Historian and professor Sean Fear joins Kenneth to discuss the complexities of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and how it shaped the war’s outcome. Together, they revisit moments and ask a provocative question: What if South Vietnam had been better funded, structured, and supported? Could history have unfolded differently? This conversation offers a nuanced take on counterfactual history, American foreign policy, and the often-overlooked perspectives of Vietnamese actors in a war too often told from the outside in.
Dr. Sean Fear is a Lecturer in International History at the University of Leeds (UK), where he also directs international activities and teaches on Vietnam and Cold War history. He earned his Ph.D. in History from Cornell University and his undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto.
His work focuses on the interplay between South Vietnamese domestic politics and U.S. foreign policy during 1967–1975, drawing extensively on Vietnamese-language archives, memoirs, and media—his forthcoming book (with Harvard University Press) examines South Vietnam’s struggle for legitimacy.
Professor Fear has held fellowships at Dartmouth’s John Sloan Dickey Center, New York University’s Centre on the Cold War, McGill University, and the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada. In 2022–23, he served as Visiting Professor at Fulbright University Vietnam and advises Ho Chi Minh City’s Independence Palace Museum. He's also co-editor (with Tuong Vu) of The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975: Vietnamese Perspectives on Nation Building (Cornell University Press, 2020).
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Many of you still have the chance to record and preserve the legacies of your own families. I’ve sat with families now for interview sessions to record the rich histories of parents and explore the lives of the generations that preceded them. Don’t let your family stories go untold! Take a moment to reach out and together we will bring out your family’s story on a recorded journey. - Kenneth Nguyen
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