American Experience in Vietnam: Vietnam War Web Sites

This web site was created in the English department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Among the sections on the web site are a Vietnam War timeline, "The Causes of the Vietnam War", "The Domestic Course of the War", "A Vietnam Photo Essay", "Changing Interpretations of the War", and "Poetry and Vietnam".

This database provides links to full-text, primary documents in American history from 1000 AD to the present. United States documents are organized by presidential administration.

This database provides access to 19th and 20th century primary resources from unique historical digital collections. The database includes such digitized objects as maps, posters, and political cartoons, as well as other resources. The "Browsing Shortcuts" feature will help you focus your search.

"On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh square. The first lines of his speech repeated verbatim the famous second paragraph of America’s 1776 Declaration of Independence."

From the Library of Congress, American Folklife Center, this is a collection of video oral histories and additional material—memoirs (some lengthy), letters, diaries, photo albums, scrapbooks, poetry, artwork, and official documents—from American veterans of 20th-century wars. The site currently provides digital materials from 4,351 veterans from World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War, Afghanistan and the Iraq War, and other similar events.

"The Free Speech Movement (FSM) Digital Archives document the role of Mario Savio and other participants in the Free Speech Movement (University of California, Berkeley, September-December 1964), as well as its origins in political protest and civil rights movements and its legacy of political activism and educational reform that can be traced throughout the country and the world down to the present."

A well-designed and innovative approach to teaching history, this site, designed by Karl Miller, Ellen Noonan, and John Spencer; three Ph.D. candidates at New York University, presents multifaceted perspectives on the May 8, 1970, attacks in New York City on Vietnam War protesters by hundreds of construction workers.

This site is a "... searchable archive of politically significant audio materials ... and is a component of the 'Historical Voices' funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in partnership with the Michigan State University."

Searching for the Vietnam War, you will find webcasts that include autobiography, poetry, a talk by Tim O'Brien, and a number of other presentations by historians, writers, commentators, and political figures. The Library of Congress webcasts are not limited to history;however, but also include the sciences, the arts, religion, technology and a wide variety of other fields.

Hosted by Google Images, the LIFE magazine photo archives allows you to search millions of photographs from the 1750s to the present.

"The heart of this collection of material about Lyndon Baines Johnson is the group of 64 oral history interviews selected from a collection of more than 1,000 ... A selection of 20 speeches and nine messages to Congress ... address issues such as the Great Society and limitations on the war in Vietnam ... Facsimiles of 98 National Security Action memoranda discuss policies towards Vietnam, nuclear weapons, and Latin America, among other issues."

“A collection of textual and audio documents concerning ‘arguably the most important Supreme Court case ever on freedom of the press.’ The case revolved around the 1971 decision to lift prior restraint orders instigated by the Nixon Administration to prohibit publication of the government’s secret historical collection of documents labeled ‘United States-Vietnam Relations 1945–1967.’ These quickly became known to the world as the ‘Pentagon Papers’.”

This is an extensive image gallery from the New York Public Library, and though only four images are found when searching "Vietnam War" these images help represent how this war reached all segments of American society: Three of the four images relate to anti-war protests within the gay community.

"Calisphere is the University of California's free public gateway to a world of primary sources. More than 150,000 digitized items — including photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts — reveal the diverse history and culture of California and its role in national and world history."

Sponsored by the Viet Nam Generation, Inc., and the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, this site is a resource for teaching and researching America in the 1960s and during the Vietnam War.

Listen to tapes of four telephone conversations about the Vietnam War secretly recorded by Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office in 1964. This site is related to the Houghton Mifflin textbook, CHALLENGE OF DEMOCRACY, and to "History and Politics Out Loud", a web site created by Jerry Goldman, one of the book’s authors.

Directed out of Buffalo State College, "The Vietnam Veterans Oral History and Folklore Project is engaged in an ongoing undertaking to collect, preserve and make better known the folklore, especially the folksongs, of Americans in war." What distinguishes this site is its focus on " ... the songs made by the American men and women, civilian and military, who served ... (in Vietnam), for themselves."

In April 2000, the Gerald R. Ford Library released approximately 30,000 pages of classified documents concerning the Vietnam War. Many are from National Security Advisors Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft and their staffs and deal with the decision to evacuate U.S. forces from Vietnam in April 1975.

An introduction to the history of the Vietnam War, this site was developed for a course taught by Robert Brigham in the history department at Vassar College, “the first American scholar given access to the Vietnamese archives on the war in Hanoi.” The site offers an overview of the war featuring 20 primary documents and 47 links to related resources both historical and contemporary.

Among the information you will find here is lists of O'Brien's published work, a collection of interviews, discussions of his work, bibliographies, audio & video, biographical information, research links for students, and a list of colleges and universities reading The Things They Carried.

This PBS web site on the Vietnam War is part of the "American Experience" series. It includes an extensive timeline of the war, a "Who's Who" section, information on the weapons of war, the My Lai Massacre, the M.I.A. issue, a list of terms and acronyms used in the war, a list of primary sources, a maps section, personal reflections from people with a connection to the war ("Reflections"), place where readers can share personnel reflections, and a teacher's guide.

Moise is a professor of history at Clemson University who teaches on the Vietnam War. His bibliography is extensive and covers all aspects of the war and includes both items published commercially and by government agencies. Publications from countries outside the United States are provided and a wide variety of viewpoints is represented. Dr. Moise also links to a web page he has developed for his students titled "Writing a Term Paper in Military History."

Part of the University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections, this small collection of 232 items “contains leaflets and newspapers that were distributed on the University of Washington campus during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. They reflect the social environment and political activities of the youth movement in Seattle during that period.” The collection can be browsed in 24 thematic categories that include Vietnam protests, pro-Vietnam War, “Age of Aquarius,” and …

"Offering access to more than 2,500 hours of White House recordings of six American presidents between 1940 and 1973, this website presents recordings from Franklin Roosevelt (8 hours), Harry Truman (10 hours), Dwight Eisenhower (4.5 hours), John Kennedy (260 hours), Lyndon Johnson (550 hours), and Richard Nixon (2,019 hours)."

Virtual Library's directory of websites in American history. Topical areas include Women's History, Ethnic Studies, the Beat Generation, U.S. Military History, Radicalism and Reform, the Cold War, Generational Studies and more.

Leslie Gelb, a State Department official during the Vietnam War and Defense Department official afterward, offers an insider’s appraisal ... of the reasons for the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

From the "Vietnam War 25 Years After" web site from the College of Charleston, this admittedly incomplete list presents 43 songs, written between 1962 and 1996, that reflect upon the Vietnam conflict. Within the list you will find links to the lyrics (though some links are inactive). Regardless, it is a useful list that can lead to further exploration of the connection between Vietnam and music.