Web Review
Although relatively few people quibble about the basic facts of the Vietnam War – locations and dates of major battles, the details of coups and US military operations, domestic dissent and politics, diplomatic conferences and negotiations, etc. – I doubt people will ever agree on the meanings and interpretations of those facts. When debating the rights and wrongs of the Vietnam War and other topics, it can be very useful to have a user-friendly source of basic information easily accessible. Before the internet, people turned to encyclopedias and paper reference books (or, if a student at Bowling Green State University, called the FactLine) to settle disagreements on basic questions of fact: when was the coup that toppled Ngo Dinh Diem? how many advisors were in Vietnam before the Gulf of Tonkin incident? what exactly did Nixon promise the South Vietnamese government? With the internet, such questions are now answered through a quick Google or Wikipedia search. Such searches tend to turn up two types of website: overviews and timelines. Although basic overviews of the war can be useful, timelines are often the quickest and least biased sources of information. However, I have found that many timelines are either too vague or too complex to by truly user-friendly.
As the above impression was initially the result of personal experience and not careful research, I decided to systematically examine the timelines available online. If this digital version of a literature review supported my first impression of the quality and usability of online timelines, I planned to create a better timeline for my final project. Since I wanted to find a timeline that would give site visitors solid historical information in an accessible and intuitive format, I avoided gated and academic search sites with limited or restricted access and availability. My search for “Vietnam timelines” in Google, Dogpile, Yahoo, Webcrawler, and similar search engines resulted in a wide variety of timelines. These results formed the foundation of my search, but when a website linked to other timelines, I went to them before returning to my original search.
The websites collected by my searches ranged from agenda-driven timelines and almost the exact site I was looking for. All of the websites conformed to the standard timeline structure (date – event) although variations in the details determined usefulness and effectiveness of a given site. Accuracy and bias, authorship, and context were the major determinants of the quality of a given timeline. When it was a challenge to figure out who (individuals or groups) wrote and researched a given site – in one instance, the only information about the site’s creators was a scanned business card – the website and timeline were immediately less credible in my eyes. Similarly, brightly colored and flashing advertisements did little to convey a sense of scholarly accuracy. Fortunately, the above flaws were limited to a relatively small number of timelines turned up by my searches. For the rest of the timelines – the ones with substantial and accurate information, reasonably clear and credible authorship, and limited advertising – navigability was the most important determinant of quality. Many of these websites were text-driven timelines that appeared to be posted directly to the web from a word processing program. Other timelines, the ones I found most useful and interesting, took advantage of the technology of the internet to augment the basic timeline with additional information through hypertext links and images.
For the most part, all of these timelines seem to address the general public. Some sites take effort to figure out, but the basic information about the Vietnam War is readily available within the familiar format of a timeline in all of the sites. Surprisingly, given my initial opinion about online timelines of the Vietnam War, nothing seems to be missing. Taken together, the PBS companion site for Vietnam: A Television History and Vietnam: Yesterday and Today address the issues and use the technology I planned to use for my website. Each site complements the other as my only real complaint with Vietnam: Yesterday and Today is that it is relatively light on domestic information, but the PBS site skillfully integrate the domestic and international history of the war. Conversely, the PBS site does not have as much detail or use hypertext links and other technology to guide users to additional layers of information as much as Vietnam: Yesterday and Today.
Annotated Bibliography
Vietnam: Yesterday and Today
http://servercc.oakton.edu/~wittman/chronol.htm
For all intents and purposes, this site is the site I planned to make. The author integrates the basic details of the war while keeping an eye on the larger diplomatic picture. Additionally, she uses the hyperlink technology I was so anxious to use – linking readers to additional information about events, places, and individuals. All in all, an excellent site
American Experience: Vietnam Online: Timeline
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/timeline/
Although this timeline can be light on significant details (including dates beyond the year in which an event occurred), I really appreciated how it included key moments in domestic history – Jackie Robinson, Levittown, Playboy’s debut, Howl, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” etc. This site is the companion site to “Vietnam: A Television History,” an excellent PBS series on the war. Given the high quality of this and other PBS documentaries, I was not as bothered with the lack of clear authorship as I was with other sites.
The Vietnam War
http://home.earthlink.net/~gfeldmeth/chart.Vietnam.html
This is a fairly basic timeline compared with many of the others, but it does an excellent job of conveying key information about the events of the war (date, location, significance). Additionally, the author of the site is very clear: Greg D. Feldmeth, http://home.earthlink.net/~gfeldmeth/USHistory.html, an AP US history teacher in CA (as of 1998)
Indochina War Timeline
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_war_timeline
Other than the standard authorship problems with Wikipedia, namely that the authors are anonymous, this is an excellent site. Very user-friendly and intuitive to navigate with hyperlinks to more detailed entries embedded in the timeline.
The History Place – Vietnam War http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/vietnam/index.html
Essentially, another basic timeline of the Vietnam War, but the “about” page (http://www.historyplace.com/awards/about.htm) is rather unimpressive and I don’t *quite* trust the site – particularly because it is almost impossible to know the sources for a specific claim, quote, etc. and I don’t know enough about Philip Gavin to really trust his work. (The “target-fish” advertisement at the top of the page when I visited did not help matters.)
Battlefield: Vietnam, Timeline
http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/timeline/
This timeline of military and political events starts with Dien Bien Phu and traces the US involvement in the conflict. It a text-based timeline focused on US and great powers diplomacy and military history
Vietnam Period: 1847-1961
http://www.hotkey.net.au/~marshalle/chrono1/chrono1.htm
A basic text-based timeline of the military and political events of the Vietnam War from an Australian perspective. Despite the useful information in this site, it is not very clear on *who* constructed the site, but “they” seem to be military revisionists (http://www.hotkey.net.au/~marshalle/)
Interactive Wartime Chronology
http://members.aol.com/warlib/chron/v.htm
This site is indicative of many of the problems I had with these online timelines. The front page is incredibly user-unfriendly – ffering nothing more than advertisements and a string of dates – and the timeline itself is quite insubstantial. There is very little, if any, analysis or explanations of events and it can be hard to find exact dates as well. Additionally, there is very little information (actually a business card) about the group behind the site (http://members.aol.com/usregistry/warcard.htm)
The Vietnam War – Timeline, 1965-1968 and 1969-1975
http://www.vietnamwar.com/timeline65-68.htm
http://www.vietnamwar.com/timeline69-75.htm
This very wordy timeline does not offer much actual information. The few hyperlinks link to similarly light explanations and the advertisements detract from the limited information provided in this revisionist (http://www.vietnamwar.com/overview.htm) timeline.
Vietnam War in the Yahoo Directory
This site links to a very basic “yahoo encyclopedia” article about the war. Honestly, the only noteworthy thing about this site is that it links to an ad for “term papers” at the bottom! “Downloadable Papers (Established site sells papers on Vietnam War. www.the-paper-store.com )” Despite this, and other, advertising and the unclear authorship, this site does provide a very useful introductory bibliography to the Vietnam War.
Key dates in the history of Viet Nam and America in Viet Nam, the French, etc
http://www.deanza.edu/faculty/swensson/vnhist.html
This site offers the standard timeline of the war. Except the last entry is a little unique: “Summers, 1998-1999 — De Anza and Foothill students invade Viet Nam.”
Vietnam War > Events
http://www.multied.com/vietnam/Events.html
This cluttered site matches the the *idea* of what I was looking for in a timeline of the Vietnam War, but contains too little information in the initial timeline (month/date, clear idea of event) and the pages are far too cluttered to be useful