The past is never dead. It's not even past
From the editors: January 22nd, 2023 marked the passage of fifty years since the death of former president Lyndon Baines Johnson, a man whose remarkable but also controversial career in public life looms large both over the history of his home state of Texas and the United States as a whole. To better understand LBJ’s […]
Lawrence, Mark Atwood. The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. While most Americans are likely to think of President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) in connection with the Vietnam War, Johnson himself wanted to be remembered in terms of his domestic achievements […]
By Mark Lawrence At the dawn of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy and other American liberals expressed boundless optimism about the ability of the United States to promote democracy and economic development in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. So vast were American power, resources, and know-how that almost anything seemed possible in […]
In this episode, Jeremi and Zachary talk with special guest Dr. Mark Atwood Lawrence about the Vietnam War and its continuing legacies in American society, global policy, as well as recent similar conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “It is Hard to Build Utopias”. Mark Atwood Lawrence is Director […]
The Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War (2017), shown in 10 parts on PBS, once again brought a divisive and contested conflict into American living rooms. Mark A. Lawrence, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and preeminent historian of the Vietnam War, recently wrote about what we are learning from […]
by Mark Atwood Lawrence Originally published as “Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship Has Changed” in the Fall 2017 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.” Editors Note: The Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War premiered on PBS last Sunday, September 17. Mark A. Lawrence, Associate Professor […]
During the summer of 2016, we will be bringing together our previously published articles, book reviews, and podcasts on key themes and periods in the history of the USA. Each grouping is designed to correspond to the core areas of the US History Survey Courses taken by undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.
Most Americans, including policy makers, and Vietnam Veterans have expressed their lack of knowledge of Vietnam's history and culture before US's involvement in Vietnam to fight a war over ideology.
Must must-read books on the Vietnam War by Mark A. Lawrence Christian Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (2015). The latest in a long line of studies focused on the legacies of the war in the United States, Appy’s book covers everything from film and literature to foreign and military policy. […]
The on-going legacy of the War in Vietnam.