Lecture to Explore South's Response to Vietnam War

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Feb. 19, 2016) — Historian and University Press of Kentucky (UPK) author Joseph A. Fry will visit campus to deliver a lecture on how the South's response impacted America's participation in the Vietnam War. Fry will speak 4 p.m. Monday, March 7, 2016, in the Great Hall of Margaret I. King Library on the University of Kentucky campus. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Fry's talk, “Place Matters: Domestic Regionalism, the American South, and the Vietnam War,” explores how place matters in how Americans have responded to and sought to influence U.S. foreign policy. The dynamic of domestic regional influence on U.S. foreign relations was especially apparent in the American South’s role in the Vietnam War.

From the general public to soldiers, college students and crucially placed political leaders, the South supported the war more strongly and longer than any other section of the country. As had been the southern practice since the 1780s, the South’s bellicose foreign policy stance was grounded in distinctly regional political and economic interests, racial views, ideological and historical assumptions, and religious values.

Although the South's support helped to sustain an increasingly unpopular war under both Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, many of these same regional interests and values spawned an articulate minority opposition to the war. These antiwar protests, together with the war’s mounting agony, led even the South and its pro-war leaders to tire of the conflict by the early 1970s.

Fry is the author of "The American South and the Vietnam War: Belligerence, Protest, and Agony in Dixie," published by UPK in 2015. His visit to UK is made possible by sponsors UK Libraries and UPK.

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Fry is also the author of "Henry S. Sanford: Diplomacy and Business in Nineteenth Century America," "John Tyler Morgan and the Search for Southern Autonomy," "Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1789-1973" and "Debating Vietnam: Fulbright, Stennis, and Their Senate Hearings. He has published articles in Diplomatic History, the Pacific Historical Review and various other journals and collections. Fry is the series editor for "Biographies in American Foreign Policy" published by Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. To date, 18 volumes have appeared. Fry's current research focuses on Lincoln, Seward and U.S. foreign relations in the 1860s.

UPK is the scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, representing a consortium that now includes all of the state universities, five private colleges and two historical societies. The editorial program of the press focuses on the humanities and the social sciences. Offices for the administrative, editorial, production and marketing departments of the press are found at UK, which provides financial support toward the operating expenses of the publishing operation.

MEDIA CONTACT: Whitney Hale, 859-257-8716; whitney.hale@uky.edu