What I mean is, why isn’t the adjective used? Who ever names these wars did that for the “Korean” War, the “French” and “American” Revolutions and the “Spanish” Civil War.
That leads me to my second question. Who names these wars (in the US)?
I don’t know your first question, but generally who gets to name wars are the newspapers (and lately, TV.) Hell, the last war we fought wasn’t even named for a country: the Persian Gulf war.
If you go search books on the Vietnam War in a library catalog, you better use the subject term of “Vietnamese Conflict”
In the 19-teenish part of the previous century, there were three significant wars in the Balkans. I guess all the good names had already been taken, since that has historically been such a volatile area, so the first one (in that time frame) was simply called “The First Balkan War,” and the second one, “The Second Balkan War.” The third one, though–well, that’s another thing. . .
I believe, and someone will correct me if I’m wrong, that the US never declared war on Veitnam, therefore we have a “conflict” and not a war.
Nope it wasn’t declared. Neither was Korea or the Persian Gulf. But realisitcally, they were all wars.
When two or more countries come into armed conflict, you have a war. It’s as simple as that. It might be an undeclared war, as with most of the recent ones, but calling it a “conflict” or a “police action” does not change the reality that you have a state of war. Only the ultra-anal-retentive lawyer-types will fault you for calling the Vietnam “conflict” the “Vietnam War”.
Historians, newspapers, and the general public. And the names for wars can change. Do you really think they called it World War I in 1934? No, it was The Great War. And the changes can even occur centuries after the event: The War of the Roses didn’t get that name until Sir Walter Scott started using the term (taking it from a quite fictional scene in Shakespeare) in the 19th century (before that, it was referred to as “The Cousins’ War”).
As long as everyone knows what you’re pointing at, that name will suffice.
I believe that the Department of Defense gives its own names to wars. However “Vietnamese Conflict” is a subject created by a group of catalogers at the Library of Congress. You can find the names used for all wars if you ask your local librarian for the “big red subject books”. These don’t usually lend themselves to easy searching in online databases.
“World War, 1914-1918”
“World War, 1939-1945”
Basically if you want to find a book on WWI or WWII, you better know the author or title.
However others are
“Korean War, 1950-1953”
“Persian Gulf War, 1991”
“Panama, History, American Invasion, 1989”
“United States, History, Civil War, 1861-1865”
“United States, History, War of 1812”
“Mexican War, 1846-1848”
“Spanish-American War, 1898”
Stuff like this is why you never search by subject in a library’s catalog. Catalogers seem to have no clue as to how people identify things.
Exhibit developers at Chicago’s Field Museum tried to re-name two recent conflicts as “the Korean-American War” and “the Vietnam-American war.” Knowing the people involved, I speculate they were influenced by some left-fringe academic propositions.
Not that left-fringe academics are always wrong. I can kind of see the second one, if I’m willing to ignore the French phase of the war. But both titles ignore the fact that both conflicts started as civil wars, and involved more than just two countries. The names were changed shortly after the exhibit opened.
Not that this adds much to the discussion, but the Vietnamese call it the American War.