During the vietnam war the tet offensive what conflict was called the soviet union's vietnam3/8/2024 ![]() ![]() ![]() involvement in Central America would lead to “another Vietnam” ultimately proved exaggerated. Herring observed, is almost always misleading, because the analogies often rest on superficial knowledge and debatable premises - and because history never repeats itself. Thus, when people seek to avoid “another Vietnam,” some of them are calling for the United States to stay out of civil conflicts in foreign cultures, while others insist that when America does intervene, it must do so with decisive force and the assurance of public support.īut “reasoning by analogy,” Dr. For some, typically on the left, the mistake of Vietnam was to have been involved there at all for some on the right, the mistake was to lose. But the “lessons” that disputants claim to have learned from Vietnam tend to reflect their personal political predilections. Vietnam, as he pointed out, continues to cast a long shadow on every debate over sending U.S. Herring, the Alumni Professor of History at the University of Kentucky and author of several acclaimed works on the Vietnam War, cautioned against misusing history to derive lessons that it is not capable of providing. ![]() History teaches us “how to think, not what to do.” So concluded George Herring in his keynote lecture on the lessons of Vietnam. Unsurprisingly, no simple answers were forthcoming, but from the complex portraits of diplomacy, Cold War grand strategy, and electoral politics emerged a larger picture of the war that provided teachers with new perspectives and numerous provocative techniques to help students discover the war for themselves. But the question underlying all of them, the real reason for the conference, was deceptively simple: How should we teach the history of the Vietnam War to our children today? More than forty high school and college history teachers from around the country convened on May 6-7 for FPRI’s sixth History Institute to craft answers to that question. How did the United States get into Vietnam? What was it doing there? What happened at home? How did we get out? What have we learned? For two days, these questions were explored in great depth by some of the country’s most renowned authorities on the period. ![]()
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