Professional Affiliation

Adjunct Professor Department of History, University of Wyoming

Expert Bio

Dr. Michael J. Devine served as the Director the Harry S. Truman Library from 2001-2014. During his 40 year career in the administration of public history institutions, he held positions as Director of the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, Illinois State Historian and Director of the Illinois State Historical Society, and Assistant Director of the Ohio Historical Society. He has served as a Senior Fulbright Lecturer to Argentina (1983) and Korea (1995), and was the Haughton Freeman Professor of American History at the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing University Graduate Center in Nanjing, China (1998-1999). In 2014 he was awarded the Robert Kelley Memorial Prize from the National Council on Public History for life-time achievement. He received his Ph.D. in U.S. Diplomatic History from Ohio State University in 1974.

Wilson Center Project

The Korean War in American Public Memory

Project Summary

The Korean conflict of 1950-1953 was overshadowed in American public memory by World War II and the Vietnam War. Veterans of Korea were ignored and they failed to organize their own veteran associations until the 1980s. Korean War POWs were often treated with suspicion. However, things began to change in the 1980s, and the War and its veterans are now memorialized in numerous sites across the nation and on the National Mall in Washington, DC. "The Korean War in American Public Memory," a monograph expected to be published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2018, will explore the evolution of public perceptions and misperceptions abut the conflict and its impact on American society and U. S. relations with the nations of East Asia.

Major Publications

• 1. John W. Foster: Politics and Diplomacy in the Imperial Era (Ohio University Press, 1981).
• 2. Presidential Address. "The Education of a Public Historian," The Public Historian, 2000
• 3. "Administrators," in Public History, LaPaglia and Gardner eds., (1999),