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    Making the Forever War

    Marilyn Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism

     

     

    Edited by Mark Philip Bradley and Mary L. Dudziak

    With an Afterword by Andrew Bacevich

  • About the Book

    The late historian Marilyn B. Young, a preeminent voice on the history of U.S. military conflict, spent her career reassessing the nature of American global power, its influence on domestic culture and politics, and the consequences felt by those on the receiving end of U.S. military force. At the center of her inquiries was a seeming paradox: How can the United States stay continually at war, yet Americans pay so little attention to this militarism?

     

    Making the Forever War brings Young's articles and essays on American war together for the first time, including never before published works. Moving from the first years of the Cold War to Korea, Vietnam, and more recent “forever" wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Young reveals the ways in which war became ever-present, yet more covert and abstract, particularly as aerial bombings and faceless drone strikes have attained greater strategic value. For Young, U.S. empire persisted because of, not despite, the inattention of most Americans. The collection concludes with an afterword by prominent military historian Andrew Bacevich.

     

  • Reviews

    "The essays in this collection serve as a durable testament to one of the most important academic critics of US war-making in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."—Susan L. Carruthers, author of The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace

     

    “Marilyn Young remains the preeminent historian of war’s place in modern American history.”—Michael S. Sherry, author of The Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s

     

  • Photo by Sara Krulwich

    About Marilyn Young

    Marilyn B. Young was a landmark scholar on American war and empire. At a time when U.S. war has seemed invisible to most Americans, she wrote powerfully on the importance of acknowledging the persistence and destruction of warfare.

    “Our continuous task," Young argued, "must be to make war visible, vivid, an inescapable part of the country’s self-consciousness, as inescapable a subject of study as it is a reality.”

     

    Young taught first at the University of Michigan, and then was Professor of History at New York University from 1980-2017. A powerful public voice against war, and a beloved mentor, she influenced the direction of foreign relations history, and was elected President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Her most renown book is The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990. During the last two decades of her life, she published many essays in journals and edited collections, focusing especially on the impact of ongoing war, and on the culture and politics that enabled it. Making the Forever War brings many of these essays together for the first time, and includes works previously unpublished.

     

    Photograph by Sara Krulwich.

     

  • Events

    Book discussion with Andrew Bacevich, Mary Dudziak, Christy Thornton, and Stephen Wertheim

  • Resources

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