Ellen Hammer

Who was Ellen Hammer?

Ellen Joy Hammer was an American historian who specialized in 20th-century Vietnamese history.

Born in New York City, the daughter of David and Rea 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 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.