This is a hybrid event. Registration information is below.

Professor Amy Rutenberg will discuss the idea that debates over U.S. manpower policy -because they rest on questions of personal liberty, collective responsibility, and competing visions of national security – end up substituting for much larger debates over the meaning of “America.” In this way, policy proposals end up acting as a cipher. The same basic program idea symbolizes very different things depending on the lens through which individuals decode it. This seminar will use debates over universal military training and selective service in the twentieth century as case studies.

About the speaker

Amy J. Rutenberg is an Associate Professor of History at Iowa State University. Her works focus on the intersection of war, gender, militarization, and American society in the second half of the twentieth century. Cornell University Press published her first book, Rough Draft: Cold War Military Manpower Policy and the Origins of Vietnam-Era Draft Resistance, in 2019, and she is working on a book tentatively titled In the Service of Peace: Peace Activism and Military Service in Post-Vietnam War America.

This seminar is part of the spring seminar series with the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS).

Cosponsored by the American Studies Program.

Register here

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