Beth Bailey, War in Society and Culture Program Lecture

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Pyle Center 232
@ 4:00 pm

Event Poster: Beth Bailey - War in Society and Culture Program Lecture“An Army Afire: How the U.S. Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era”

Beth Bailey (University of Kansas)

Even as US troops fought in Vietnam, Black and white soldiers battled each other in barracks and bars, with violence spilling into the streets of towns and cities in the United States and around the world. By the late 1960s, key Army leaders had begun to worry that racial conflict undermined the Army’s ability to defend the nation. In their attempts to solve “the problem of race,” Army leaders were surprisingly creative, even willing to challenge military principles of discipline, order, hierarchy, and authority. Confronting what some saw as an existential threat, the fundamentally conservative institution of the US Army took strikingly progressive actions, though in service of a conservative goal.

Co-sponsored by Department of History and Wisconsin Veterans Museum