Departments

;

antiwar movement

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    12/6/2022

    Don Luce, Activist Against Vietnam War, Dies at 88

    Luce helped expose the torture and human rights abuses carried out by the government of South Vietnam, and campaigned against the war after being expelled from South Vietnam as an aid worker. 

  • 12/4/2022

    Farewell, Brother Staughton

    by Carl Mirra

    Staughton Lynd was always in the trenches fighting for a better world, and for that he remains a “admirable radical” and, for that matter, a beautiful person.

  • SOURCE: Tropics of Meta
    10/21/2022

    Screaming Past Each Other at Christmas: Debating the End of the Vietnam War

    by Ryan Reft

    In December 1972 the United States launched a massive bombing campaign, notionally to force the North back to the bargaining table and secure an "honorable" peace. The fierce debate between Anthony Lewis and Robert Conquest over the merits of that reasoning would resonate for years. 

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    10/17/2021

    Seeing the Future When No One Believes You

    by Rebecca Gordon

    The recollections and rehabilitations occasioned by the 20th anniversary of the War on Terror are, predictably, giving short shrift to the voices of dissent who questioned the ability of American military power to resolve political conflicts. Like their mythical namesake, those denounced as Cassandras in 2001 were right. 

  • 6/13/2021

    The Night Vietnam Veterans Stormed Bunker Hill

    by Elise Lemire

    The Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775 was a military defeat for the Continental Army but a coup for morale. In 1971, Vietnam Veterans Against the War won a nonviolent battle at the site for the allegiance of the working class residents of Charlestown. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    4/19/2021

    The Girl in the Kent State Photo

    by Patricia McCormick

    Mary Ann Vecchio's life was forever changed by being pictured in the famous photograph with Kent State shooting victim Jeffrey Miller; she became a lightning rod for a nation's anger at age 14. 

  • SOURCE: Current Affairs
    10/22/2020

    The Real Abbie Hoffman

    by Nathan J. Robinson

    While The Trial of the Chicago 7 is sympathetic to Hoffman, it also softens him in a way that ultimately amounts to historical fabrication.

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    10/21/2020

    Aaron Sorkin Sanitizes the Chicago 7

    by Jeet Heer

    According to Jeet Heer, "Sorkin takes many liberties with the facts, most of which are designed to make both the New Left and its conservative opponents more palatable to contemporary liberal viewers."

  • SOURCE: Smithsonian
    5/1/2020

    How 13 Seconds Changed Kent State University Forever

    As the 50th anniversary of the Kent State killings passed this week, the University had been advancing along a difficult path to acknowledge the events and introduce new students to the campus's tragic history.

  • SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Ed.
    5-13-13

    Penny Lewis: Hard Hats, Hippies, and the Real Antiwar Movement

    Penny Lewis is an assistant professor of labor studies at the Joseph P. Murphy Institute for Work Education and Labor Studies in the School of Professional Studies at the City University of New York. This essay is adapted from her new book Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory, published by Cornell University Press.Decades after its conclusion, the U.S. war in Vietnam remains an unsettled part of our collective memory. Members of the military, veterans, scholars, journalists, and artists continue to revisit and reinterpret the war, assessing its historical significance while seeking meaning for wars fought today. Despite the efforts of our political elites to put the ghosts of Vietnam to rest, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have prolonged these discussions. Books and articles with titles like "Is Afghanistan Another Vietnam?" abound. The economic and political imperatives that drive U.S. foreign policy, the appropriate use of force, the domestic costs of war, the treatment and trauma of veterans, whether today's wars are "winnable" or "worth it"—appropriate or not, those are some of the many points of comparison and concern.