Public | Jan, 26 2023 4:00PM - 5:15PM
The United States has waged wars, large and small, almost continually across two and a half centuries. No figure looms as large in that history as the American president, the embodiment of national will, the nation’s preeminent diplomat, and the commander in chief of its armed forces. How have presidents made decisions about war and peace? How have they balanced American ideals with defense of the nation’s interests? Why have they succeeded in achieving their goals in some cases but not in others?
This six-part virtual series explores these and other questions through lively conversations with eminent historians of American politics, diplomacy, and military affairs. Each session will begin with a moderated discussion led by LBJ Library Director Mark Lawrence but will allow ample time for questions from the audience. Over six weeks leading up to Presidents’ Day, we will sweep across American history from the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Court House to the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. We will examine presidents from Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, delving into their choices about war and peace as well as the implications of those decisions for the nation’s present and future.
Full schedule:
January 12 Charlie Laderman, King’s College London, on Woodrow Wilson and peacemaking after World War I
January 19 Elizabeth Varon, University of Virginia, on Abraham Lincoln and the end of the Civil War
January 26 Marc Selverstone, Miller Center for Public Affairs, University of Virginia, on John F. Kennedy and the escalation of the Vietnam War
February 2 William Inboden, University of Texas at Austin, on Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War
February 9 Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Columbia University, on Richard Nixon and the end of America’s war in Vietnam
February 16 Melvyn Leffler, University of Virginia, on George W. Bush and the road to war in Iraq
Format
We will be using a Zoom webinar. Each session will begin with a moderated discussion led by LBJ Library Director Mark Lawrence but will allow ample time for questions from the audience.
Registration
Advance registration is required. You only need to register once for the series; you do not need to register for each week’s session. Once you register, you can expect to receive an email with a link to join the event. Questions about registration? Email utolli@austin.utexas.edu.
About the speaker:
On January 26, 2023, Marc Selverstone will join us to talk about John F. Kennedy and the escalation of the Vietnam War.
Marc J. Selverstone is associate professor in presidential studies and chair of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. He is the author of The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam (Harvard, 2022) and Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945-1950 (Harvard, 2009), which won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is also the editor of A Companion to John F. Kennedy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) and general editor of The Presidential Recordings Digital Edition(Virginia, 2010–).
