The United States’ War in Vietnam

David Kieran, Washington and Jefferson College

This course examines the United States’ involvement with Vietnam from 1945 to the present, with particular attention to the Second Indochina War (1954-1975) and its legacies. Among the topics that we will discuss are: the domestic and global political contexts that shaped U.S. involvement and conduct in Vietnam; the impact of U.S. support for a succession of South Vietnamese regimes on the people of Vietnam; Vietnamese and U.S. military and political strategies; U.S. domestic and global responses to the war; and the legacies of the war in both the United States and Vietnam.

As we study this conflict and its legacies, we will pay particular attention to the variety of approaches that scholars have taken in investigating it. In particular, we will spend comparatively little time on the tactical elements of the war and the majority of our time considering the strategic, political, and cultural elements of it. We will particularly interrogate the war’s relationship to discourses of race, class, gender, and sexuality as well as to the ways that Vietnam intersected with larger debates about rights and representation (e.g. the Civil Rights movement and other freedom struggles), American liberalism (e.g. the Great Society and the rise of the New Right), and the United States role in the world (e.g. the Cold War, the global third world liberation struggle, etc.).

As well, we will pay particular attention to the various methods, theoretical commitments, and archives that scholars have drawn upon to investigate this history and to the competing historiographical debates that surround the war, and we will discuss which arguments and approaches are most effective and carry the most weight. In doing so, our goal will be to probe the ways in which the history of the Vietnam War remains unsettled and deeply contested, and to analyze the ways in which new archives and new approaches add to our understanding of what is arguably the most significant conflict in twentieth-century U.S. history.