South Bend’s History on Tap returns for the Fall!

The first History on Tap for 2017 is Wednesday, Sept. 13 at 6pm. Join us for drinks and conversation at South Bend Brew Werks (now family friendly!).

The brief and interesting talk will be about South Bend university student reaction to the Vietnam War and US involvement in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 1970s.

Current IU South Bend student Katilin Mann has published on the fascinating history of this area last year and will share her findings at the pub. Come for the talk, stay for a beverage.

The IU South Bend Veterans Book Club is excited to be included in the NEA Big Read of St. Joe County.  The first meeting of the year will be part of the kick-off events for the community-wide reading program.  The event will be held on Thursday Sept 28 at 5:30 in Fireside A, off the Grill in the Administration building.

The book club has explored a wide variety of literature, including short stories, graphic novels, autobiography, personal essays and literary journalism touching on a number of U.S. conflicts.  Tackling one of the classics of Vietnam War literature is sure to result in interesting conversation and new perspectives on this important era of American history.

Participants in the book club have included veterans who have served in a number of capacities over the past 50 years, family members of veterans and others who have an interest in veterans’ experiences.

Please consider joining us for our discussion of The Things They Carried.  The book club is open to anyone from the campus or community.  For more information visit the book club blog: https://vetsbookclub.wordpress.com/

Copies of the book are available at the library for check-out (call number PS3565.B75 T48 2009) or by contacting Vicki Bloom, Director of Library Services at IU South Bend (vdbloom@iusb.edu) To RSVP, or for more information, please contact Rhonda Culbertson (rculbert@iusb.edu)

From the New York Times, a story about the other side of the war, from the other side of the world:

“The first time I ever saw Americans was when I was 12 years old. It wasn’t actually blond-haired, blue-eyed Americans that I was seeing up close. The Americans I saw that day were F-4 Phantom bombers, brutally attacking small towns on the shore of Ha Long Bay. It was Aug. 5, 1964, and I was at the beach on a school trip, swimming with my classmates. That was right after the Tonkin Gulf incident, the day President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his decision to expand the war throughout Vietnam.”

Read the whole reflection here. 

The Art of Valor exhibit at the South Bend Museum of Art is a wonderful presentation of the memories and emotions of military veterans. The exhibit is a collaboration between students and faculty from IU South Bend and Notre Dame with local veterans and the Vet Center. It is a great example of how art can be used to engage with and inform a community.  See it for yourself until November 12, 2017.

Read more about the exhibit here: https://www.southbendart.org/see/the-art-of-valor.

A page from the Notre Dame student paper from 1969 shows student opposition to the Vietnam War.  The article discusses student displeasure with implications of the war, but also faculty and administration resistance to resolutions made by the students.

In 1970, as a protest of President Nixon’s Southeast Asian “policies of murder,” IU South Bend students held Cambodia Week. The week was scheduled with events on campus such as a reading of war dead and ceremonial digging of a grave on campus; talks by student government members; guerilla theater; a teach-in on draft resistance, a history of Cambodia, Southeast Asia, and the United States; a rock concert; and a mass march with the wider community in downtown South Bend on March 9th. Read more about the finds from the campus archives here. 

Here’s the official announcement about all the grants, including that awarded to Big Read St. Joe: https://www.arts.gov/news/2017/national-endowment-arts-announces-2017-2018-nea-big-read-grants

An excerpt: Today the National Endowment for the Arts announced seventy-five nonprofit organizations will receive grants totaling more than $1 million to host an NEA Big Read project between September 2017 and June 2018. An initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest, the NEA Big Read broadens our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the joy of sharing a good book.

The 2017-2018 grants range from $5,000 to $20,000 for community reading programs taking place in 32 states and focusing on 21 works of literature, such as Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, and Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. Grant recipients range from schools to libraries to arts organizations.

“Through the NEA Big Read we are bringing contemporary works to communities across the country, helping us better understand the diverse voices and perspectives that come with it,” said NEA Chairman Jane Chu. “These 75 organizations have developed unique plans to celebrate these works, including numerous opportunities for exploration and conversation.”

The take-away: IU South Bend’s project is one of four in the state of Indiana and one of four focused on “The Things They Carried.”

The NEA Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest  (NEABigRead.org).  Our NEA Big Read St. Joe County is a partnership between these three institutions:

CHAPTER #1027

If you have ideas related to The Things They Carried, we’d love to work with your school or organization. Contact Jay VanderVeen at jmvander@iusb.edu or use the comment feature here.

The Vietnam War still has the power to divide Americans between those for it and those against. Today it also divides us, just as surely, between those who remember its era firsthand and those not yet born when the troops came home. There may be no better bridge across these twin divides than Tim O’Brien’s novel in stories The Things They Carried. The details of warfare may have changed since Vietnam, but O’Brien’s semi-autobiographical account of a young platoon on a battlefield without a front, dodging sniper fire and their own misgivings, continues to win legions of dedicated readers, both in uniform and out.

Published in 1990, The Things They Carried  is considered one of the finest books about the Vietnam War. Far from a combat story of pride and glory, it is a compassionate tale of the American soldier, brimming with raw honesty and thoughtful reflection.

The book’s narrator follows a platoon of infantrymen through the jungles of Vietnam. We see them trudge through the muck of a constant downpour, get hit by sniper fire, pull body parts out of a tree, laugh while they tell their stories to each other, and fall silent when faced with making sense of it all—both in the moment and twenty years later.

Before Tim O’Brien was drafted into the army, he had what some would consider an all-American childhood. He was born on October 1, 1946, in Austin, Minnesota, and raised in Worthington, a small prairie town in the southern part of the state. His mother was an elementary school teacher, his father an insurance salesman and sailor in World War II. O’Brien played Little League, dabbled in magic tricks, and spent much of his youth in the county library daydreaming about such characters as Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.

At Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, he received good grades and became student body president. Occasionally, he’d attend peace vigils and protests against the burgeoning war in Vietnam. He graduated in 1968 with a B.A. in political science and thought of becoming a writer, inspired in part by his father’s personal accounts of two World War II battles, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, published in The New York Times. Then O’Brien got his draft notice. He once recalled in an interview that “even getting on the plane for boot camp, I couldn’t believe any of it was happening to me, someone who hated Boy Scouts and bugs and rifles.”

O’Brien spent his tour of duty from 1969 to 1970 as a foot soldier with the 46th Infantry in Quang Ngai province. For some of that time he was stationed in My Lai, just one year after the infamous My Lai Massacre. He was sent home with a Purple Heart when he got hit with shrapnel in a grenade attack.

The NEA Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest. El proyecto NEA Big Read es una iniciativa del National Endowment for the Arts (el Fondo Nacional para las Artes de Estados Unidos) en cooperación con Arts Midwest.

The goal of NEA Big Read is to broaden our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the joy of sharing a good book. Showcasing a diverse range of contemporary titles that reflect many different voices and perspectives, the NEA Big Read aims to inspire conversation and discovery.

This year, the NEA Big Read is supporting 77 dynamic community reading programs, each designed around a single NEA Big Read selection. The Big Read St. Joe project is one of three in the state of Indiana. Each community program that receives an NEA Big Read grant—which ranges between $5,000 and $20,000—is also provided with resources, outreach materials, and training on various aspects such as working with local partners, developing public relations strategies, and leading book discussions and Q&As. The programs last approximately one month and include a kick-off event, often attended by the mayor and other local luminaries; major events devoted specifically to the book (e.g., panel discussions and author reading); events using the book as a point of departure (e.g., film screenings and theatrical readings); and book discussions in diverse locations involving a wide range of audiences.