The Historical Imagination

I came up with this fake syllabus when I studied history with John Ott at Portland State. He liked this, but noted its lack of female gender considerations. And in that he is of course correct. He is not a PhD for nothing, Mr. Ott.

Ott's class was sensational and this assignment is one of the best I've ever dealt with as a student of history: design a syllabus that demonstrates your understanding of the Historian's Methodology.

It's fun to do this kind of thing and think about where it might fall in the imaginations of those who insist colleges are "too liberal."

The Causes and Consequences of the Vietnam War

The Philosophy

I would be disingenuous to deny an element of presentism in the orientation, structure and methodologies of this inquiry into the causes and consequences of the Vietnam War. This class will deconstruct the oft-too-common propensity of American historians and scholars to ignore or underestimate the hegemonic influences of United States’ foreign policy on emerging nations (Edward W. Said, Orientalism, p. 9, 10). This course posits that U.S. foreign policy—since the dawn of the Cold War and in a newer post-Cold War paradigm—is designed to stymie political contradictions world-wide that directly threaten U.S. economic and cultural hegemony under the banner of globalization. Necessarily, politics plays a dominate role in the historiography of the Vietnam War. Politics, however, will not be the sole arbiter of our survey. We will also draw from several other interpretive methods as we look backward and, hopefully, achieve a heightened understanding of the war’s many complexities.

While we have not gathered here to create a political agenda, this course is firmly rooted in political historicism and reality. Over a non-linear or synchronic terrain, we will draw upon most, if not all, of the known postmodern historical approaches to inquiry. We will also assume Thucydides’ dictum that to be finally content with one’s inquiry is fool hearty; that the heart of history is skepticism (Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, pp. 1-19). And we will give a knowing nod to R.G. Collingwood by attempting to decipher (re-enact) the thought processes of the war’s major protagonists, the decision makers who led the U.S. into its first large-scale failed adventure in a foreign land, as well as their Vietnamese counterparts, and the man-in-the-street reactions of those whom bore the brunt of the war’s violence (R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, pp. 282-315).

While this course’s foundation is based in the Science of politics, it will strive to become Art by focusing on both micro and macro analysis through an amalgam of the historian’s obligatory duties. In other words, we will examine every aspect of the war we can in the time we are allotted—10 weeks of rigorous reading, seeing, listening, touching, speaking, feeling, smelling, and most importantly, thinking about the Vietnam War’s causes and consequences in a world that remains as dangerous today as that of any other epoch. To achieve our purpose, we will rely on all or most of the varieties of historical generation, including the aforementioned micro/macro views as well as cultural, social and intellectual interpretations (Norman J. Wilson, History in Crisis? pp. 70-102).

In carrying this extreme load, we will add weight by investigating (comparing and contrasting) the differences between corporate (private) and state ownership of resources via an interpretive analysis of Marx’s material imperative (Karl Marx, The Illusions of German Ideology, pp. 1-18).

The Objectives

1. To create an understanding of the political causes and consequences of the Vietnam War while employing variant interpretive methodologies, including but not limited to macro/micro perspectives and analyses of socio-economic factors.
2. To deconstruct limiting U.S. historiography where it may exist and deliver new insights into the Vietnam War canon.
3. To contemplate the role of hegemony in the U.S. policy apparatus while contrasting that policy with the notion of insurrection as a liberating tool among the Vietnamese population (post-colonial analysis).
4. To engage in a discourse regarding all the factors at hand (and feet) that may limit/advance our understanding of the causes and consequences of the Vietnam War.
5. To think independently about the war.

Week 1: Sourcing and an Introduction to the Historiography of the Vietnam War.

Read: The Communist Manifesto (excerpts). Lectures on the Rise of the Viet Minh. Read Greene’s The Quiet American; a collection of Vietnamese poetry, A Walk to the River; and Ami, Ami: Memoirs of a Vietnamese Prostitute.

To provide background to the displacement of the Japanese (1945) and French (1955) and the emergence of the U.S. as a player in Southeast Asia from a political viewpoint while attempting to recognize the dynamics of the liberation movement among ordinary Vietnamese men and women. To enter into a dialogue regarding the economic realities of French hegemony and why people would support liberation. During week 1 we will analyze the variant views of the Vietnamese liberation movement contrasted with the view from Washington in consideration of Cold War perspectives (Martha Howell & Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources, pp.17-42).

Week 2: The Best and the Brightest

Read: Excerpts from Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, lectures on the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations’ Southeast Asian Perspectives.

Read "The Final Declaration on Indochina," Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Volume XVI: The Geneva Conference (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1981), 1541 (handout) and Scott Laderman’s article on Diem: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/reviews_in_american_history/v034/34.1laderman.html

Our purpose this week is to analyze the initial changes in U.S. policy that led directly to the Kennedy decision to place advisers in Vietnam. Remember, we are looking for causes, the essence of history (Edward Hallett Carr, What is History? p. 113). Because you are yourselves among the best and the brightest in the academic world you will contemplate a multitude of theories or possible causes of the war. Don’t be frightened! We should expect complexity, for cause should not be static, but rather evolutionary in nature. “The historian deals in a multiplicity of causes,” writes E.H. Carr (Carr, p. 116). While we can expect to uncover a multiplicity of causes, then, it is important to note that causation is spread over time and is continuous (Howell and Prevenier, p. 120). Causation and change are linked and inseparable in their importance to every aspect of historical study.

Week 3: The Covert War

Read: Start Sheehan’s A Bright and Shining Lie. Watch Go Tell the Spartans in class. Start Herr’s Dispatches. Lecture, 1963: Rumors of War.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted Lyndon Johnson the lawful right to wage war against North Vietnam without a formal Declaration of War from Congress, is generally considered among the most controversial of congressional actions leading to the tragedy of the Vietnam War. In the historiography of the war, it may be referred to as a Big Event, made the more so by its transparency and the degree to which it was supported by the U.S. Congress (two Senators voted against it, including the Oregon “maverick” Wayne Morse).

In another era, the fact of the resolution’s existence might have been enough to write a history of Vietnam. If the U.S. had won the war, the fact of the resolution might have sufficed to tell the history of the war. But the U.S. lost the war. Historians, being historians, were obliged to discover why the U.S. lost the war. What Carr refers to as the “widening horizon” is the tendency of history to regenerate and take on new meaning as our understanding of the past is recognized through a continuum of accelerated knowledge, through new discourse, and through new thinking. (Carr, p. 183). We no longer look at governments as untouchable institutions. They must be deconstructed and shredded through the historian’s methodological canon. The pedagogy of history now concerns a quest for freedom—everybody’s. We now know that Robert McNamara lied to Congress about the covert war in Southeast Asia. Behind the Big Event lay an element of psycho history if you will. Carr’s progress has mutated into post colonial analysis because we have “deepening insights into the course of events” (Carr, p. 165).

Week 4: Ia Drang Valley and Escalation

Read: Excerpts from Galloway’s We Were Soldiers Once…and Young. Listen to a collection of anti-war songs. Watch The Green Berets in class. Read a selection of oral histories of combat vets. Lectures on The Beginning of A Protest Movement.

Read “The Historian and the Study of War” by Louis Morton at: http://www.jstor.org/view/0161391x/di952329/95p1302g/0

John Wayne’s The Green Berets was a pro-war fantasy produced in 1968. Our purpose here is to analyze its use as pro-war propaganda and to contrast it with other forms of propaganda, both pro and anti-war. How much of history involves forms of propaganda? We can be fairly certain that all of history has propagandists' elements, so how do we go about finding them, identifying them, and using them for the purpose of creating an historical narrative? To grasp the question, we must turn to politics, more specifically to what Howell and Prevenier refer to as “the politics of history writing,” i.e., the postmodernist approach to history that synthesizes everything new in historicism into a powerful and new thesis under the historian’s imprint (Howell and Prevenier, p. 109-118). To me, then, politics is the unavoidable bias of the historian. After he or she has done all to solve the riddle of an historical exercise, what remains is the dust of political inquiry—presentism. In this manner, history informs the present and the future.

Week 5: Into Cambodia, The Battle of Hue, My Lai

Read: Excerpts from Laurence’s The Cat from Hue. Watch Apocalypse Now in class. Read selections from the oral history Women in The Nam. Lectures on the Secret Bombings, Hue, My Lai and Reactions from the Media and College Campuses. Listen to an extended interview with Seymour Hersh.

At the halfway point in our class, the consequences of the Vietnam War are beginning to become apparent. Growing protests, the media’s seizure of the massacre at My Lai, Johnson quitting, the rise of Nixon—all of these elements are helping to divide the U.S. into two loud camps. In little more than two decades, from the end of World War II, to the mid-sixties, the U.S. was irretrievably altered. What changed then? Nothing was spared, but the consciousness of Americans was most significantly altered. The cold warriors in one camp were met head on by countercultural minions in the other camp. History ebbed and flowed, tides swept in, knocking people out of equilibrium. The radical historians found balance in even more radical postmodernism, embracing new contingencies for the consideration of context in their analyses. The New Historicists were distinguishable by their propensity for anecdote, their outrage, their inclination to resistance, their desire to contain history, and the close scrutiny of “the critic’s autobiographical comments” (Wilson, p. 134). The historian of the Vietnam era was possibly a leftist exploring the Renaissance, a leftist classicist, a leftist medievalist, etc., and sometimes a leftist in Modern U.S. Cultural History. But then the historian could be something else entirely—the gates of the New Historicism were now opened wide.

Week 6: World Responses to the Vietnam War

Read: Schimberg’s A European View of the Vietnam War. Read a collection of essays by Russian dissident writers who have varying interpretations of the Vietnam War in the context of the Cold War. Lectures on Russia’s View of the Vietnam War, and European Responses to Vietnam.

Read Jeffery P. Kimball’s “Russia’s Vietnam War”at:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/reviews_in_american_history/v025/25.1kimball.html

Who were the actors in the Vietnam War and how did they arrive at their positions? How were they viewed by not only American and Vietnamese citizens, but also by the world watching on television? Many war critics, intellectuals and academics abroad as well as those at home, were reacting to the Vietnam War with Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism in mind. They saw the war as a class war, wherein a superpower was picking on a little kid in another and poorer neighborhood. With that in mind, we should investigate the differences between collectivist and individual contingencies in our interpretation of the world view of the Vietnam War. We should also, as Wilson has Karl Popper remind us, be philosophical enough to see the war through both collectivists’ and individualists’ eyes (Wilson, pp. 110-113). This may be the only way to achieve a real political historicism in our inquiry.

Week 7: Politics

Read: Excerpts from Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, ’72. Read excerpts from All the President’s Men. Watch The Deer Hunter in class. Lectures on the Genesis of and Development of the Paris Peace Talks. Finish Sheehan and Herr. Start Barber’s The Imperial Presidency.

In our discussion of U.S. politics we will take a closer look at the role of political ideology in the determination of the government’s Vietnam policy in the war years, 1962-1975. How did social and intellectual forces conjoin in those years to create an impasse between the U.S. government and the war’s resistors? How is Carr’s notion of a progressive consciousness linked to Michel Foucault’s “profound skepticism about all the categories of modern thought—the state, nature, the individual, rationality” (Joyce Appleby, “The Power of History”, p. 8)? This week we will strive for elasticity in our understanding of politics and discuss the polarization between the political and the theoretical in our analysis of the war.

Week 8: Pulling Back, Watergate, Secret Talks, Nixon Resigns.

Read: Excerpts from Mailer’s The Armies of the Night. Lectures on the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and Kissinger’s Machinations. Read excerpts from The Pentagon Papers.

Read Joyce Appleby’s “The Power of History” at: http://www.jstor.org/view/00028762/di014861/01p0002m/0

In our reflections on the Vietnam War we are interested in more than the mere facts, like a timeline, of the war. We have sought causation and consequences, but we are also engaged in a postmodernist inquiry into how and why events are remembered as significant in a historiographical realm. Let us then remain elastic as we consider the limits of the analyses of cause and effect, particularly as they concern successive generations of “incalculably complex diagram(s) of causes and effects” in an unavoidable teleological sense (Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, p. 5).

Week 9: End of the Draft, Drawing Down, The Fall of Saigon.

Read: Finish the Imperial Presidency. Panel of Vietnam Vets visit class and discuss the war. Lectures On the Damaged Ecology of Vietnam.

We have learned that the study of events in history is the study of history itself. One cannot be separated from the other. Our purpose has been to grow the historiography of the Vietnam War using the tools of the historian: documents, oral histories, textual analyses, artifacts, etc.—but beyond that we have sought to understand how history evolves, how new methodologies may contribute to new discoveries regarding not only historical events but also “recent directions in historiography,” to borrow the subtitle of Wilson’s History in Crisis? As Wilson notes in chapter one, on page one, in his first sentence: “History is both a subject, or what happened, and the process of recounting and analyzing that subject’ (Wilson, p. 1). As students, you may occasionally forget or ignore a detail of the Vietnam War, but as historians you will never forget how to think about the war.

Week 10: Where Are We Now?

Read: Read Your Final Papers Out Loud in Class. Lectures Recapping the Vietnam War, the Present Roles of the U.S. and Vietnam in World Geopolitics, and a Few Considerations Regarding the Future. Watch Dr. Strangelove in class.

Approaches to history have changed over time. Today, the historical imagination is a fundamental part of interdisciplinary studies. A student training to be a doctor will in part need to heed historical inquiry (regarding medical history at the least), just as a historian studying historiographical content will need to know all regarding methodology. There can be no limitations on who among us needs history. We all need it, just as we need air to breathe. History’s importance lies in its ability to help us understand the past, the present and, perhaps, the future. History is political, interdisciplinary, and influences the way we see the world. Carr’s notion that history is the progress of consciousness through time is a powerful idea, which, even if it does not play out as the context of history for everyone, must yet exist as an aspect of individual endeavor—we are all captives of history, whether we recognize it or not.

Bibliography

Carr, Edward Hallett, What is History?, Alfred A. Knopf, New York (1963)
Collingwood, R.G., The Idea of History, At The Clarendon Press, Oxford (1946)
Howell, Martha and Prevenier, Walter, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London (2001)
Said, Edward W., Orientalism, Pantheon Books, New York (1978)
Wilson, Norman J., History in Crisis? (Second Edition) Pearson/Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey (2005)


TS