So I'm in late high school and I have recently been given a 1200 word assignment/essay type thing to do for my history class.
The question is to write an essay based on a question that I get to come up with that centres around how the Vietnam war affected Australasia. Some example questions given were:
How did the Vietnam war affect returning Soldiers?
How did the Vietnam war affect Australia?
How did the Vietnam war affect Cambodia?
ETC.
So I'm looking for some advice/help on what a good question to write about is and some guidance on writing that question. Thanks
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Speaking from a biased perspective (Southeast Asian Cold War history nut), Number #3 is a good one, particularly if you go beyond the common cliches of both wings of the political spectrum of the USA to the Khmer POV, their politics, and how the US (and the Vietnamese) effected it. I know of a pretty good paper concerning the background behind Sihanouk's fall and Nixon's Cambodian Campaign, and I can drag up others.
Another idea is looking at the leadup to the war in Hanoi and Saigon rather than in Washington, specifically the rarely discussed power struggles in the North Vietnamese government.
What would you particularly like to cover? Is there a certain time period or country or something you want to write about?
The best questions usually come from things you encounter when you start reading your sources. My advice would be to use these suggested prompts as a starting point to go read a few newspaper articles, memoirs, or books.
Say, for example, you're interested in Australian returning soldiers. You might visit the website of an Australian newspaper and search for old accounts of returning soldiers written during the war. Or searching for books that describe this experience at your library, or via google books. After you've read a half dozen or so of these, you might start to notice something that surprises you, captures your interest, or gives you an idea of a specific theme that you can talk about. Maybe you start to see a pattern, and will choose to highlight it. Or perhaps you'll see that experiences were very different, and want to ask why.
Basically - take one of these prompts as a starting point, and do a bit of reading. See what you find, and allow that to point you toward a question that can direct the rest of the reading you do to write this paper.
Good luck!