Making the Forever War: Marilyn B. Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism

The constancy of American war, and its paradoxical erasure in U.S. politics and culture, were central concerns of Marilyn Young, the preeminent historian of war’s place in modern U.S. history. In Making the Forever War, historians Mark Philip Bradley and Mary Dudziak have drawn together a collection of Young’s most important writings that illuminate how endless war came about, the nature of its deadly consequences, and how it became embedded and invisible for most Americans.

Mark Philip Bradley is Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor History at the University of Chicago and the Editor of the American Historical Review. He is the author of The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (2016), Vietnam at War (2009), and Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam (2000). With Marilyn Young, he was the co-editor of Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars (2008).

Mary L. Dudziak, the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University, is a leading legal historian and U.S. and the World scholar. She is past-President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and is the author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (2012); Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall’s African Journey (2008); Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2nd ed. 2011), and other works.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.