Vietnam Topic of Teachers' Workshop

The road to American involvement in Vietnam will be explored in a workshop for schoolteachers Saturday (March 16) at Bates College.

The program, “Why Vietnam? The U.S. Path toward Intervention, 1945-65,” is sponsored by The Maine Collaborative, a consortium of Maine colleges and universities which offers programs in the arts and humanities for teachers in the state.

The faculty for the all-day session includes Christopher Beam, director of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives at Bates; Robert Whelan, a lecturer in English at the University of Maine; Robert Weisbrot, a professor of history at Colby College; and Jon Oplinger, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Maine at Farmington. The workshop will include discussion of Graham Greene’s novel “The Quiet American,” which examines the early days of American involvement in Southeast Asia.

Teachers interested in taking part should call The Maine Collaborative in Portland at 207-828-1529.

The program will include a background lecture and discussion on Vietnamese geography and culture; a discussion of the French involvement in Indochina and the emergence of nationalist leaders such as Ho Chi Minh; and a lecture on the steps by which the United States became more and more deeply involved, politically and militarily, in Vietnam during the 1960s.