Dr.+Robert+K.+Brigham

=**Dr. Robert K. Brigham **=

====** Day Four: [|Robert K. Brigham] ** Professor of History on the Shirley Ecker Boskey Chair of International Relationsof Vassar College will cover the Cold War through 1990. . He teaches courses on the history of American foreign relations, modern America, and international history. Along with several teaching awards, Brigham has also earned fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for Humanities, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute, the Cooper Foundation, the Gilman Foundation, and the Social Sciences Committee in Hanoi, Vietnam. In addition, Brigham has been Albert Shaw Endowed Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, Mellon Senior Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University (Clare College), visiting professor of international relations at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, and Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History (Fulbright) at University College Dublin. Brigham is author of numerous books and essays on American foreign relations and politics, including // Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF's Foreign Relations and the Vietnam War // (Cornell, 1998); // Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy // (Public Affairs, 1999) written with Robert S. McNamara and James G. Blight; // ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army // (Kansas, 2006); // Is Iraq Another Vietnam? // (Public Affairs, 2006); // Iraq ////, Vietnam, and the Limits of American Power // (Public Affairs, 2008); // The Global Ho Chi Minh // (Potomac, 2009); and // The Wars for Vietnam //, written with Mark P. Bradley and Lien-Hang Nguyen (Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming). Brigham is currently working on a history of nation building in South Vietnam (Cambridge), a textbook on America's wars in Iraq, and a book about the future of U.S. foreign policy. ====

America's longest war ended more than two decades ago, yet a number of significant and important questions remain unanswered: What was the nature of the modern Vietnamese revolution? How can we explain the American intervention? Why did the war drag on so long? Critics of the American intervention claim that the war was unnecessary and immoral and that policymakers in Washington dragged the country into an unwanted war. In contrast, a small group of scholars and military leaders offer an emotional defense of American intervention. A careful examination of the myriad sources reveals that neither view is entirely accurate and that the interplay of events was far more complicated than most accounts suggest. This site, developed around the course materials for Robert Brigham's senior seminar on the Viet Nam War at [|Vassar College], offers students an opportunity to examine some of those sources, including numerous official documents. Brigham was the first American scholar given access to the Vietnamese archives on the war in Hanoi. Included here are his translations of some of the Hanoi documents, offered for examination and study. []