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Twenty-Five Years Later:

Historian Cottrell Reports on Vietnam

Robert Cottrell, Department of History, will present "Rebuilding a Nation: Vietnam since 1975" in the third segment of the Friends of History Lecture Series titled "Historians View the Construction of Nationality." The lecture will be given on November 12 at 4 p.m. in PAC 134 and is based on Cottrell's 11-day visit to Vietnam this past summer.

Cottrell created the course America's Vietnam Experience, which he began teaching shortly after coming to CSU, Chico, in 1984. In the late '60s and early '70s, when U.S. involvement with Vietnam was intense and hostile, Cottrell was attending the University of Texas, Austin and became immersed in political activism. For Cottrell, as for most Americans who came of age during this era, the experience of the Vietnam War on home soil -- and perhaps especially on a college campus -- was profound.

Cottrell's graduate work at the Universities of Texas, Arlington, and Oklahoma (where he earned his Ph.D. in 1983) was primarily in U.S. history, especially American reform and radical movements, and secondarily in Latin American history. He has published several books: Izzy: A Biography of I.F. Stone; The Social Gospel of E. Nicholas Comfort: Founder of the Oklahoma School of Religion; and Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union. He has three more forthcoming: 1920: The Black Sox, Blackball, and the Babe; Rube Foster, Blackball Giant; and the co-authored textbook Uncertain Order: The World in the Twentieth Century.

The recipient of numerous awards, including a CSU Stanley Wang Family Excellence Award this year and the CSU, Chico Outstanding Professor Award for 1998-99, Cottrell has always had a fundamental interest in Vietnam. This summer for the first time, he got to see the land he teaches about. He toured northern, central, and southern areas of the country and was deeply impressed with Vietnam's physical beauty and hardworking people. In his talk, Cottrell plans to discuss the significance Vietnam has long held for Americans and give a brief overview of the war's end, particularly its aftermath.

"Rebuilding a Nation" is free and open to the public and is co-sponsored by the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, the Department of History, and the Humanities Center. A reception will follow. For information, call the Department of History at x5366. On Monday, November 13, at noon, the Humanities Center will sponsor a follow-up discussion with Cottrell in the University Center Lounge. For information, call Rob Burton, director of the center, at x6568.

Thomasin Saxe, College of Humanities and Fine Arts