HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2025-01-23T10:59:20.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Who was the greatest President of the United States in history?
items: Sixties counterculture: everything you wanted to know
items: Dien Bien Phu: the battle that split Vietnam
items: The Vietnam War: everything you wanted to know
items: Star Wars: why did the film make history?
items: The war that America could never win? Opposition, dissent and the Vietnam War
items: Your guide to the Vietnam War – plus 7 surprising facts you might not know
items: From the Napoleonic Wars to Vietnam and Iraq: a history of war trauma
items: Max Hastings on Vietnam
items: Seymour Hersh on the US civil rights movement and the Vietnam War

Who was the greatest President of the United States in history?
type: item
date: 2025-01-23T10:59:20.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: US presidents
description: Seven historians put forward their nominations for the most accomplished leader to have sat in the White House
encoded: George Washington In office: 1789–97 Party affiliation: none Nominated by: Thomas Kidd, historian and author of Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh (Yale, 2022) George Washington was the first president in US history – and I’m nominating him as the best, too. I am basing this on his success as a leader, his ability to negotiate conflict in his administration, and most importantly the example he set for future presidents. Americans at the time of the Revolutionary War were enamoured with the ideal of the virtuous republican leader, in the model of the ancient Roman general Cincinnatus. Washington was no perfect man, of course, and like many elite southern Americans he was a slaveholder. But in politics he came the closest to manifesting the republican ideal of any American president. Washington became president after serving as the commander of the Continental Army during the fight for independence from the British. His leadership of the army was not uniformly positive, but his tenacity ultimately led to a successful outcome. Many suspected he might simply remain in the position as a kind of benevolent autocrat, but he resigned from the army in late 1783, returning to his Mount Vernon home in Virginia. Befitting the respect that he commanded, Washington was chosen to preside over the Constitutional Convention of 1787, where the US Constitution was drafted. Then he became the first president to be elected under that Constitution in 1789, in a unanimous vote of the electoral college. Washington dealt with major political conflicts in his administration, especially between the treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, who bitterly disagreed over economic policy and the direction of the new republic. Washington was largely (if not completely) able to rise above the partisan bickering, and always believed that the republic and its leaders needed to manifest consensus for the public good. He assiduously reached out to m…

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Sixties counterculture: everything you wanted to know
type: item
date: 2022-12-04T10:03:59.000Z
creator: Spencer Mizen
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
description: From hippies and protests to mind-altering music, Alwyn Turner tackles listener questions on the anti-establishment movement that swept the west in the 1960s
encoded: Where did the term “hippie” originate? What music best reflected a generation’s disaffection with the establishment, and opposition to the Vietnam War? And how did the culture wars of the sixties shape attitudes to race, gender equality and sexual liberation? Speaking with Spencer Mizen, Alwyn Turner answers listener questions on 1960s counterculture.

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Dien Bien Phu: the battle that split Vietnam
type: item
date: 2022-07-20T16:00:53.000Z
creator: Julian Humphrys
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
description: France’s catastrophic defeat at Dien Bien Phu in northwest Vietnam in May 1954 ended its hopes of maintaining any influence in Indochina and set the stage for the monumental Vietnam War. Julian Humphrys explains…
encoded: The French had always been rather half-hearted about the war against the Viet Minh. Whereas the brunt of Britain’s post-war military efforts was borne by National Servicemen, the French decided not to send any conscripts to fight in Vietnam. The result was that their generals were always short of boots on the ground and the ‘French’ forces that fought in the war were actually an amalgam of local forces, troops raised from their other colonies, soldiers from the French Foreign Legion and a smattering of French regulars. By 1953, the French government had faced the inevitable. Starved of men and short of popular support, they were never going to be able to force the surrender of the Viet Minh. It was now simply a case of strengthening their position at the bargaining table. To achieve that end, General Henri Navarre, their new military commander in Indochina, was instructed to improve the military situation in the country. Read more in our guide to the Vietnam War Dien Bien Phu: in context French Indochina refers to an amalgamation of colonial territories in southeast Asia ruled by France from 1887 onwards. During World War II, the colony was occupied by Japan, who ousted the French. Following the Japanese surrender at the war’s end, Vietnamese independence was declared by the Viet Minh, a communist coalition led by Hô Chi Minh. However, France quickly resumed control, causing the outbreak of a war of independence in 1946 – the First Indochina War. The battle of Dien Bien Phu extinguished French influence in the region. When? 20 November 1953 to 7 May 1954 Where? Dien Bien Phu, northwest Vietnam Who fought? Viet Minh (General Võ Nguyên Giáp) 50,000 troops, 15,000 support troops, 250,000 civilians French Republic (Colonel Christian de Castries) 2,800 French, 2,900 Foreign Legion, 2,900 Africans, 5,500 Indochinese Who won? Viet Minh victory Losses: Viet Minh c23,000 killed and wounded French c2,000 killed, 6,000 wounded, 11,000 prisoners Although Navarre planned to use …

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The Vietnam War: everything you wanted to know
type: item
date: 2021-05-09T11:32:21.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Cold War
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
description: Mark Atwood Lawrence responds to readers’ questions about the United States’ failure to stem the advance of communism in Vietnam
encoded: Historian Mark Atwood Lawrence responds to listener questions and popular internet search queries on the Vietnam War, one of the most seismic events of the Cold War, American history and the history of Southeast Asia. He explores some of the biggest debates surrounding the United States’ failure to stem the advance of communism in Vietnam. Mark Atwood Lawrence is the author of The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (OUP USA, 2021) Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones Buy now on Bookshop.org

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Star Wars: why did the film make history?
type: item
date: 2020-05-04T13:40:00.000Z
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Space
subject: TV interest
description: Professor Nicholas John Cull explores the history of the Star Wars franchise, and explains why in 1977 thousands of people flocked to cinemas to be taken to a galaxy far, far away...
encoded: There is a moment in the first Star Wars film when the mystic Obi Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) detects across at great distance of space the destruction of a planet and remarks: “I felt a great disturbance in the Force… as if as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.” So what might the particular “disturbance in the Force” associated with the release of the first film in the series back in May 1977 mean historically? What does it say about the time in which it was made and the people who so took it to their hearts? And what does the ongoing success of the franchise say about us? A poster for the 1977 fantasy film 'Star Wars' starring Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher. (Photo by Movie Poster Image Art/Getty Images)At one level, Star Wars was – and is – a commercial commodity: a milestone in the evolution of the film industry. Its creator, George Lucas, demonstrated that films could be made for families; that spectacular effects could help film to claw back some territory from the small-screen entertainment; and profits could be swollen to astonishing proportions though tie-in merchandise. Other films of the era attempted similar synergies, but there was plainly something about Star Wars that struck a particular chord. Reports of initial audiences in the US stressed how hungry they seemed for what Star Wars offered: the film was fundamentally not like so many other elements of the culture in which it landed – a world that was only too happy to embrace the film’s escapism because it had so much that it wished to escape from. For the initial audiences in America and beyond, the experience of viewing Star Wars was a curious mixture of watching something completely new and something incredibly familiar. It was a paradox, illustrated in the film’s opening declaration that it was set “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”. Listen | Dominic Sandbrook explores how science fiction books and movies can offer insights into the past The fami…

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The war that America could never win? Opposition, dissent and the Vietnam War
type: item
date: 2020-03-27T15:55:14.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: As GIs struggled to overcome their communist enemies in the jungle, another very different adversary brought the fight to the streets of America. Jonny Wilkes explores the hidden enemy for BBC History Revealed…
encoded: Somewhere in the line of veterans – a single file of bedraggled hair, faded fatigues, wheelchairs and crutches – as they slowly snake towards the Capitol Building is Barry Romo. The former lieutenant of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade enlisted believing in fighting communism, and wishing to emulate his father’s deeds in World War II, but now he is joining comrades to protest the war in Vietnam. Today, 23 April 1971, is the end of a week of demonstrations, street theatre, candlelit vigils, arrests and camping on the Mall in Washington DC, and there is one last act of defiance, and sacrifice, for Romo to perform. He looks down at his medals, which he will soon be rid of. He remembers when his patrol in Tam Kỳ province was ambushed by the Viet Cong and he, just 19 years old, ran out in the open rice paddy to wave down a medevac chopper. He received a Bronze Star for saving the wounded. He remembers when his platoon sergeant stepped on an American ‘Bouncing Betty’ mine and had his intestines and stomach blown out. He remembers his beloved nephew being shot in the throat and it taking 48 hours before the body could be retrieved. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/03/30b.GettyImages-120555904-d1a2490.jpg" width="1024" height="695" alt="Hippies, veterans and celebrities alike descended on the Mall, Washington, DC to protest the war." title="Hippies, veterans and celebrities alike descended on the Mall, Washington, DC to protest the war. (Photo by Don Carl STEFFEN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)" /> It is almost his turn. Romo looks at each man stepping to the microphone to say a few words before turning and hurling their medals, ribbons and dogtags at the Capitol, stood behind a quickly constructed fence to keep protestors out. Many curse the government, others apologise, and one limping man throws his cane. Rejecting these symbols of bravery is a powerful display of how the war has no meaning. Romo says of his medals: “These ain’t shi…

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Your guide to the Vietnam War – plus 7 surprising facts you might not know
type: item
date: 2020-03-26T11:59:43.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
description: The Vietnam War (1954–75) was fought between the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam (known as the Viet Cong) on one side, and the government of South Vietnam and its key ally, the United States, on the other, and it defined America in the second half of the 20th century. But how much do you know about the controversial Vietnam War?
encoded: The Vietnam War came to define America in the second half of the 20th century, after America became entangled in Vietnam following a disastrous French attempt to prevent Indochina [the area of south-east Asia that contains Vietnam] from gaining its independence. So contentious was the conflict that for years afterwards the country suffered marches, riots and even deaths as a result of the turmoil. US conscripts, who had no option but to serve, returned home to be branded ‘baby killers’, and the anti-war movement was portrayed by the political right as un-American. Here's a brief guide to one of the most complicated conflicts in history, plus seven facts you might not know… What was the Vietnam war about? American interests in Vietnam went back over a decade before US President Lyndon B Johnson deployed troops. The rise of communists in North Vietnam, led by Ho Chi Minh, in the 1950s had turned the divided country into a Cold War battleground. As the US believed that if one state fell to communism, others would follow – the 'Domino Theory' – they had to get involved (albeit incrementally). Who won the Vietnam War? Certainly not the US, who withdrew in 1973 humiliated, the national psyche and economy in tatters for years to come and more than 58,000 men dead. Vietnam came out even worse as millions perished and the country had been all but destroyed. Yet North Vietnam had stood toe-to-toe against a global superpower and forced them to retreat. Was Britain involved? In terms of rhetoric, Britain proved a tepid ally. Even with LBJ pushing Prime Minister Harold Wilson for a greater show of support, – as part of his 'More Flags' policy (the President hoped to sell the war as a crusade against communism) – they offered nothing more than minor non-military assistance. Like in America, Britain witnessed plenty of anti-war action. Who was the USA's enemy? The US had to fight both the armies of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (the North) and zealous communists in the South,…

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From the Napoleonic Wars to Vietnam and Iraq: a history of war trauma
type: item
date: 2019-08-08T06:02:21.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: First World War
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War battles
description: From the mental anguish of survivors of the Napoleonic Wars to Vietnam veterans' 'PTSD blues', historians Emma Butcher and Hannah Partis-Jennings explore humanity's evolving attitudes to war trauma
encoded: Writers have recorded the traumatic effects of war for thousands of years. Nearly three millennia ago, in Homer's Iliad, Achilles describes how the death in battle of his friend Patroclus caused him to have nightmares, and to isolate himself. Around 1200 BC, in Mesopotamia, soldiers wrote of being visited by the "ghosts they faced in battle". In his account of the battle of Marathon (490 BC), the historian Herodotus recorded that, in the midst of fighting, the warrior Epizelus "suddenly lost sight in both eyes, though nothing had touched him". Fast-forward to Tudor England, and allusions to war trauma appear in the works of Shakespeare. In Henry IV, Part I, Lady Percy frets at her husband Hotspur's sorrowful state after he returns from war: "Tell me, sweet lord, what is't that takes from thee / Thy stomach, pleasure and golden sleep? / Why dost though bend thine eyes upon the earth / And start so often when thou sit'st alone? / Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks / And given me treasures and me rights of thee / To thick-eyed musing and cursed melancholy?" As the writings of Shakespeare, Herodotus and Homer attest, soldiers and civilians alike have been aware of the psychological impact of war for centuries. But, as the following examples prove, it would be a long time before this recognition was reflected in medical diagnosis or treatment. REVOLUTIONARY AND NAPOLEONIC WARS The trauma with no name Shakespeare’s histories may have alluded to war trauma but it would be another two centuries before the British public would experience vicariously the horrors of combat – courtesy of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the birth of the military memoir. More than 200 British veterans of the conflicts published their tales of life on the front line, and these autobiographies increasingly addressed the emotional impact of war. In one, Captain Howard chronicles his hallucinations in the catacombs of Paris, when touring the capital after 1814’s battle of Toul…

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Max Hastings on Vietnam
type: item
date: 2018-11-01T11:01:01.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Half a century ago, as a young reporter, Max Hastings witnessed the horrors of the Vietnam War at first hand. He has now produced a major new history of the conflict and speaks to Rob Attar about some of the big questions arising from his research
encoded: America became entangled in Vietnam following a disastrous French attempt to prevent Indochina gaining its independence. Was the French campaign doomed from the outset? One of the most extraordinary aspects of postwar French history was the fact that they fought these ferocious battles in Indochina [the area of south-east Asia that contains Vietnam] – and then in Algeria – to try to hang on to an empire that it was obvious to most people was doomed. You could only sustain these European empires in faraway places with some degree of popular acquiescence and this was completely destroyed by the experience of the Second World War [where Vietnam had been administered by Vichy France at the behest of Japan]. George Orwell memorably said the quickest way to end a war is to lose it and in Indochina the French took eight years to do so in what was a messy, bloody, murderous business. I don’t think that the French would have tried it but for the fact that they had been so humiliated by their experience of occupation and defeat by the Nazis that they were desperate to restore La Gloire. De Gaulle foolishly overruled the views of some of his advisors in 1945 that they would have to talk to the Viet Minh. Instead, he decided to fight it out. The result was a disaster. Having seen what happened to the French, why did the Americans still decide to get involved militarily? The Americans have always had a deep belief in their own exceptionalism. They came to believe that the French had lost their war to the communists because they were French, while they, as Americans, were imbued with this virtue that they wanted to introduce democracy and bring good things to the people of Indochina. Yet underlying everything that the Americans did from 1954 onwards was their desire to contain China. They were absolutely convinced – completely wrongly, as I show in the book – that the Russians and Chinese were pulling the strings on Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese nationalists as their puppets. On…

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Seymour Hersh on the US civil rights movement and the Vietnam War
type: item
date: 2018-10-01T13:47:34.000Z
creator: Matt Elton
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Civil rights
description: Seymour Hersh recalls his career as a journalist covering the political and social stories that defined 20th-century America
encoded: Born in 1937, Seymour Hersh began his career as a journalist in Chicago in the late 1950s. Across the ensuing half-century he reported on major episodes in US history, including the evolution of the civil rights movement, military atrocities in the Vietnam War and, in 2004, the torture by US personnel of detainees in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. His writing has appeared in leading publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Times, and has been recognised with awards including the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. My parents came to the United States from eastern Europe, Jewish immigrants – that’s a very bad word these days, but I can assure you they weren’t in any gangs – and they didn’t communicate much. Neither of them spoke much about what led them to come to the US. My father got cancer when I was 15, and I took over the running of the family business, a cleaning store in Chicago’s black ghetto, until I was 22. That experience meant that I knew the African-American world well and had some empathy for the fact that, if your colour was ‘wrong’ in the 1950s, there was nowhere to go. Things are still bad for black people in the United States now, but nothing like they were then. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/10/US-civil-rights-movement-and-the-Vietnam-War-2-b569ecd-e1690298662159.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Seymour Hersh pictured in 1982, won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his work reporting on the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at Mỹ Lai by US troops" title="Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, pictured in 1982" /> Eventually, after dropping out of law school because I hated it, I got a job in 1959 as a street reporter for City News. It was a crime newspaper agency, set up in 1890, that later reported on the heyday of gangsters such as John Dillinger in the 1920s and 1930s. That was a period during which newspapers and radio stations simply couldn’t cover all of th…

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