While working on his BA in American Studies at Amherst College during the 1970s, Chris was inspired by a wave of new historical work that was exploring the lives of poor and working-class people and a host of other subjects long ignored by conventional scholars. He subsequently wrote an honors thesis on Appalachian coal miners.
Chris continued on to graduate studies at Harvard University, getting a PhD in the History of American Civilization. His dissertation on American combat soldiers in the Vietnam War received the American Studies Association’s prize for the year’s best dissertation in the field and became the basis for his book Working-Class War, which was published by the University of North Carolina Press and has been used in many college and university courses on modern U.S. history.
Chris taught undergraduate History and Literature at Harvard for four year before becoming a member of the History facility at MIT, where he taught for eight years. In 1999 he left to pursue writing full time.
His work on PATRIOTS, which he calls “the most challenging and rewarding work of my life,” took him throughout Vietnam and the United States, talking to more than 350 people about their memories of that long and bitterly divisive war. The result is an oral history that stretches from the summer of 1945, when Americans first parachuted into northern Vietnam, to April 30, 1975, when the last U.S. helicopter flew off the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon.
Photo taken by Amy Guerrero.
