Tag Archives: Marilyn Young

Marilyn Young Analyzes Counterinsurgency

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For the next National History Center and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Weekly History Seminar, Marilyn B. Young, Professor of History at New York University, analyzes “The Eternal Question of Counterinsurgency” on Monday, May 3, 2010 at the Wilson Center.

What are historians to make of the phrase made famous during the Vietnam war, “hearts and minds”? With the advantage of distance in time and the cooling of passions, it seems clear that the phrase reflected a tactic of counterinsurgency characteristic of the European colonial empires as well as the American attempt to find a solution to the war. The rediscovery of counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan is not only a military tactic but also something that approaches an ideology—and something well worth discussing in the context of the war in Vietnam.

Please click here to watch a video presentation of the seminar.

Marilyn Young is a graduate of Vassar and Harvard. Her books include The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy, 1895–1901; The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990; and (with William G. Rosenberg) Transforming Russia and China: Revolutionary Struggle in the Twentieth Century. She also co-edited with Mark A. Bradley the first volume of the Center’s Reinterpreting History series, which is entitled Making Sense of the Vietnam War: Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives.

This is part of the weekly history seminar that aims to facilitate the understanding of contemporary affairs in light of historical knowledge of all times and places, and from multiple perspectives. Click here to see a complete listing of the schedule of speakers and topics, as well as videos of the presentations.

New Books in History Podcast of Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars

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New Books In History
New Books In History

New Books in History has a new podcast of an interview with Mark Philip Bradley and Marilyn Young, the editors of the Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars, the first volume in the Reinterpreting History series produced by the National History Center and Oxford University Press. The volumes in the series aim to convey to readers how and why historians revise and reinterpret their understanding of the past, and they do so by focusing on a particular historical topic, event, or idea that has long gained the attention of historians.

As Marshall Poe, editor of New Books in History,  states, “[The] authors provide no simple answers because there are none. You will not find easy explanations, good guys and bad guys, or ideological drum-beating in these pages. What you will find is a sensitive effort to understand an event of mind-boggling, irreducible complexity. There’s a lesson here: we may think we know what we are doing on far-away shores, but we are fooling ourselves.”

Click here to listen to the podcast.

Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars
Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars

Both this and the second volume in the Reinterpreting History series on the Atlantic World are available for purchase.
 The podcast of the Atlantic World on New Books in History is available here.

Philippa Levine’s Lecture on Women and Decolonization

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Professor Philippa Levine, Professor of History at the University of Southern California, gave the lecture on Still Invisible?: 
Women, Gender, and Decolonization, as part of the National History Center’s fourth international seminar on decolonization and its public lecture series.  The John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress co-sponsored the event.

The lecture’s web cast can be viewed here.

Philippa Levine

Asking why studies of decolonization so rarely explore the contributions of women to decolonization struggles around the world, Professor Levine explored the perspective both of women involved in anti-colonial movements and women who were part of the colonial authority structure. She offered examples of women in both these roles, and hoped to encourage researchers to open up this fascinating field for further study.

Philippa Levine is Professor of History at the University of Southern California. She received her Doctorate in Philosophy from St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, in 1983. She is a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of British Studies and Women’s History Review, and President-elect of the North American Conference on British Studies. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is currently president of the University of Southern California faculty. Professor Levine’s works include Feminist Lives in Victorian England: Private Roles and Public Commitment; Victorian Feminism 1850-1900; Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation and Race (co-edited with Laura Mayhall and Ian Fletcher); Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire; and The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset.

This lecture was a second in series on subjects relating to decolonization, with Marilyn Young of New York University giving another lecture.