UNKEPT WOMEN: Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris
Lecture by NINA KUSHNER D'90, Assistant Professor of History, Clark University
TOPPLING KUCHUM, CROSSING A CONTINENT: Russia's Conquest of Siberia and Expansion Across Eurasia
Lecture by Erika Monahan D'96, Assistant Professor of History, University of New Mexico
Associate Professor of History
Office: 204 Carson Hall
Office Phone: (603) 646-2096
Fax: (603) 646-3353
Email: Edward.Miller@Dartmouth.edu
Edward Miller is a historian of American Foreign Relations and modern Vietnam, with particular expertise in the Vietnam War. He received his B.A. degree from Swarthmore College, an M.A. from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University (2004). His research examines the Vietnam War from international and transnational history perspectives; he is especially interested in the connections between that war and global histories of development, nation building, and counterinsurgency. In addition to conducting research in U.S. and European archives, Prof. Miller has also worked extensively in archives and libraries in Vietnam.
At Dartmouth, Prof. Miller teaches courses on the Vietnam War, American empire, the Cold War in Asia and the Middle East, Guerilla Warfare and Counterinsurgency, and the United States and the World. In Fall 2013 he will collaborate with Prof. Leslie Butler in teaching a new historical methods course, entitled “What is History?”
Prof. Miller’s first book, entitled Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam, will be published by Harvard University Press in Spring 2013. This book presents a new interpretation of Ngo Dinh Diem, who ruled the anticommunist state of South Vietnam from 1954 until his death in 1963. Once hailed by U.S. leaders as “the miracle man of Southeast Asia,” Diem was ousted and assassinated in a military coup endorsed by President John F. Kennedy. In Misalliance, Prof. Miller overturns the received wisdom about Diem’s downfall and the larger tragedy of South Vietnam.
For Diem and U.S. leaders, Prof. Miller argues, the alliance was more than just a joint effort to contain communism. It was also a means for each side to pursue its plans for nation building in South Vietnam. This definitive portrait of Diem—based on extensive research in Vietnamese, French and American archives—shows that the South Vietnamese leader was neither Washington’s pawn nor a tradition-bound mandarin. Rather, he was a shrewd and ruthless operator with his own vision for Vietnam’s modernization. In 1963, clashes between the allies over development and reform, combined with rising internal resistance to Diem’s nation building programs, fractured the alliance and changed the course of the Vietnam War. By revealing the true story of the rise and fall of the U.S.-Diem partnership, Misalliance shows how America’s fate in Vietnam was written not only on the battlefield but also in Washington’s dealings with its Vietnamese allies.
