This bibliographic essay originally appeared in the June 2016 issue of Choice (volume 53 | number 10).
In 2012, Congress appropriated $65 million for a thirteen-year ongoing series of events commemorating fifty-year anniversaries of Vietnam War dates. One year later, the celebrated filmmaker Ken Burns announced plans for what he called "a mammoth history of the Vietnam War." With millions of federal dollars priming the planning and programming pumps, and the imprimatur given the subject by the US's virtuoso visual documentarian, the prominence of the war in Vietnam in college and university curricula for the coming decade is assured.
Jerry Lembcke (jlembcke@holycross.edu) is emeritus associate professor of sociology at College of the Holy Cross and a distinguished lecturer of the Organization of American Historians.