The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era

Dr. Mark Atwood Lawrence is the Director of the LBJ Presidential Library. Previously Dr. Lawrence was an Associate Professor of History at The University of Texas at Austin, where he taught since 2000. He also served as Director of Graduate Studies for UT-Austin’s Clements Center for National Security. Dr. Lawrence is considered a prominent scholar on President Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War. Beginning in 2015, he has taught an undergraduate course at the LBJ Presidential Library entitled “The Johnson Years.” Currently, Dr. Lawrence is completing a study of U.S. policymaking toward the Third World in the LBJ era, tentatively entitled “In the Shadow of Vietnam: The United States and the Third World in the 1960s.” Dr. Lawrence is author of Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), which won the Paul Birdsall Prize for European military and strategic history and the George Louis Beer Prize for European international history. In 2008, he published The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (New York: Oxford University Press), which was selected by the History Book Club and the Military History Book Club.

In 2005, Dr. Lawrence was awarded the President’s Associates’ Award for Teaching Excellence at UT-Austin, and in 2019 he won the Silver Spurs Centennial Teaching Fellowship from UT-Austin’s College of Liberal Arts. Dr. Lawrence 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 has served as Consulting Historian for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and for the National Veterans Memorial and Museum. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University in 1988 and his doctorate in history from Yale University in 1998.

For more information about this event, contact Elizabeth Doughtie at [email protected].