The preliminary agenda for the Vietnam Center’s 2013 conference is now available online.

The Vietnam Center and Archive is proud to announce that we will host our 2013 annual conference in partnership with the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and the Department of Defense 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War Commemoration. The conference will take place at the McGowan Theater in the National Archives in Washington, DC, Sept. 26-28, 2013. To organize this conference, we have worked very closely in collaboration with three important scholars of the Vietnam War to include Dr. Lien-Hang T. Nguyen (University of Kentucky), Dr. Edward Miller (Dartmouth College) and Dr. Larry Berman (Georgia State University).

The intellectual objectives of this conference are to examine the year 1963 as it has long been viewed as a watershed in both the history of the Vietnam War and in the evolution of the United States’ intervention in that conflict. The Battle of Ap Bac, the “Buddhist crisis” and the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc, the abortive “Kennedy withdrawal” of U.S. military advisors from South Vietnam, the overthrow and death of Ngo Dinh Diem in the Saigon coup of November, the Kennedy assassination that same month, the Ninth Plenum of the Vietnam Worker’s Party—all of these events and many others shaped the subsequent escalation of the Vietnam War and contributed to its transformation into a major international conflict. This conference (which will take place during the fiftieth anniversary year of these events) will highlight recent research on various aspects of 1963 in Vietnam. In addition, we expect the conference to use 1963 as a means to explore the larger themes and trends running throughout the history of the Vietnam War. This conference will bring together specialists in the history of the Vietnam War, U.S. foreign relations, international history, the Cold War, and Vietnamese studies.

More information will be added to the conference website as it becomes available.

Vietnam Center Conference – Vietnam, 1963
September 26th-28th, 2013
McGowan Theater, NARA
700 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, DC

Conference website: www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/2013_Conference

Preliminary Agenda: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/2013_Conference/agenda.htm