In this episode, Jeremi and Zachary talk with special guest Dr. Mark Atwood Lawrence about the Vietnam War and its continuing legacies in American society, global policy, as well as recent similar conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “It is Hard to Build Utopias”.

Mark Atwood Lawrence is Director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. Until January 2020, he taught history at UT-Austin, where his classes focused on American and international history. Lawrence is author of Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History, and, this fall, The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era, as well as several edited books and numerous articles, chapters, and reviews on various aspects of the history of U.S. foreign relations. Lawrence has held the Cassius Marcellus Clay Fellowship at Yale University (2006-2008) and the Stanley Kaplan Visiting Professorship in American Foreign Policy at Williams College (2011-2012). He earned his BA from Stanford University and his PhD from Yale University.

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Ean Herrera.