Ellen Hammer

Ellen Joy Hammer (September 17, 1921 – January 28, 2001) was an American historian who specialized in 20th-century Vietnamese history.

Biography Born in New York City, the daughter of David and Rea (Welt) Hammer, she received a bachelor's degree from Barnard College in 1941 and worked for a few years on the research staff of the Council on Foreign Relations in Manhattan. She earned a doctorate in public law and government from Columbia University, where she specialized in international relations. She became known in the early 1950s for her work on colonial rule in French Indochina. She was regarded as one of the first Americans to become scholars of Vietnamese history, often traveling to the Asian country for extended periods.

Her first book, The Struggle for Indochina, published in 1954, was regarded as a pioneering text for that period of history. Douglas Pike, a historian and director of research at the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University, said that as a scholar Hammer was "one of the few Americans that got into Vietnam before the American buildup there" in the mid-1960s.

Hammer was regarded by Pike as being "very loyal personally to Diem" and being "bitter" about his demise. After the fall of Diem, she moved to France and vowed to stay away from the subject. Despite this, she still wrote A Death in November. She died of lymphoma in 2001 in New York City.