Nu-Anh Tran, University of Connecticut

Nu-Anh Tran is Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. She graduated with a PhD from UC Berkeley and has worked extensively in American and Vietnamese archives.

What was the Vietnam War about? Most American scholarship focuses on the confrontation between American intervention and Vietnamese communism, but the war was also a conflict between different groups of Vietnamese. This presentation explains that the war was part of a longer struggle between Vietnamese nationalists that predated American involvement. It proposes a new conceptual approach to the war and focuses on South Vietnamese anticommunism.