On Friday, February 23rd, 2018 at 6:00 pm, Public Seminar will be livestreaming the Marilyn B. Young lecture, described below, on our Facebook page.
Marilyn B. Young (1937-2017) was an influential historian of U.S. foreign policy, a feminist, and a prominent public critic of America’s endless wars in the twentieth and twenty-first century. She was a Professor of History at NYU, founder and director of the Center for the United States and the Cold War at NYU’s Tamiment Library, and past president of SHAFR, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Brilliant, charismatic, and witty, Marilyn was a beloved colleague and friend, a devoted teacher, and an inspiring model of a politically engaged intellectual.
It is fitting that the first Marilyn B. Young memorial lecture is on “The Korean War Today: A Roundtable on the U.S. and the Two Koreas” for as she wrote in her address as President of SHAFR, “I find that I have spent most of my life as a teacher and scholar thinking and writing about war… The constancy of war and its as constant erasure is linked intimately to the pursuit and maintenance of an American empire similarly erased.” The wars she so brilliantly analyzed and against many of which she so passionately protested included the War of 1898, the Chinese civil war, the numerous U.S. interventions in Central America, and the newer wars in the Middle East and revival of Vietnam era counterinsurgency that was integral to them. The Vietnam War stood at the center of her scholarly writing and political activism; Korea, the “forgotten war” was the project she hoped to pursue in her retirement. Her voice is missed in these tense and troubled times.
