Tag: Vietnam War

Contested Territory: The Saigon Staircase in the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum

Sometimes you have to leave a place to understand it better. By travelling to North Carolina, I have come to understand a local resource in a new and…

Sacrifices and the Consequences of Dissent

Muhammad Ali was drafted into the Vietnam War in 1966. Ali did not believe in fighting in the war and he was willing to sacrifice everything based on…

Why Americans in Indochina Wars?

I misunderstood the Geneva Accords and the reasons behind American involvement in Vietnam. I knew it was in the context of the Cold War but I did not…

It Was Never about the Slingshot

I was selected for a two week institute entitled, Contested Territory, in which we took a deep dive into the multiple understandings and misunderstanding surrounding the Vietnam War…

Flying Over the Ho Chi Minh Trail

When I was young my father, knowing of my interest in music and war, gave me a book entitled Singing the Vietnam Blues: Songs of the Air Force…

The Consequences of War Dissension

The most powerful Humanities Moments for me occurred during William Sturkey’s NEH session entitled “Contested Patriotisms: Dissent and Nationalism on the US Homefront.” One thing that stuck with…

Perspectives on Commemorating the Vietnam War

“There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our…

The Senselessness of Rambo and Other Things

It was the beginning of another morning session for Contested Territory and I was still circulating ideas in my mind about connections between Vietnam and the South Side…

The Long History of Contested Freedom in Vietnam

“Vietnam” has been a contested idea for a long time. As an American History teacher, I tend to offer my students a compelling look at the American government’s…

Agency on the Margins

During the NEH Summer Institute on Contested Territory, a moment occurred in a lecture Christian Lentz gave on the Struggles at Dien Bien Phu that caused me to…

You Cannot Copy That Map

In a lecture on the lived experiences of the local peoples of the area surrounding Dien Bien Phu in Northwest Vietnam, Dr. Christian C. Lentz, Assistant Professor of…

P.O.W. Poetry in Code

In the Hanoi Hilton, the place where the North Vietnamese imprisoned and often tortured American captives during the Vietnam War, the US prisoners used a tapping code to…

Coming to Terms with the Experience of War

National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman William “Bro” Adams shares how philosophy professor and World War II veteran Glenn Gray and his book The Warriors: Reflections on Men…