Tag: Vietnam

Contested Autonomy

The video clip I saw of a young Vietnamese-American woman who opened an art gallery in Vietnam led to my humanities moment. She said that her mother disowned…

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…

“Three Mountain Pass” — Connecting to Vietnam

For teenagers, the world they live in is often described as “normal” and everything else is “weird.” One of my goals as a history teacher is to help…

The Truth About Territory

Over the course of the National Humanities Center Institute on Contested Territory: Southeast Asia 1945-1975 through the National Endowment for the Humanities, I learned about the contributing factors…

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 Ho Chi Minh and Marcus Garvey Connection

This seminar has been an amazing experience for me. I have always admired Ho Chi Minh. His commitment to the people of Vietnam and his efforts to free…

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…

Vietnamese Declaration of Independence

The introduction of the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence from the Nancy Gardner presentation was one of the high points of the week for me. Until that time I…

Discovering Contested Territory Through Vietnamese Folk Poetry

Until this summer institute, I had never heard of the Vietnamese folk poetry known as ca dao. To be honest, I had never even thought of Vietnamese people…

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…

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…

Violent Legacy Continued

My moment was a culmination of two. The first was the image or video taken from Muhammad Ali’s comments regarding the Vietnam War. I have played this video…

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…