Mark Atwood Lawrence

Mark Atwood Lawrence is associate professor of history and distinguished scholar at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his B.A. from Stanford University and his doctorate from Yale. After teaching as a lecturer in history at Yale, he joined the history department at UT-Austin in 2000. Since then, he has published two books, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005) and The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (Oxford University Press, 2008). Lawrence is also co-editor of The First Indochina War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2007), Nation-States and the Global Environment: New Approaches to International Environmental History (Oxford University Press, 2013), and Beyond the Cold War: Lyndon Johnson and the New Global Challenges of the 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is now at work on a study of U.S. policymaking toward the developing world in the 1960s.

Posts by Mark Atwood Lawrence

Revisionism as a Substitute for Victory

Revisionists have been making their case that the Vietnam War was winnable ever since Lyndon Johnson abandoned hope of a decisive American victory in the spring of 1968. Far more striking, however, is that even in the early 21sth century the idea that the United States stole defeat from the jaws of victory in Vietnam thrives as never before.