Major Problems in American History Since 1945

About Mark LawrenceNatasha ZaretskyPaula BakerRobert Griffith

Robert Griffith Professor of History at American University received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin Madison. A specialist of the history of the United States since 1945 he is the author of The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate (1970). Paula Baker is an associate professor of history at Ohio State University. She received her PhD from Rutgers University. Dr. Baker is the author of The Moral Frameworks of Public Life (1991) and numerous essays on political history women's history and the social sciences. Mark Atwood Lawrence is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his B.A. from Stanford University in 1988 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1999. His first book Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (University of California Press 2005) explores the early years of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He is also author of The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (Oxford University Press 2008) and co-editor of The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis (Harvard University Press 2007). His articles have appeared in Diplomatic History and The India Review. He is now working on a study of U.S. policymaking toward the developing world during the 1960s and early 1970s. Lawrence teaches courses in U.S. foreign relations history the Vietnam Wars and the Cold War. In 2005 he was awarded the President's Associates' Award for Teaching Excellence by UT-Austin. Natasha Zaretsky is an Associate Professor of History at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. She earned her Ph.D. from Brown University. Her book No Direction Home: the American Family and the Fear of National Decline 1968-1980 (University of North Carolina Press 2007) explores the place of the family in debates about American national decline 1968-1980. Her articles and essays have appeared in The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America (Temple University Press 2003) Race Nation and Empire in American History (University of North Carolina Press 2007) Diplomatic History and The New Republic. She is currently writing a cultural history of the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. Zaretsky teaches courses in modern American history research and writing gender and family and an introductory course in American Studies. In 2009 the History News Network named her a top young historian.