Author: Ruth Lawlor

Ruth Lawlor is co-editor of U.S. Studies Online. She is a PhD candidate in history at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge, and a Fox International Fellow at Yale. Her research on gender and U.S. foreign relations is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK, the Cambridge Trust, and the Robert Gardiner Memorial Fund. She is a recipient of the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Research Grant (2018) and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations' Samuel Flagg Bemis Dissertation Research Grant (2018). You can follow her on Twitter at @lawlor_ruth
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Our Latest Longest War: Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan

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Aaron O’Connell is a veteran of the Afghanistan war — the aptly dubbed ‘latest longest’ one for the United States — where he served as Special Assistant to General David Petraeus. The book’s title evokes both the spectre of America’s other endless war, that in Vietnam, as well as the… Continue reading

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Book Review: The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace by Susan L. Carruthers

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Historical amnesia has created the impression that the reconstruction of Germany and Japan along liberal capitalist lines was a foregone conclusion in 1945. In reality, however, the decision to occupy was a contested question for both Washington’s decision-makers and for soldiers on the ground, many of whom would become reluctant participants in America’s project of democratic nation-building. Continue reading