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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Laderman, Scott. "Witnessing the Past: History, Tourism, and Memory in Vietnam, 1930-2002," American Studies, University of Minnesota, July 2005.
This dissertation reexamines the history of America and Vietnam through the lens of travel and tourism. Through archival and published documents from Vietnam and the United States, interviews and oral histories of Americans and Vietnamese, and extensive fieldwork in Southeast Asia, I examine the ways that tourism became directly embroiled in U.S. foreign relations and domestic American politics throughout much of the twentieth century. I argue that tourism has been intertwined with the projection of American power. For example, I show how the U.S. Defense Department, beginning in 1963, published travel guidebooks as vehicles for instilling in military personnel the necessity of the Vietnam intervention. I show how tourism’s attendant literature - guidebooks, pamphlets and brochures, etc. - has historically served both to construct contemporary notions of Vietnam in the minds of travelers, almost always in ways favorable to American foreign policy goals. I trace how, from 1957 until the major American escalation in 1965, tourism served as a means for authorities in the Republic of Vietnam (“South Vietnam”) to promote the fledgling state’s disputed international legitimacy. And I survey the manner in which Vietnamese and Western guidebooks from the early twentieth century to the present - in combination with films and literature - have helped to define historical knowledge of foreigners in Vietnam in ways that have often served American interests.
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