The Viet Nam War Seen Through Oral History
I teach this course annually as part of a bigger effort to build our oral history archive, My Viet Nam Story, capturing, documenting, and preserving voices of the war generation while we still can. The course offers an overview of the war and draws largely on oral history sources, offering students a practical opportunity to advance their skills in conducting oral-history interviews. Working from the spoken testimony of those who participated in or witnessed historical events, together we seek to examine the lives of individuals and communities whose voices and perspectives may be marginalized or neglected in conventional interpretations of the war. Students will explore the art of oral history and the role of oral testimony in research and writing the history of war through interviews they conduct, which will be contextualized, interpreted, and presented in digital exhibits as a final course project.
The students’ digital exhibits are displayed on the website of my oral history project My Viet Nam Story. Please let us know if you’re interested in participating in our project!
Other undergraduate and graduate courses I’m teaching at UC Irvine include:
The Viet Nam Wars
Pre-modern Southeast Asia
Modern Southeast Asia
Twentieth-century Southeast Asia through Biography and Autobiography
Oral History: Theory and Practice
Please explore the website of our oral history project developed by my students at Haverford College in Fall 2018.