In his examination of the historical literature on the Vietnam War, where does Simon Toner say he concentrates his effort? What were the categories into which he says the initial scholarship fell? What kind of shift does he say has occurred in the historical writing on the subject? According to Toner, who are some orthodox, revisionist, and post-revisionist historians and what titles have they written? What is Lewis Sorley’s main argument? What types of evidence does he use? How does he use particular pieces of evidence to make specific points? Which one of Toner’s categories does Sorley’s work fall into?
Your assignments this semester include reading a book chapter and a journal article. The chapter is a historiographical essay, Simon Toner, “Interminable: The Historiography of the Vietnam War, 1945–1975,” in A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations: Colonial Era to the Present, vol. 2, 1st ed., ed. Christopher R. W. Dietrich (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2020), 855-887. The article is Lewis Sorley, “Vietnam’s Better War,” Orbis 57 (2013): 516-531.
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