Event

For decades, historical scholarship on the Vietnam War has focused two main interpretations of the conflict. In most accounts, the war is depicted either as a war of Vietnamese national liberation or as a conflict defined and shaped by the global Cold War.Recently, however, Vietnamese studies scholars have challenged key elements of both interpretations, arguing that they flatten Vietnam’s political and social complexity and discount the actual experiences of Vietnamese and other participants in the war. In this presentation, Edward Miller reviews these critiques and proposes a third interpretation: the Vietnam War as a civil war. Drawing on prior work on violence and sovereignty in civil wars, Miller shows how the dynamics of civil warfare profoundly shaped the conflict in Bến Tre, a large coastal province in the Mekong Delta. Edward Miller is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College. His research and teaching focus on Modern Vietnam, the Vietnam War, oral history, and the digital humanities. His publications include Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Harvard, 2013) and The Vietnam War: A Documentary Reader (Wiley, 2016).Prof. Miller is the founder and director of the Dartmouth Digital History Initiative, a digital humanities project that is developing data visualization tools for use with oral history archives. He is also a co-founder of the Dartmouth Vietnam Project, a program that trains Dartmouth undergraduate students to interview older members of the Dartmouth community about their experiences and memories of the Vietnam War era.