When I was an undergraduate history major in college, I learned much from the inspired teaching of the great Grinnell College historian Joseph F. Wall. One of the books assigned was E. H. Carr’s, What is History? Later in graduate school, one of my best professors told me it was a dangerous book. But I discovered a great deal from Wall and from the book, including the astounding claim that the history was not the same as “the past,” and, even more confusing, that the present influences the past, an observation that was not immediately obvious to students. As Carr wrote, history should be understood as “an unending dialogue between the present and the past.”1¹ Nowhere is the truth of this observation more evident than in the literature about U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. Without the traumatic war in Vietnam, it is very unlikely that we would even be having this discussion regarding the historical literature about U.S. involvement in Vietnam and greater Southeast Asia.

中文翻译：

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东南亚：我们去过哪里，我们可以去哪里？

当我在大学攻读历史本科时，我从格林内尔学院伟大的历史学家约瑟夫·F·沃尔的启发性教学中学到了很多东西。分配的书之一是EH Carr的《历史是什么？后来在研究生院，我最好的一位教授告诉我这是一本危险的书。但是我从沃尔和书中发现了很多东西，包括令人震惊的说法，即历史与“过去”不同，更令人困惑的是，现在影响着过去，这种观察并没有立即显而易见。给学生。正如卡尔所言，历史应被理解为“现在与过去之间的无休止的对话。” 1 ¹这种观察的真相在关于美国卷入东南亚的文献中最明显。如果没有越南的创伤性战争，我们甚至不可能就美国介入越南和更大的东南亚的历史文献进行讨论。