OSHER 933 - The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War, with its great cost and unsatisfactory ending, confronts Americans with unresolved questions about our country's proper role in the world and about the uses and limits of America's vast military power. In this class we will explore the policies, events and personalities responsible for U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. We will examine how, in a prominent historian's words, the U.S. built its war on the embers of France's failed Indochina war; and we will study how the U.S. went about fighting, and then abandoning, its war. We will identify the best books, whether American, French, or Vietnamese, written about the war's many facets; and we will discuss the war's continuing legacy.