MARY L. DUDZIAK

law, history, politics

Law and American history in a global context

War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences

Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law
Past President, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
Honorary Fellow, American Society for Legal History
Inaugural Nonresidential Fellow, The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

Current work

I am writing a book on the history of American war and political accountability in an effort to understand how we have reached a point in U.S. history when our nation can go to war without the involvement and even the awareness of the American people.

Related essays:
Death and the War Power, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities
"You didn't see him lying...beside the gravel road in France": Death, Distance, and American War Politics, Diplomatic History
How War Lost Its Politics, Dissent Magazine

BOOKS

Forthcoming:
Making the Forever War: Marilyn Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism

The late historian Marilyn B. Young, a preeminent voice on the history of U.S. military conflict, spent her career reassessing the nature of American global power, its influence on domestic culture and politics, and the consequences felt by those on the receiving end of U.S. military force. At the center of her inquiries was a seeming paradox: How can the United States stay continually at war, yet Americans pay so little attention to this militarism?

Making the Forever War brings Young's articles and essays on American war together for the first time, including never before published works. Moving from the first years of the Cold War to Korea, Vietnam, and more recent “forever" wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Young reveals the ways in which war became ever-present, yet more covert and abstract, particularly as aerial bombings and faceless drone strikes have attained greater strategic value. For Young, U.S. empire persisted because of, not despite, the inattention of most Americans. The collection concludes with an afterword by prominent military historian Andrew Bacevich.

“Marilyn Young remains the preeminent historian of war’s place in modern American history.”—Michael S. Sherry, author of The Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s

War Time

In this inventive meditation on war, time, and the law, Mary Dudziak argues that wartime is not as discrete a time period as we like to think. Instead, America has been engaged in some form of ongoing overseas armed conflict for over a century. Meanwhile policy makers and the American public continue to view wars as exceptional events that eventually give way to normal peace times.

"Mary Dudziak's new book, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, is a crucial document. Her smooth foray into legal and political history reveals that in not just the past decade but the past century, wartime has become a more or less permanent feature of the American experience, though we fail to recognize it " --The Nation

"A thoughtful and original take on the concept of war." --Foreign Affairs

Cold War Civil Rights

"Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Mary Dudziak's book makes a spectacularly illuminating contribution to a subject traditionally neglected--the linkage between race relations and foreign policy: neither African-American history nor diplomatic history will be the same again."--Gerald Horne, author of Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois

"This book is a tour de force."
--Elaine Tyler May, author of Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era

"Groundbreaking."--American Lawyer

Exporting American Dreams

"In this gem of a book, Mary Dudziak brings vividly to life the important but little known history of Thurgood Marshall's intense involvement with Kenya during its journey toward independence in the 1960s. This great champion of the American civil rights struggle never relinquished his hope that democracy and equality would one day flourish in Kenya, even as he became painfully aware of the obstacles that stood in the path of this dream. A powerful and poignant story, beautifully told."--Gary Gerstle, Vanderbilt University and author of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century

“Insightful and important.”

– Henry Richardson, Law and History Review

Edited collections

September 11 in History: A Watershed Moment?

“I am exhilarated by the collective wisdom, creativity, and insight of this unusual yet riveting distillation of perspectives on September 11.”—Bruce Lawrence, author of Shattering the Myth: Islam beyond Violence

Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (co-edited with Leti Volpp)

"By weaving together colorful and contentious strands of culture, history and law, these essays make a compelling argument that "it is in its bleeding borders that law itself, and with it American identity, is constructed, contested, and made meaningful." Harvard Law Review