DemCP workshop - "A Desperate Act: Nguyen Thai Binh and the Long 1960s" with SCOTT LADERMAN (University of Minnesota Duluth)

A short written piece will be circulated in advance. Please RSVP to a.m.martinez rug.nl to receive this.

Scott Laderman, professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Duluth (Fulbright, Uppsala).

Laderman's Fulbright project, which draws on extensive archival research and oral history interviews, examines the fascinating and largely forgotten story of Nguyen Thai Binh, a young Vietnamese man studying in the United States under a U.S. government scholarship program who, in 1972, was killed while unsuccessfully trying to hijack a Pan Am flight from San Francisco to Saigon. Binh’s story provides, in its particulars, a tragic and almost cinematic human drama. But it also raises questions about the Vietnam War, U.S. political culture, and American cultural diplomacy during a particularly fraught moment in twentieth-century American history.