Teaching Students about the Vietnam War: The Case for Balance |
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Authors: | Robert Peter Hager |
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Affiliation: | Los Angeles Mission College, Instructional Television, Sylmar, CA USA |
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Abstract: | This work examines how the American role in the Vietnam War has been portrayed in standard college- and university-level textbooks dealing with American foreign policy. It argues that this topic has been presented in a manner that leaves an incomplete understanding. This conclusion is based on scholarship that has been available for decades as well as much Cold War historiography that has appeared since 1975. I conclude that the distortions need to be addressed for several reasons. Their propagation produces bad scholarship, gratuitously alienates Americans from their institutions of government, and justifies anti-Americanism and authoritarianism elsewhere. |
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Keywords: | Communism United States Vietnam war |
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