William J. Duiker

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William J. Duiker (* 1932 in Chicago , Illinois ) is an American historian and emeritus professor of East Asian history at the Pennsylvania State University . His main research interests are the history of Vietnam , and he is also known as the author of several world-historical overviews.

Life

Duiker was born in Chicago and spent his childhood and youth in Washington, DC , and later in Philadelphia and Miami, Indiana . He attended the prestigious Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania before studying at Georgetown University in Washington.

Duiker then began a career in the diplomatic service with the Foreign Service , an agency of the Foreign Ministry . From mid-1964 to autumn 1965 he worked in the US embassy in Saigon in South Vietnam , where he was responsible for economic reports. He had previously learned Chinese in Taiwan in order to negotiate with the Chinese minority in Vietnam.

At the end of 1965, Duiker left the Foreign Service. He continued his studies at Georgetown University and earned a PhD. Shortly thereafter, he received a position in the history faculty at Pennsylvania State University, where he was later appointed professor of East Asian history. He held his apprenticeship for 30 years before retiring in the late 1990s.

William Duiker spent his retirement on the Outer Banks in North Carolina .

Research and publications

Duiker dealt mainly with the history of Vietnam and especially Vietnam in the 20th century, i.e. the topics of the Vietnamese independence movement, the Vietnam War and the development of the country after its military reunification. His best-known work is the biography "Ho Chi Minh: A Life" (2000/01) about Hồ Chí Minh . The book is now regarded as the standard work on the subject, even if Duiker was occasionally accused of having trusted the one-sided official Vietnamese historiography too much.

Furthermore, Duiker wrote several rather popular scientific overview works on world and human history, which are also used as teaching material. In total, Duiker is the author of well over a dozen books; His writings have also appeared in many other specialist publications.

Books on Vietnam:

  • Comintern and Vietnamese communism (1975)
  • Rise of nationalism in Vietnam, 1900-1941 (1976)
  • Vietnam since the fall of Saigon (1980)
  • Communist road to power in Vietnam (1981)
  • Vietnam: nation in revolution (1983)
  • China and Vietnam: the roots of conflict (1986)
  • Historical dictionary of Vietnam (1989, edited by Jon Woronoff )
  • US containment policy and the conflict in Indochina (1994)
  • Sacred war: nationalism and revolution in a divided Vietnam (1995)
  • Vietnam: revolution in transition (1995)
  • Ho Chi Minh: A Life (2000/01)

Further works on East Asian history:

Overview works on world history:

  • World History (with Jackson J. Spielvogel ; first edition 1994, ninth edition 2018/19, also published in two volumes)
  • Essential World History (with Jackson J. Spielvogel; first edition 2002, ninth edition 2019/20, also published in two volumes)
  • Contemporary World History (seventh edition 2020; first published as Twentieth-Century World History 1999; now also published as World since World War II )

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Booknotes ( C-SPAN ): Interview with Duiker about his Ho Chi Minh biography, November 12, 2000 ( Memento from October 4, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ Stein Tønnesson : Vietnam 1946: How the War Began , p. 263 ( Notes )
personal data
SURNAME Duiker, William J.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American Vietnam historian
DATE OF BIRTH 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago , Illinois