HIST 401: Senior Seminar- Vietnam Wars: Digital Web Collections

This collection of declassified estimative products is the first such release by the Central Intelligence Agency of documents exclusively on the Vietnam war. The National Intelligence Council (NIC) commissioned Lloyd Gardner, the renowned American scholar on the Vietnam war, to prepare an introductory essay providing historical context for the documents.

The DPLA consolidates items from various digital collections into a central location for searching. If you look at the information in the left hand column, you will notice that it tracks the "owning institution" of the items listed in the search. I would recommend going to these institution's various sites, i.e. National Archives.

Photographs, memorandums, letters, leaflets, and official government documents capturing the Vietnam era.

The original formats include manuscripts, prints, photographs, posters, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, books, pamphlets, and sheet music. Each online collection is accompanied by a set of explanatory features designed to make the materials easy to find, use, and understand. Collections may be browsed individually, searched individually (including full-text searching for many written items), or searched across multiple collections.

Limited online collections, but does offer a unique perspective on the Johnson administration and the man

The Pentagon Papers, officially titled "Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force", was commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967. In June of 1971, small portions of the report were leaked to the press and widely distributed. However, the publications of the report that resulted from these leaks were incomplete and suffered from many quality issues.

On the 40th anniversary of the leak to the press, the National Archives, along with the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon Presidential Libraries, has released the complete report. There are 48 boxes and approximately 7,000 declassified pages. Approximately 34% of the report is available for the first time.

The National Archives has custody of a wide assortment of both textual documents and electronic records related to the Vietnam conflict.

The Central Intelligence Agency participated in every aspect of the wars in Indochina, political and military, according to newly declassified CIA histories. The six volumes of formerly secret histories (the Agency's belated response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by National Security Archive senior fellow John Prados) document CIA activities in South and North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in unprecedented detail. The histories contain a great deal of new material and shed light on aspects of the CIA's work that were not well known or were poorly understood.

Vietnam: A Television History was a landmark documentary series produced by WGBH. This collection contains most of the materials gathered and created for the 1983 series, as well as additional Vietnam-related materials from the WGBH archive. Vietnam: A Television History was one of the last WGBH series produced entirely on film. Starting in 2008, materials were reconstructed, transferred, and digitized for preservation and access.