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Professor Mark A. Lawrence, University of Texas.
Episode 2935 of the Vietnam Veteran News Podcast will feature Professor Mark Atwood Lawrence who talks about his new book End of Ambition. He is an eminent who is currently serving as the head of the History Department of the University of Texas at Austin and the LBJ Presidential Library which is located on the UT campus.
The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era is a groundbreaking new history of how the Vietnam War thwarted U.S. liberal ambitions in the developing world and at home in the 1960s.
At the start of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy and other American liberals expressed boundless optimism about the ability of the United States to promote democracy and development in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. With U.S. power, resources, and expertise, almost anything seemed possible in the countries of the Cold War’s “Third World”—developing, postcolonial nations unaligned with the United States or Soviet Union. Yet by the end of the decade, this vision lay in ruins. What happened? In The End of Ambition, Mark Atwood Lawrence offers a groundbreaking new history of America’s most consequential decade. He reveals how the Vietnam War, combined with dizzying social and political changes in the United States, led to a collapse of American liberal ambition in the Third World—and how this transformation was connected to shrinking aspirations back home in America.
The result is an original new perspective on a war that continues to haunt U.S. foreign policy today.
Listen to Episode 2935 and discover more about Professor Mark Lawrence and his latest outstanding book End of Ambition.
