Analytical Paper 2

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For this assignment you will write a paper analyzing and critiquing a scholarly article of your choice. First you will select an article from the American Historical Review or Journal of American History [NO BOOK REVIEWS ALLOWED]. Both can be accessed through the USF Library.

This article can be on any topic that interests you, so long as it pertains to American history in some way and falls into the timeframe if this class [1865 - 2016].

After selecting your article you will answer the following questions:

1. Summarize the Article: What is the author discussing in this article? What is the argument/main point that the author is trying to make?

2. Evidence: What type of evidence does the author use to support their argument/main point. What do they use in their bibliography – newspapers, speeches, written histories? Are there any types of evidence you feel the author could have used to reinforce their argument?

3. Analyze the Article: After writing about the main point and type of evidence, answer if you thought the author made a convincing argument? Do you agree or disagree with the conclusions of the article? Why or why not?

4. Further Research: After reviewing your article do a little more research on this topic. Name one or two more articles that address similar subjects and see if they have a similar argument or different? Do they share the same sources?

All essays must be typed in 12 point, Times New Roman font using 1-inch margins. All papers must be double-spaced, grammatically correct, and refer back to the journal article you selected.

Please include a citation of your article at the top of your paper! Here is the MLA format:

Author's Last Name, Author's First Name. "Title." Title of Journal, volume #, issue no., date published, page numbers.

Each question should be a new heading in the paper. I do not expect a flowing narrative with this assignment. Instead, I want you to simply provide the answers to the questions above in roughly 2-3 paragraphs per question.

I uploaded the article down.

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Contested Memory: The Vietnam War and American Society, 1975–2001 Author(s): ROBERT J. MCMAHON Source: Diplomatic History, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring 2002), pp. 159-184 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24914305 Accessed: 13-11-2018 23:33 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Diplomatic History This content downloaded from 131.247.112.3 on Tue, 13 Nov 2018 23:33:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 131.247.112.3 on Tue, 13 Nov 2018 23:33:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ROBERT J. MCMAHON SHAFR Presidential Address: Contested Memory: The Vietnam War and American Society, 1975-2001 "The past is never dead," William Faulkner once famously remarked. "It's not even past.'" The celebrated novelist was alluding, of course, to the powerful grip that the Civil War and its troubled aftermath continued to exert on his native region. And one need only scan contemporary newspaper headlines about the controversy that still surrounds the flying of the Confederate flag in South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and other Southern states to appreciate the acuity of Faulkner's observation. "Memory is a living thing," noted Eudora Welty, another distinguished Southern author - "it too is in transit."2 The tangled connection between past and present - or, in the idiom that has become so common in our postmodern era, between history and memory - seems particularly apt when considering the place of the Vietnam War in American culture and society. Arguably the second most traumatic, contentious, and problematic event in U.S. history, the Vietnam War, like the Civil War, remains a "zone of contested meaning."3 Recent revelations about ex-governor and ex-senator Bob Kerrey s involve ment in the killing of more than a dozen Vietnamese women and children during a botched intelligence operation over three decades ago serve as but the most recent reminder of the Vietnam War's enduring hold on the national psyche.4 "The Ghosts of Vietnam," screamed a Time magazine cover story about the Kerrey incident.5 It joined a long pantheon of searching reassessments of the Vietnam War by that newsmagazine and its counterparts in the mainstream media. For the war's tenth anniversary, in April 1985, Time's cover story pro claimed: "A Bloody Rite of Passage, Viet Nam Cost America Its Innocence and 1. Quoted in Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (New York, 2000), 293. 2. Quoted in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, "Introduction: No Deed but Memory," in Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 9. 3. The phrase is from Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1943-1990 (New York, 1991), 314. 4. Gregory L. Vistica, "One Awful Night in Thanh Phong," New York Times Magazine, 29 April 2001; CBS News, 60 Minutes II, 1 May 2001. 5. Time 157 (7 May 2001): 24-34. Diplomatic History, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring 2002). © 2002 The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Blackwell Publishing, Inc., 350 Main Street, Maiden, MA, 02148, USA and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 iJF, UK. >59 This content downloaded from 131.247.112.3 on Tue, 13 Nov 2018 23:33:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms l6o: DIPLOMATIC HISTORY Still Haunts Its Conscience." Five years later, its cover st "Vietnam 15 Years Later. Guilt and Recrimination Still Sh Perception of the Only War It Ever Lost." In 1995, the weekly's a more concise lead: "Vietnam 20 Years Later, It Haunts U persistent conceptualization of the Vietnam War as a haunting, the United States has become a staple of such retrospectives, that shows no sign of ebbing. Indeed, just this past April, the a Times Book Festival featured an overflow session entitled, "W Go Away?" The panelists' conclusion: probably not, or at least long time.7 "Vietnam won't go away," bemoaned conservative policy ana Lefever in 1997. "Its ghosts still haunt the American psyche lik twisted nightmare."8 From the other side of the political spec Walsh, a liberal activist who left his seminary back in 196 involvement in Vietnam, echoed Lefever in a recent interview coming back," he commented in response to the flap ignited by "it's forever."9 This essay examines the ongoing struggle within Americ society over the meaning and significance of the Vietnam Wa that was joined first in the mid- and late 1960s, when raging d morality and efficacy of U.S. involvement triggered the most divisions since the Civil War. It has continued without surcease war's end as various claims-makers, operating from a wide dive — political leaders, military officers, veterans, intellectuals, fi sion producers, writers, artists, monument-builders, and more fit this turbulent chapter of America's recent past into the wid nation's history and purpose. Although the ultimate triumph o came in 1975, two years after the withdrawal of the last U.S. co South Vietnam, the war's outcome constituted a humiliatin United Stares and was widelv viewed as such Plainlv. desnire the deaths of over 58,000 Americans and somewhere between two and three million namese, Cambodians, and Laotians, the expenditure of billions of dollars, a the most extensive bombing campaign in world history, Americans had fa in their principal purpose. They could not preserve the independent S Vietnamese government that so much U.S. blood, treasure, and prestige ha been tied to; nor could they prevent the emergence of communist regimes any of the three countries that once constituted French Indochina. Critical questions loomed in the war's immediate aftermath. What lesson should Americans learn from defeat in Southeast Asia? How would they ap those lessons? Who, or what, should be blamed for the debacle? How could 6. 7. 8. 9. Time 115 (15 April 1985): 16-61; Time 135 (30 April 1990): 18-29; Time 145 (24 April 1995): 2 I am indebted to Fredrik Logevall, who participated in the session, for this informatio Ernest W Lefever, "Vietnam's Ghosts," Wall Street Journal, 21 May 1997. Quoted in New York Times, May 3, 2001. This content downloaded from 131.247.112.3 on Tue, 13 Nov 2018 23:33:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms SHAFR Presidential Address : 161 deep societal ruptures opened by the war be closed, the wounds still festering within the body politic healed? And, most fundamental of all: How would, and should, the war be remembered? How would, and should, ordinary Americans, and their political leaders, fit this colossal national failure, and the enormous sacrifices in lives, money, and domestic comity it had entailed, into the overall American narrative? My central purpose here is to explore in a very preliminary way how the process of remembering the Vietnam War and fitting it into the broader national story has played out over the past quarter-century. How, I ask, has the war been explained, rationalized, memorialized, represented, understood? My chief subject here is not history per se, but memory. The obsession with memory, individual and collective, seems to be a defining feature of our age. "Everyone's talking about memory," notes the novelist Mary Gor don: "French intellectuals, historians of the Holocaust, victims of child abuse, alleged abusers.'"0 She might have added the Vatican, which publish ed just last year a lengthy document entitled Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past, in which it confessed and sought forgiveness for its role in the Inquisition and other past injustices committed in the name of Christianity," and South Africa, whose Truth and Reconciliation Commis sion has pioneered a brave approach to reconciling the competing demands of history and memory, of forgiveness and justice, in the process of seeking to account for and mend the depredations of the apartheid era. Numerous modern societies, forced, like South Africa, to confront traumatic episodes in their recent histories, have agonized about the memory problem. Follow ing World War I, victors and vanquished alike searched for appropriate ways to memorialize and find meaning in the millions of lives taken or shattered by that catastrophic conflict.12 Germany andjapan continue to wrestle with the legacy of their aggression and brutality during World War II. How can it be atoned for? How should that era be remembered, taught, presented to the public? So, in a less direct and tortured way, do nations such as Austria, Switzerland, and France grapple with the emotionally freighted events of io. Mary Gordon, Shadow Man (New York, 1996), xx. On this burgeoning interest in memory, see especially Daniel Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago, 1999), 1—35; Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz ( Ithaca, NY, 1998); Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (New York, 1999); and John Bodnar, "Pierre Nora, National Memory, and Democracy: A Review," Journal of American History 87 (December 2000): 951-63. il International Theological Commission, Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past (Vatican City, 2000). 12. Among the important books that have dealt with this subject, see especially Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, U.K., 1995); Sherman, Construction of Memory, Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return (Melbourne, 1996); Alex King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (New York, 1998); and David William Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain (New York, 1998). This content downloaded from 131.247.112.3 on Tue, 13 Nov 2018 23:33:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms l6z : DIPLOMATIC HISTORY that same era: were they victims of the Nazis, or willing co perpetrators?'5 The concept of collective, or public, memory offers a construct for examining each of those cases, as it does for exp of meaning over the Vietnam War. A diverse array of scholars of academic disciplines have been drawn of late to the impo function that public memory plays within societies. Nation come to grips with traumatic events of the recent past. Mon memoirs, popular culture, political debate, public rhetor arenns of contestation in that reirard arenas in which collective memories are forged. Public memory, according to historian John Bodnar, refers to of beliefs and ideas about the past that helps a public or society underst both its past, present, and by implication, its future."'4 Memories, of c national as well as private, are by nature highly selective. This is so, arg historian Michael Kämmen, since societies "reconstruct their pasts rathe faithfully record them" in order to serve the "needs of contemporary . . . manipulating the past in order to mold the present.'"f As individua polities choose to remember certain aspects of the past, they foreclose — to foreclose — other aspects. In the end, alternative memories come silenced. The stakes are extraordinarily high in this struggle over memory since, as so many scholars have demonstrated, our reconstruct the past prove as, or even more, important than the actual past (if the lat ever be recovered — a philosophical problem of no small import). A theoretical and case-specific literature has developed around the general ject of collective memory, a substantial amount of it focused specifically question of war and remembrance. I will draw liberally from that literat framing the remarks that follow."5 13. Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identi bridge, MA, 1988); Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (Ne 1994); Robert G. Moeller, "War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Rep Germany," American Historical Review 101 (October 1996): 1008—48; Wood, Vectors of Memory, J Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War //(New York, 1999); Yoskhkuni Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, ip^y—iyyo (Princeton, NJ, 200 Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western (New York, 2000). 14. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the T Century (Princeton, NJ, 1992), 15. 15. Michael Kämmen, Mystic Chords of Memory The Transformation of Tradition in Am Culture (New York, 1991), 3,13. 16. In addition to the works cited above, see especially Jay Winter and Emmanuel Siva War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, U.K., 1999); Philip West, Steven I. and Jackie Hiltz, eds., America's Wars in Asia: A Cultural Approach to History and Memory (Arm 1998); Martin Evans and Kenneth Lunn, War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (New Yor John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics ofNational Identity (Princeton, NJ, 1994); and M J. Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in History and Memory (New York, 1996). Works that have dealt with different aspects of collective memory and the Vietnam include: Myra MacPherson, Long Time Passing.• Vietnam and the Haunted Generation (Gard NY, i984);John HeUman, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York, 1986); Richard J This content downloaded from 131.247.112.3 on Tue, 13 Nov 2018 23:33:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms SHAFR Presidential Address : 163 Although there is nothing approaching scholarly unanimity on the topic of collective memory, several broad conclusions emerge from much of this literature. First, memories, individual and collective, are typically constructed rather than emerging as the simple, unfiltered recollections of past events. Individuals and societies choose what they will remember about the past - and what they will forget. Second, memories are constructed to meet present needs. The process of collective memory formation within societies is tied up with utilitarian ends. There are conscious purposes and goals behind these efforts; they never occur in a social or political vacuum. Third, the project of forging a collective memory of important episodes in the histories of nations or groups is invariably led by elites, with the state itself often playing a dominant role. Finally, collective memory formation is intimately related to larger questions of group, or national, purpose and identity.'7 The study of memory has, of course, tended to fall within the ever exnandine boundaries of cultural history. But the topic is far too important to be left to the cultural historians alone. It is quite germane, moreover, to our field, one whose boundaries have also been expanding of late, particularly into the cultural realm. A growing number of U.S. diplomatic historians have begun to recognize that American culture, broadly conceived, helps explain some of the distinctive tendencies that have shaped the American approach to and encounter with the wider world. The struggle over societal memories of the Vietnam War, a struggle with enormous foreign policy implications, belongs to that broader culturalist trend. In the remarks that follow, I will examine three important aspects of this struggle. I begin by analyzing the role of official rhetoric in setting some of the and Peter C. Ehrenhaus, eds., Cultural Legacies of Vietnam: Uses of the Past in the Present (Norwood, NJ, i99o);John Carlos Rowe and Rick Berg, eds., The Vietnam War and American Culture^ New York, 1991); Fred Turner, Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (New York, 1996); Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidetnic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley, CA, 1997); Arnold R. Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy (Baltimore, 1997); Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York, 1998); Kristin Ann Hass, Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial ( Berkeley, 1998); Keith Beattie, The Scar That Binds: American Culture and the Vietnam War (New York, 1998); Katherine Kinney, Friendly Fire: American Images of the Vietnam War (New York, 2000). See also Christian G. Appy, "The Muffling ofPublic Memory in Post-Vietnam America," Chronicle of Higher Education (12 February 1999): B4-B6. For an important analysis of the Vietnamese struggle over memories of the war, see Mark Bradley, "Contests of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting War in the Contemporary Vietnam ese Cinema," in The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, ed. FIue-Tam Flo Tai (Berkeley, 2001), 196-226. 17. Brundage, "Introduction: No Deed but Memory," in Where These Memories Grow, ed. Brundage, 3-14; Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, "Setting the Framework," in War and Remem brance, ed. Winter and Sivan, 6-39; Maurice Flalbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, 1992); Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, MA, 1989); Thomas Butler, ed., Memory: History, Culture, and the Mind (Oxford, U.K., 1990). For an important examination of the significance of the memory literature to historians of American foreign relations, see Robert D. Schulzinger, "Memory, History, and the Study of U.S. Foreign Relations," in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G.Paterson, 2nd rev. ed. (New York, forthcoming). This content downloaded from 131.247.112.3 on Tue, 13 Nov 2018 23:33:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms IÖ4 : DIPLOMATIC HISTORY terms of the debate. I turn next to the public and congressional clashes over the memory of the Vietnam War, clashes intimately connected to debates about the present and future U.S. world role. Finally, I probe the crucial influence exerted by popular culture in the formation of the nation's collective memories of the Vietnam experience. Since national leaders invariably assume a lead role in the development of an official memory of traumatic events in a nation's history, I begin with their efforts. On 23 April 1975, less than a week before the final collapse of the Saigon regime, President Gerald R. Ford delivered a speech at Tulane University in New Orleans in which he appealed for a permanent moratorium on any additional debate about the Vietnam War. "Today," he proclaimed, "Americans can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished - as far as America is concerned." His appeal for closure, however premature, seemed to mirror the prevailing sense of national exhaustion with a war that had for so long divided the American people and fractured the country's political system. Indeed, Ford had personally inserted those last lines, categorically foreclosing any possibility of a last-minute U.S. reinvolvement, into the prepared text of the speech just prior to its delivery. They met with deafening applause from the audience. "The time has come to look forward to an agenda for the future," Ford continued, "to unity, to binding up the nation's wounds and restoring it to health and optimistic self-confidence. I ask tonight that we stop refighting the battles and recriminations of the past." The president pleaded with Americans, instead, to "look now at what is right with America, at our possibilities and our potentialities for change, and growth, and achievement, and sharing." Dwelling on the country's failures in Vietnam, he warned, could just sap national çpl£-rnnfirlf*nrf» tn fefl thaf if w
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Hauser ,William L. Hauser. “Why America Should Restore the Draft”. Journal of American
history, Vol. 44, pg 181-185, Apr.2005.
Summary
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returned and active military part presumably supported by residential political leadership.
Colonies proposes draft return instead within a national service program that...


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