She graduated from
Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn in 1953 and
Vassar College in 1957.[2] Her doctoral work at Harvard University was supported by an anonymous full scholarship to learn Chinese and to pursue research in the field of United States relations with East Asia. She did her doctoral work under the direction of
Ernest R. May, a scholar of American foreign relations, and
John King Fairbank, an historian of China. Her doctoral dissertation became her first book, The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy, 1895–1901,[3] which examined the American
Open Door Notes and the international diplomacy of the
Boxer Uprising. She taught at
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, before moving to NYU in 1980.[4]
I find that I have spent most of my life as a teacher and scholar thinking and writing about war. I moved from war to war, from the War of 1898 and U.S. participation in the
Boxer Expedition and the
Chinese civil war, to the
Vietnam War, back to the
Korean War, then further back to World War II and forward to the wars of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Initially, I wrote about all these as if war and peace were discrete: prewar, war, peace, or postwar. Over time, this progression of wars has looked to me less like a progression than a continuation: as if between one war and the next, the country was on hold.[6]
Of the
Iraq War, she wrote: "If Vietnam was Korea in slow motion, then
Operation Iraqi Freedom is Vietnam on crack cocaine. In less than two weeks a 30-year-old vocabulary is back: credibility gap, seek and destroy, hard to tell friend from foe, civilian interference in military affairs, the dominance of domestic politics, winning, or more often, losing hearts and minds."[7]
Young joined the faculty at NYU in 1980. Young founded the Women Studies Department at NYU and, from 1993 to 1996, she was the chairwoman of its history department.[2] Young was a co-director of the Tamiment Library's Center for the United States and the Cold War. She became president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 2011.[2]
While in graduate school she met and married
Ernest P. Young, an historian of China described by a friend as her "early intellectual companion." They separated and then divorced in 1986. [8]
Selected publications
For a fuller list, see Rebecca Karl, "In Memoriam." [9]
with Rayna Rapp and Sonia Kruks, Promissory Notes: Women and the Transition to Socialism,
Monthly Review Press, 1983.
American Expansionism: the Critical Issues, Little Brown, 1973, edited collection
Articles
"The Korean War: Ambivalence on the Silver Screen," in The Korean War at Fifty: International Perspectives, edited by Mark F. Wilkinson (John Adams Center for Military History and Strategic Analysis, 2004).
"In the Combat Zone," reprinted in Hollywood and War: The Film Reader, edited by J. David Slocum (NY/London; Routledge, 2006).
"Two, Three, Many Vietnams," Cold War Studies, November 2006.
"The Vietnam Laugh Track," in David Ryan, ed. Iraq in Vietnam (London: Routledge, 2006)
"’Shared Victory,’ Korea, the U.S. and France," in The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis, ed. Mark Atwood Lawrence and
Fredrik Logevall. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
"The American Empire at War," in The Barbarization of Warfare, edited by George Kassimeris (London: Routledge/NY: NYU Press, 2006).
"Counterinsurgency, Now and Forever," in
Gardner and Young, Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam
"Why Vietnam Still Matters," in The War That Never Ends, edited by John Ernst and David Anderson (University Press of Kentucky), 2007.
^quoted at
Bill Moyers Journal (PBS) May 11, 2007 from Historians Reflect on the War in Iraq: A Roundtable (Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, Memphis Tennessee, 2003).