TEACHING THE VIETNAM WAR FROM MULTIPLE VIETNAMESE PERSPECTIVES – A SAMPLE SYLLABUS (PART 1)

The Vietnam War is one of the most popular history courses on American college campuses, but the vast majority of such courses present the war as an event in American history. If professors incorporate Vietnamese perspectives at all, it is almost exclusively the perspective of Vietnamese communists, and students come away from the experience thinking that the war was between the US and Vietnam.

I resolved from the very start of my teaching career that I would teach the war as an event in Vietnamese history. My version of this popular course traces the conflicts between different groups of Vietnamese from the French colonial period to the Vietnam War and after, and I teach my students that the American intervention transformed existing conflicts but did not create them. I intentionally select reading materials that highlight diverse Vietnamese and American perspectives. Interestingly, my students – most of whom are not of Vietnamese heritage – tell me that they like learning about the Vietnamese dimension of the war because they only got to learn about the American side in high school. Reflecting the Vietnam-centered content, my course is coded as Asian rather than American history at my institution.

In developing the course, I quickly realized why most professors privilege the US. It’s a structural problem. Most professors who teach about the war are trained in American rather than Asian history, and there’s tons of English-language, student-friendly material about the American side of the war. In contrast, there’s fairly few Vietnam historians working in higher education and very limited teaching material on the war’s Vietnamese participants. It took me years to track down and test out the readings on my syllabus, and I even translated a few primary sources of my own as a supplement. I will share a sample syllabus from my course in this post and the next one. Later posts will feature sample assignments, some handouts, and original translations. I hope these materials will be helpful for other professors who want to incorporate Vietnamese perspectives but find the task daunting. The sample syllabus below is an idealized version of my course in the sense that it reflects the best teaching conditions I have enjoyed. Over the years, I have reduced the number of required journals because the size of the class grew to the point where weekly journals created an unmanageable workload. My notes explaining my thinking for each week’s readings is included in red. In the future, I anticipate increasing the number of readings on neutralism and the NLF as scholars produce more scholarship on those topics. I also hope that the research on ethnic minorities within Vietnam and their experiences of the war will become robust enough that I can incorporate that into the course.

SAMPLE SYLLABUS: HISTORY OF THE VIETNAM WAR (first half of semester)

Although Americans refer to the most famous conflict to take place in Vietnam as the “Vietnam War,” our popular conceptions of the struggle are based primarily on the American experience of the war. This course invites you to expand your understanding of the conflict by also considering the experiences of the three Vietnamese belligerents: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, or North Vietnam), the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam), and the National Liberation Front (NLF). We will pay special attention to diverse Vietnamese and American perspectives as we survey the origins, development, and aftermath of the Vietnam War. Our course will pose questions, such as: What cleavages within Vietnamese society led to war, and how were the various Vietnamese belligerents different? How did the anticolonial war develop into the Vietnam War? How important were issues such as class, nationalism, and political ideology? Which side escalated the war? How did American intervention transform the conflict? What explains the outcome of the war? Why has the war remained so contentious for both Vietnamese and Americans? A variety of novels, memoirs, films, music, and secondary sources will help us explore these issues, and lectures will provide a basic narrative to contextualize the material.

REQUIRED TEXTS

COURSE ORGANIZATION

The course features a mixture of lecture and discussion, with the first class usually dedicated to lecture and the second class usually reserved for discussion. I will provide lecture handouts to help you keep track of the main ideas during lecture. I will also provide reading handouts that include reading questions and the prompts for the journals. Readings and journals are due on discussion days.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS, ASSIGNMENTS, AND GRADES

Class participation: Class participation is an essential component of the course, and you will be expected to actively contribute to discussion. In fact, I frequently call on students before they raise their hands because I am interested in what you have to say and because I want to know how well you understood the material. You will not be graded on attendance, but excessive absences do result in insufficient participation. How will I grade participation? You are expected to contribute at least once per discussion for at least five class discussions.

Journals: Every week, you will be required to write a 1-page paper (single spaced, one side only) about the readings. The journals will respond to a specific prompt that I provide, and you should start all journals by retyping the full prompt. Journals should be thoughtful and clear and should fully address all questions in the prompt. A hard copy of the journal is due in class every discussion day unless otherwise noted. Should you write more than 1 page, feel free to print on both sides of the paper. You are allowed to miss one journal before it affects your grade.

Quiz: A short quiz on geography, terms, and dates. The quiz will be weighted equal to one journal.

Exams: There will be a midterm and final exam. They will be based on lectures and reading and will include mix-and-match, multiple choice, and short answer questions.

Papers: You will write two short papers. The first paper will be about Nationalist in the Viet Nam Wars, and the second will be on Kill Anything That Moves. Both papers must fall within the required page range.

SCHEDULE OF READINGS

ORIGINS

CONFLICT

4. Building Socialism in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam

• *Excerpt from We Want to Live [my original translation]
• *Video clip We Want to Live [my original translation added as subtitles]
• *Nguyễn Văn Bổng, “Planting Stakes in Cau Field,” trans. Christine Pelzer White, in White, “Agrarian Reform and National Liberation in the Vietnamese Revolution, 1920-1957” (Phd diss, Cornell University, 1981), selected pages
• *Dương Thu Hương, Paradise of the Blind, trans. Phan Huy Dương and Nina McPherson (New York: William Morrow, 2002), 16-34, 40-42, 47-52, 60-67, 69-81

Journal prompt: Based on We Want to Live, how did Vietnamese anticommunists in the RVN depict the land reform and what were they trying to say about the DRV through this portrayal? Based on “Planting Stakes in Cau Field,” how did communist writers in the DRV depict the land reform and what were they trying to say about the regime through this portrayal? How does Paradise of the Blind depict the land reform and how would you describe the politics of that book?

My notes: The readings for week 3 constitute a sort of debate on the land reform and, by extension, the legitimacy of the DRV and the communist party. In class, we discuss how the different fictional accounts portray landlords, villagers, and local leaders of the campaign. This discussion builds on the theme of political division from weeks 2 and 3 to examine the polarization of Vietnamese politics between communists and anticommunists. Paradise of the Blind is also useful as a foreshadow of economic renovation (đổi mới) and the reinterpretation of the war by communist dissidents after the war, which is covered in week 12.