Military scholar to give talk on Vietnam War at W&J

Created: October 25, 2017  |  Last Updated: January 14, 2020  |  Category:   |  Tagged: ,

WASHINGTON, PA (Oct. 25, 2017)—Author, professor and Vietnam War expert Gregory Daddis will present his lecture, “Withdrawal: America’s Final Years in Vietnam,” at Washington & Jefferson College (W&J) at 7 p.m. Nov. 2.

The talk will be held in Yost Auditorium in the Howard J. Burnett Center and is free and open to the public.

Daddis specializes in the history of the Vietnam War and the Cold War Era. He has authored four books, including his most recent entry Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam, which debuted in early October 2017. Through his writing, Daddis offers a reinterpretation of American strategy during the Vietnam War and dispels major myths surrounding conflict.

The lecture is sponsored by the W&J History Department with financial support from the College’s National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fund and is organized by Assistant Professor of History David Kieran, Ph.D., who said Daddis’s talk will likely be greatly influential for students and community members alike.

“More than any other event in the 20th century, the Vietnam War has defined how Americans think about the United States’ contemporary foreign policy commitments. Understanding the Vietnam War in all of its complexity is essential to our goal of becoming citizens who are capable of engaging in meaningful debate over those issues,” said W&J Assistant Professor of History David Kieran, Ph.D.

Daddis is an associate professor of history and director of Chapman University’s master’s program in War and Society. Prior to joining the faculty at Chapman, Daddis was the Chief of the American History Division in the Department of History at The United States Military Academy at West Point and is a retired US Army colonel, having served in Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

“Greg Daddis is both a career as a military officer who served in Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq and a very good historian who has taught at West Point, and studied and written about U.S. strategy and leadership in Vietnam in a way that is both accessible and innovative,” Kieran said. “For us at W&J, it’s a unique opportunity to engage with a scholar who is doing cutting edge work in the field and who also has a background that is relatively unique among historians of the war.”

About Washington & Jefferson College

Washington & Jefferson College, located in Washington, Pa., is a selective liberal arts college founded in 1781. Committed to providing each of its students with the highest-quality undergraduate education available, W&J offers a traditional arts and sciences curriculum emphasizing interdisciplinary study and independent study work. For more information about W&J, visit www.washjeff.edu, or call 888-W-AND-JAY.

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