by Nathan Stone I started going to camp in 1968. We were still just children, but we already had Vietnam to think about. The evening news was a body count. At camp, we didn’t see the news, but we listened to Eric Burdon and the Animals’ Sky Pilot while doing our beadwork with Father Pekarski. […]
A Longhorn’s Life of Service: Tom Ward
By Nicholas Roland On March 23, 1961, recently-inaugurated President John F. Kennedy held a press conference at the State Department on Laos, a country little-known to most Americans at the time. Using a series of oversized maps, Kennedy detailed the advance of Communist Laotian and North Vietnamese forces in the country’s northeastern provinces. Rejecting an […]
Legacies of the Vietnam War
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 […]
Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship Has Changed
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 […]
Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, by Nick Turse (2013)
By Aden Knaap, Harvard University The protagonist-narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel The Sympathizer has a thing for squid. (Think less calamari, more American Pie.) The bastard son of a Vietnamese maid and a French priest, he discovers at the age of thirteen that he has a peculiar fetish for masturbating into gutted squid, […]
Restless Youth: The CIA, Socialist Humanism, and Yugoslavia’s 1968 Student Protests
By Aleksej Demjanski The 1960s saw an explosion of student activism across the globe. This increase in youth movements for social change was so influential that U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson had the Central Intelligence Agency illegally monitor student movements both at home and abroad. After some investigation, the CIA produced an over two-hundred-page report, titled […]
US Survey Course: Vietnam War
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.
Must Read Books on the Vietnam War
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 War in Vietnam Revisited
The on-going legacy of the War in Vietnam.
Student Showcase – Defending Democracy: Government Responsibility vs. Individual Rights
Zakary Piwetz Senior Division Individual Documentary Rockport- Fulton High School Read Zakary’s Process Paper What is more important: the responsibility of America’s government to raise an effective fighting force? Or the right of Americans to refuse military service? This is a question that has persisted throughout our nation’s history, from the Revolution through the controversial […]