Marilyn B. Young

Marilyn B. Young (born 1937) is an historian of American foreign relations and professor of history at New York University.

Her doctoral work at Harvard University was supported by an anonymous full scholarship to learn Chinese and to pursue research in the field of United States relations with East Asia. She did her doctoral work under the direction of Ernest R. May, a scholar of American foreign relations, and John King Fairbank, an historian of China. Her doctoral dissertation became her first book, The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy, 1895–1901,[1] which examined the American Open Door Notes and the international diplomacy of the Boxer Uprising. She taught at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, before coming to NYU in 1980.[2]

In 2000–01 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Council of Learned Society Fellowship, and the Berkshire Women's History Prize for The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 [3] She was elected President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 2011.

Scholarly and political career

In the late 1960s, as part of her opposition to the American war in Vietnam, she was a founding member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. Many of her subsequent writings concerned this and following American wars. She recalled in her presidential address to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations:

I find that I have spent most of my life as a teacher and scholar thinking and writing about war. I moved from war to war, from the War of 1898 and U.S. participation in the Boxer Expedition and the Chinese civil war, to the Vietnam War, back to the Korean War, then further back to World War II and forward to the wars of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Initially, I wrote about all these as if war and peace were discrete: prewar, war, peace, or postwar. Over time, this progression of wars has looked to me less like a progression than a continuation: as if between one war and the next, the country was on hold.[4]

Of the Iraq War, she wrote: "If Vietnam was Korea in slow motion, then Operation Iraqi Freedom is Vietnam on crack cocaine. In less than two weeks a 30-year-old vocabulary is back: credibility gap, seek and destroy, hard to tell friend from foe, civilian interference in military affairs, the dominance of domestic politics, winning, or more often, losing hearts and minds."[5]

Selected publications

Edited Books

Articles

External links

Notes

  1. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Harvard East Asian Series 36, 1968. ISBN 0196265223.
  2. Faculty Profile New York University Department of History
  3. Faculty Profile New York University Department of History.
  4. Marilyn B. Young (2012). "'I Was Thinking, as I Often Do These Days, of War': The United States in the Twenty-First Century". Diplomatic History 36 (1): 1. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.2011.01004.x.
  5. quoted at Bill Moyers Journal (PBS) May 11, 2007 from Historians Reflect on the War in Iraq: A Roundtable (Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, Memphis Tennessee, 2003).
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Monday, November 02, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.