The Eternal Question of Counterinsurgency
Marilyn B. Young, New York University
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Overview
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.
Marilyn B. Young is professor of history at New York University, where her courses include Third World Women and Gender. A native of Brooklyn, she 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.
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Speaker
Christian F. Ostermann
Woodrow Wilson Center
Hosted By
History and Public Policy Program
The History and Public Policy Program makes public the primary source record of 20th and 21st century international history from repositories around the world, facilitates scholarship based on those records, and uses these materials to provide context for classroom, public, and policy debates on global affairs. Read more
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