8/3/2019 Actual Process Paper

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After deciding to research Vietnam, we came across the Geneva Accords of 1954, a

conference and flawed reform to pacify Vietnam after the French Indochina War. This subject

sparked an interest about how a Cold War proxy-conflict formally began in Vietnam.

Our research comprised of mainly using scholarly and archival databases: Academic

OneFile, JSTOR, E-Library, and newspaper/magazine sites. We found primary documents,

including parts of the Pentagon Papers, a formidable collection of documents leaked by a

whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg. These documents provided an honest perspective of the

American administration on Vietnam, 1945-1967. To find more in-depth analyses, we found

highly-acclaimed books about Vietnamese history by well-known authors, including those

Pulitzer Prize-winning and those expert of in the scholarly field, David L. Anderson and George

C. Herring. Journalists of the era who were in Vietnam are also the first-hand experts,

documenting, as cultural ambassadors, the general American atmosphere and flaws in the

revolutionary yet precarious time-period. While the Internet, except for sites with the primary

documents, gave us initial understanding of Vietnams multifaceted history on resisting imperial

powers, our books that we had borrowed delved and analyzed in a deeper and more authoritativesense surrounding the Geneva Accords as an attempted reform and the consequent reaction and

rise to revolution. Context sources referred to more specific sources, scholarly essays gave us

more analysis, and books about specific events, such as the Battle of Dienbienphu, gave us a

deeper understanding of the Vietnamese revolutionaries. Our research expanded into watching

Academy Award-winning films and documentaries that gave us useful visual insight surrounding

Indochina at the time. We are also looking for potential interviews from experts in the Boston

area, including Daniel Ellsberg and professors at Harvard and other universities.

We selected the group website because we can post pictures, videos, and text to support

our argument. In revolutionary Vietnam, the use of media became more popular as an

informative tool for the general public. This will allow us to effectively depict specific points inour argument. Our group has experience in multimedia design, as demonstrated by multiple

preceding multimedia projects. We believe a website would allow us to express our argument

and standpoint with more clarity as well as enable us to interact with the viewers.

Considering events surrounding the conference, we decided to reorder the succession of

Revolution, Reaction, Reform in order to better argue our topic in the order Revolution,

Reform, Reaction. After existing as part of colonial French Indochina for 75 years, Vietnam rose

into a nationalistic revolution against France. The uncertainty during the aftermath of the First

Indochina War led to the Geneva Accords of 1954, an international reform that established North

and South Vietnam and promised a unifying General Election in 1956. In the context of the Cold

War, the United States supported South Vietnam against the communist North by denying Ho

Chi Minh the assumed popular victory. This reaction led to the steady hostile escalation that

would ultimately result in full American military intervention in the Vietnam War.