The historiography of the Vietnam War has shifted over the decades. At the moment, there is what some might call—at least in some US-based scholarship—a “Republican” moment in which there is growing interest in interrogating the Republic of Vietnam's role and redeeming its often maligned status as a “puppet” of American imperialism. Some of this appears to be a re-righting/re-writing of representations; others suspect underlying conservative political agendas to justify America's wartime involvement in Southeast Asia.
Efforts to revisit the history of the 1954–75 era have tapped once-unavailable state archives, drawing on Vietnamese-language documents to access and convey alternative information to a general public assumed to be swayed by nationalist historiographies. Individual archival ventures on narrow topics aside, there nonetheless exists a vast amount of available material—across more than two generations of peer-reviewed scholarly works from within and outside Vietnam, collaborative archival findings across multiple institutional and private archives, and...
