Joe Dunn has been a college professor for over forty-eight years. He teaches courses on the Vietnam War, the Cold War, Middle East conflict, and Revolutions and Totalitarian Regimes. The number of wars has increased, and his courses address other areas of national security, terrorism, and political tyranny as well. The course discussed here had…

Biography has a proven track record of exciting interest in historical events. Barbara Tuchman used it extensively in her best-selling histories, considering it a "vehicle to carry the larger subject," something that "encompasses the universal in a particular... representative." Others favor biography because it "humanizes history," "personalizes…

Once adapted to the context of the classroom, the tenets of successful counterinsurgency offer teachers a potent intellectual framework for conceptualizing teachers' efforts to build effective active learning communities together with their students. In this article, the author describes a counterinsurgency analogy that shares essential features…

Describes reading material which can be used to teach about the Vietnam War at the college level. (RM)

Discusses problems with military documentation during the Vietnam War. Reports poor record keeping practices, destruction of permanent files, and mislabeled and missing records. Describes the National Archives' Vietnam project that organized and preserved the remaining military records. Concludes that the Vietnam War was better documented than the…

A comparison of the Vietnam War to the American Revolution draws analogies between the military policies of the two conflicts. (KM)

A school-year research experiment using primary resources to teach an important national issue--protest movements against the Vietnam War at the local level--is an excellent way to motivate students and energize classroom teaching. Every local community in America has its own story to tell about the war in Vietnam. Whether it is about a local son…

American history surveys and monographs have been dominated by discourses on war. The vocabulary itself--the inter-war period, postwar planning, the prewar economy, the revolutionary war generation, the irrepressible conflict--strongly suggests that the United States has been in a virtual state of war throughout its history. Ironically, this…

Improving critical thinking--defined by one expert as "reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do"--has been a frequent topic in the writing of history educators at least since the early 1970s. Attitudes and interests do support higher-level thinking and, most importantly, knowledge used in carrying it out…

Clarifies the problem of perception in history. Offers an invented conversation based on personal experience and other sources as a means to presenting an interpretation of modern war and demonstrating how different generations interpret events. Considers the "war" between empiricists and postmodernists and its effect on history teachers. (CMK)

Discusses a history professor's attempt to awaken students' interest by assigning an oral history project rather than a traditional research paper. Reports that adding to the personal dimension to the project increased students enthusiasm and introduced them to problems of historical research and historiography. Includes problems of reliability…