The Turtles did not release it as a single, and McGuire’s version became the hit. The song was originally recorded by The Turtles, who released it on their first album earlier in 1965. The assassination of US President John F Kennedy in 1963 was a big influence on the lyric.Įve Of Destruction was written by 19-year-old PF Sloan, who was a staff songwriter at McGuire’s label and went on to form The Grass Roots.
The song takes on racism, hypocrisy, and injustice at a volatile time in American history. There was an upside to this controversy, however, as it piqued interest in the song, sending it to #1 in the US. And beyond modern Vietnam, this research has implications for investigating social and cultural history of other communities that have survived conflicts.A protest song about political issues of the ’60s, many US radio stations refused to play Eve Of Destruction because of its anti-government lyrics.
By emphasizing the voices of ordinary people under the shadow of war, this grassroots history seeks to remedy the Western-centered imbalance in the war’s historiography and provide a new complimentary perspective to Vietnam studies. The research is rooted in archival government documents, personal memoirs, literature, media, as well as interviews with a wide range of people of Huế living inside and outside the country. To the urban residents, be they in the North, Center, or South, the war was not felt as immediately in the typical daily life as in the exurban countryside before 1968 yet nonetheless manifested itself in subtle and ominous ways. Vietnam War studies in both the US and Vietnam to date impose top-down perspectives which shape historical understanding in defined direction, and the insistent, nearly-exclusive scholarly focus on political and military activities which prevails has resulted in a comparative dearth of attention to social history and cultural change which exposes to scrutiny the narratives of individual human lives. Examining the forces which impacted lifestyle, interpersonal relations, and cultural expression in the imperial city, it exposes the mutability of human experience in all walks of life in a centuries–old national seat and gives voice to the common people in this locus of education, religion, and culture.
This research project illuminates how war transformed the social life of ordinary people in the city of Huế in central Vietnam, from the establishment of the University of Huế in 1957 to the Tết Offensive of January 1968.
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