Calendar: ASHP/CML Seminar, “Quagmire: The History of An Idea”

March 24, 2011

ASHP/CML, in cooperation with the Office of Continuing Education and Public Programs at The Graduate Center, will host a special seminar on Tuesday, April 27, 2004, on “Quagmire: The History of an Idea.” For more than a century, the U.S. military has marched off to engage in “splendid little wars” only to find itself mired in drawn-out occupations, contested by both the occupied populations and by critics at home. “Quagmire,”popularized as a metaphor during the war in Vietnam, has become a shorthand way to discuss recent imperial ventures gone awry. This public seminar will bring together historians and writers to explore the history of U.S. military intervention in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and its media representations at home, drawing links between past and present and providing historical context for the widely invoked idea of “quagmire.” Panelists will include Christian Appy, author of Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides; Mary A Renda, Associate Professor of History and Women’s Studies, Mount Holyoke College, and author of Taking Haiti: Military Occupation an the Culture of U.S. Imperialism; Marilyn Young, Professor of History, New York University, and author of The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990; and Pennee Bender (Moderator), Associate Director, ASHP/CML. The event is free, and will take place from 6 to 8 pm in Room C-201 at The Graduate Center.