{"id":103,"date":"2021-10-06T20:29:24","date_gmt":"2021-10-06T20:29:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jasonhiggins.vt.domains\/home\/?page_id=103"},"modified":"2026-09-16T23:30:59","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T23:30:59","slug":"public-history","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jasonhiggins.vt.domains\/home\/public-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Public History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Documentary Forthcoming <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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In the summer of 2026, I am collaborating with J. McNair on a documentary project on the connections between war, trauma, and incarceration. We recently filmed at Lorton Reformatory, outside of Washington D.C., a former federal prison which housed a 99 percent Black population. This is where Ari Sesu Merretazon organized with fellow incarcerated Vietnam veterans and fought for disability rights and acknowledgement of the large number of veterans in prison. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Waging Peace in Vietnam<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As a doctoral candidate at UMass Amherst, I designed a practicum in Public History and Comparative Literature, titled “Waging Peace in Vietnam,” which was based on an international exhibit<\/a>, designed by Ron Carver, and the accompanying Waging Peace in Vietnam<\/em> book, co-edited by Ron Carver, David Cortright, and Barbara Doherty. This course trained undergraduate students to design unique public history tours of this exhibit based on oral histories in the book. Students helped install the exhibit and served as docents while it was on campus in September and October of 2019. Read more about this experience below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jason A. Higgins, giving a tour of the Waging Peace in Vietnam exhibit, UMass Amherst, 2019<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

“One hundred and one years since the end of the First World War, militarism still pervades American culture, and our collective amnesia about our own history puts the world at great risk. In 1973, the year American forces pulled out of Vietnam, Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the end of WWI:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cIt was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. Armistice Day has become Veterans\u2019 Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans\u2019 Day is not. So I will throw Veterans\u2019 Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don\u2019t want to throw away any sacred things.\u201d<\/p>\nKurt Vonnegut Jr. Breakfast of Champions<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

A World War II veteran himself, Vonnegut saw clearly the erasure of peace as a celebrated ideal from American national identity. Two years later, Paul Fussell published The Great War and Modern Memory<\/em>, arguing that war is necessarily ironic because it always lasts longer and destroys more lives than expected. The greatest irony is that each generation perpetually relearns the timeless truths about war. Time and again, waves of soldiers have marched to battle and confronted the \u201cold lie\u201d\u2014that it is sweet and noble to die for one\u2019s country. This forgetting does not occur naturally; it is by design. The public education system omits, sanitizes, or propagandizes the history of American wars. In my own case, I did not study the war in Vietnam until graduate school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An exhibit currently touring U.S. college campuses, Waging Peace in Vietnam<\/em>, helps to correct the misremembering of the war in Vietnam. It reinserts the voices of veterans against the war and documents the most powerful and most diverse grassroots antiwar movement in U.S. history. Told from the perspective of American soldiers and veterans who opposed the war, both the exhibit and the book which accompanies it ask us to recalculate who counts as a war hero and to reconsider our understanding of patriotism. Both argue explicitly that veterans served as powerful agents of peace and significant factors in the U.S. withdrawal of troops in Vietnam. This history contradicts one of the most pervasive myths and false dichotomies about the war\u2014that peace activists and Vietnam veterans were in opposition. In fact, veterans and GIs led the peace movement, and their testimonies provide the most insightful sources from which we may learn from the past and mobilize young people for the challenges of the twenty-first century. . .”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finish reading this article, “Waging Peace in Memory,” at Massachusetts Review. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Waging Peace in Memory”<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Students leading tours of Waging Peace in Vietnam, UMass Amherst, 2019<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Public History Panels<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In the fall of 2021, The Smithsonian National Museum of American History invited me to join a History Film forum on “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946). I joined Christopher Wilson, director of Experience Design at the Smithsonian, along with Ryan Lintelman, the museum’s entertainment curator, film critic Nell Minor, curator of the State Historical Society of Iowa Leo Landis, and daughter of Donna Reed, Mary Owen. We discussed the history portrayed in the film, such as the Great Depression, the Second World War, depictions of African Americans, immigrants, and women in the film, and more. Read about the forum here<\/a> or better yet, watch the panel below. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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