TheLen

After discovering the exact site I had hoped to create, Vietnam: Yesterday and Today, I have decided not to attempt to recreate the wheel and instead create a website that will directly and usefully complement my dissertation research. My dissertation will explore how and why individuals and organizations (both official and popular) supported the Vietnam War. I am significantly more interested in stated reasons for supporting the war and the specific forms – rallies, counter-protests, articles, advertising, etc. – of this support than in writing a history of the various groups and people who supported the war. However since I have already found 10-15 groups in the Nixon Administration papers alone, it will be incredibly useful to have a quick reference guide to the groups and their interrelationships easily accessible. Therefore, for the final project this semester, I will create a site showcasing the major pro-war groups working to ensure popular support for the Vietnam War.

Although this project is an outgrowth of a concrete and personal research need, I imagine it could become a useful reference for scholars and history enthusiasts. Given that few historians – and even fewer website creators – have explored the question of active support for the Vietnam War, my site would offer a glimpse into the perspectives and attitudes of the many people who supported the war. Also, as I personally neither sympathize with nor understand these individuals and plan to show both the positives and negatives of the groups, I doubt many hard-line conservatives looking to rehabilitate the national memory of Vietnam would find my site useful. However, for students and teachers of the Vietnam War period, this website will hopefully offer a useful starting point for learning about and discussing the reasons people supported war in the past and continue to do so today.

Since I’m still in the very early stages of research, I do not have a more fully defined argument for my site and therefore in its current incarnation, this site falls into my least favorite historical category: the “hey! they were there too” school of history. However, since I can find so little information about these groups and individuals, a basic informative site is a good starting point. As I research these groups and the Presidential administrations they worked for/with/against, I hope to expand my site into a more complex analysis of why (and how) people support war – after all, if I want to stop war, I and others need to understand why people support it, right?

The bulk of my content for this website will be original analysis and discussion of these groups complemented by digitized images of key documents, counter-protest and rally coverage, advertising campaigns, letters to the editor/President/Representative, etc. Most of these images will be digitized with my digital camera while doing research in various archives and depositories across the country. This material will then be organized according to name (group or individual), activity, motivations/justifications, and other themes. I plan to have a constant menu/index on each page of the site with links these categories as well as a search option. Since my site will be a fairly basic, textual HTML website, I would like to take advantage of hypertext to link different groups by keyword, alliances, etc. I would also be interested in eventually including a survey asking visitors about their experiences, thoughts and opinions of the Vietnam War and war in general, but probably not until there is more content in the site to draw outside visitors.