Đại Việt Man Meets Đông Sơn Man
I've always wondered what would have happened if someone from the Đông Sơn period (that is, the time at the end of the first millennium BC when people in the…
Vietnamese History From A to Z (A YouTube Series)
Having spent the past couple of years experimenting with video production, the time has now come to start work on a major video project. In the weeks, months, and perhaps…
The Other North American View of “The 30-Years War in Vietnam” – the View that Will Never Change as Long as Academics only Speak to Fellow Intellectuals
In the previous post I commented on a recent essay that historian Christopher Goscha published in the New York Times called “The 30-Years War in Vietnam.” In those comments I attempted to point out the places where Goscha was basing his ideas on new scholarship.
What then is “old scholarship”?
The 30-Years War in Vietnam, and 30 Years of Western Scholarship
Historian Christopher Goscha had an essay published in the New York Times yesterday (7 February 2017) entitled “The 30-Years War in Vietnam.” This essay is about the wars that took place in Vietnam between 1945 and 1975. Goscha has recently published a survey of Vietnamese history, and the essay in the New York Times is based on his more detailed coverage of that same period in that book.
Goscha’s survey is called Vietnam: A New History, and it is indeed a “new” history. It is a history that is based on Goscha’s own research, but also on his extensive reading of the new scholarship that has emerged in the past 30 years in “the West.”
Writing History and Denouncing an Historian in 1950s North Vietnam
In 1958, North Vietnamese scholar Văn Tân published an article in the journal Văn Sử Địa entitled “Contributing to the Building of a General History of Vietnam – Some Views Regarding Some Published History Books” (Để góp phần xây dựng quyển thông sử Việt Nam – Mấy ý kiến đối với mấy bộ sách lịch sử đã xuất bản).
At that time there was a government-sponsored effort underway in the North to produce a new, and official, history of Vietnam. The goal was to produce a history that was based on scientific theory (which in this case meant Marxist theory), so as to move beyond the biases of earlier historians who had lived and worked in feudal (meaning “traditional” or “premodern”) and colonial societies.
WTXT: Resistance Against Foreign Aggression/Invasion (Chống Ngoại Xâm) Edition
Dr. K. and his friend, the Little Red Monster, respond to a question about the historicity of the idea that Vietnamese history can be characterized as a long history of…