Witnessing the past: History, tourism, and memory in Vietnam, 1930--2002

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, as well as domestic American politics, throughout much of the twentieth century. I argue that tourism has been (and, in important ways, has continued to be) intertwined with the projection of American power. For example, I show the ways in which 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 as well as shape their understandings of the very recent past, 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. I address the ways that the history and memory of the American intervention has been debated amongst tourists at contemporary Vietnam's leading museum devoted to the war. 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 for thousands of foreigners in Vietnam in ways that have often served American interests.