The Blue Collar Scholar

History in My Lifetime, episode 3 - American Wars: Vietnam to Iran

Episode Summary

This episode is designed to jog your memory and trigger discussions regarding all of the American wars of the last 70 years. Special emphasis is given to the Vietnam War. It was such a drawn-out, bloody, and exhausting conflict. It was sold as part of a great struggle of the democratic West against communism. However, from the very beginning, the War in Vietnam felt like an anti-colonial struggle by the Vietnamese people against their colonizers, especially when they were facing the French in the earliest part of the war. By the time it was over, it was an exhausting war that challenged America's prevailing belief in our own military invincibility. The war spawned an anti-war movement so strong that even many conservative hawks grew to oppose the war by the early 1970s. This episode also digs into a variety of other Cold War-related struggles, as well as the War on Terror, with all of its individual conflicts across the broad Muslim world.