David G. Marr

David George Marr (born September 22, 1937) is an American/Australian historian specializing in the modern history of Vietnam. He was also a critic of the Vietnam War.

Career Marr was born in Macon, Georgia, the son of Henry George (an auditor) and Louise M. (a teacher; maiden name Brown). Marr studied at Dartmouth College (BA), before joining the US Marine Corps as an intelligence officer. Marr learned Vietnamese in the US, then was assigned to Vietnam in 1962. He married there in April 1963, and was reassigned to marine Intelligence in Hawaii a month later. After leaving the Marines in 1964 he sought to understand the roots of Vietnamese patriotism as a graduate student at UC Berkeley (PhD 1968). He taught at University of California, Berkeley and as assistant professor at Cornell University, 1969–72, while becoming increasingly engaged in documenting the case for withdrawing from Viet Nam, notably as co-director of the Indochina Resource Center (Washington and Berkeley), 1971–75. In 1975 he moved to Australia with his family, in research positions as Fellow, Senior Fellow and finally Professor at the Research School of Pacific (and Asian) Studies, Australian National University in Canberra. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1990. In 1996, Marr had the opportunity to meet General Võ Nguyên Giáp. He has also been editor of Vietnam Today, and was an Emeritus Professor at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fox Butterfield described Marr's book Vietnamese Anticolonialism as "a brilliant study of the origins of nationalism in Vietnam". Marr's book, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power, received the John K. Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association in 1996. In 2009, he was awarded the Vietnam Studies Award by the Phan Chau Trinh Cultural Foundation for his significant contributions to the study of Vietnamese history. In addition, Marr's book Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920–1945 has been translated and circulated in Vietnam.

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