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"America's Wars in Asia: A Cultural Approach," the flagship project of The Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center at The University of Montana, encompasses two of the Center's core activities: (1) The Digital Teaching Library and (2) The U.S.-Asia Dialogue Series. Firmly grounded in the scholarly expertise and teaching experience of Center faculty, the America's Wars project takes a long view of the Asia Pacific, Korean, and Vietnam Wars. First, we locate each of these wars within the context of American interaction with Asia over a span of many decades. History is our starting point. Second, we believe that war illuminates the features of a given society, expanding our capacity to comprehend its distinctive cultural, social, and political values and characteristics. Third, we recognize that war engenders and accelerates change within and among societies in conflict. The study of war enhances our ability to grasp the ongoing evolution of American-Asian relations and modern Asian history.
The project insists upon the complex and contested character of war. It employs a cultural approach that is defined by two tensions. The first is the incongruency between the abstractions of conventional military and diplomatic history and the awful realities that constitute the human dimensions of war. Our cultural approach strikes a balance between facts, figures, timelines, and historical documents on the one hand, and the enduring issues of war that emerge from individual experience and expression, whether on the battlefield, the home front, or in the classroom, on the other.
The second defining tension is the distance between American and Asian perspectives on the history of war and the legacies of war. Differences in perspective are determined not merely by the dichotomies of victor and vanquished, right or wrong, but also by palpable cultural differences that continue to shape American-East Asian relations. In the spirit of Maureen and Mike Mansfield, the cultural approach provides an open forum for all voices to be heard, weighed, and registered.
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