Messages to America : The Letters of Ho Chi Minh: The Letters of Ho Chi Minh

By Minh, Ho , Chi

Book Id: WPLBN0100002703
Format Type: PDF eBook:
File Size: 0.2 MB
Reproduction Date: 01/01/1970

Title:	Messages to America : The Letters of Ho Chi Minh: The Letters of Ho Chi Minh
Author:	Minh, Ho , Chi
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Non Fiction, World History and History of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, etc.
Collections:	Authors Community, History
Historic Publication Date:	1970
Publisher:	Unknown

Member Page:	History Is A Weapon .org
Citation APA MLA Chicago Chi Minh, B. H. (1970). Messages to America : The Letters of Ho Chi Minh. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.cc/

Description
Born in 1890 in Vietnam under French colonialism to a committed nationalist father, Ho Chi Minh would grow up to lead not one, but two successful wars of independence to liberate his country. In his formative years, Ho traveled widely as a sailor and lived in Paris, Harlem, and Boston, where he worked as a cook, baker, and did menial jobs. In his travels, he made contact with other colonized people, communists and nationalists, and saw the Vietnamese under France as part of an international system of empire. Returning to Vietnam to expel the French colonizers and emancipate his homeland, Ho Chi Minh looked to the United States, once a colony of the British, as a model—the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence is clearly modeled on the United States Declaration—but also as a potential ally. Ho wrote numerous times to American audiences, presidents and the American people, reaching out for support. But American elites, seeing France expelled and wary of independence movements "infecting" their own colonies, decided to punish Vietnam and engaged in a decades long war of almost unthinkable violence. During this time, while Ho Chi Minh was demonized in the United States, he continued to push the United States to respect Vietnam's sovereignty. He passed away in 1969 at the age of 79, not living to see the eventual Vietnamese victory in 1975. In 1976, Vietnam's capital city, Saigon, was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in his honor.