003 Paris, 1919: Six Months that Changed the World, Margaret MacMillan, Random House, 2002

Here are two books I have read recently that I recommend to you:

David Maraniss's They Marched Into Sunlight is built around two simultaneous events that occurred in October 1967. One is the ambush of an U.S. army battalion in the jungle north of Saigon, in which nearly the entire battalion was killed or wounded in one of the costliest battles in the Vietnamese war. The other is a student protest at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, against Dow Chemical, the company that manufactured the napalm used in Vietnam. These two events epitomized the conflict of the 1960s: the military debacle in Vietnam and the growing opposition to the war within the United States. The book offers carefully crafted snapshots of the officers and men caught in the ambush and of the students and university officials caught by the protest. It offers a crisp insight into the turmoil produced by the war.

In Paris, 1919: Six Months that Changed the World, Margaret MacMillan analyzes the first six months of the Peace Conference at the end of World War I. She describes each of the principals at the Conference — Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd-George — and the relationships and objectives that shaped the decisions there. MacMillan does a masterful job of discussing the enormous range of complex issues facing the conference, from the demands for national self-determination of the many ethnic nationalists throughout central and eastern Europe, to the handling of Germany’s former colonies and the settlements reshaping the Middle East. With little knowledge of many of the areas and peoples affected, the leaders of the conference redrew boundaries and made decisions that determined many of the events later in the 20th century and that continue to form the basis for conflict in the world today.

About Robert M. Berdahl
Robert M. Berdahl is UC Berkeley's eighth chancellor. A career-long advocate of enhancing and humanizing undergraduate learning, Berdahl has expanded the highly popular Freshman Seminars in which senior faculty teach

small classes. A historian himself, he has taught a Freshman Seminar on the history of UC Berkeley. Berdahl came to UC Berkeley in 1997 from the University of Texas at Austin, where he had been president. Formerly he was Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a member of the history faculty and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon.