Amy Rutenberg

In the broadest terms, my research focuses on the relationships among war, gender, militarization, and American society in the second half of the twentieth century. My first book, Rough Draft: Cold War Military Manpower Policy and the Origins of Vietnam-Era Draft Resistance (Cornell University Press, fall 2019), explores how the policy community’s assumptions about gender, race, class, and the Cold War led it to target working-class and minority men for the draft and middle-class, white men for deferments in the years leading up the Vietnam War. My work has appeared in Cold War History, The New York Times, and TheAtlantic.com.

I am currently working on two projects. The first is an oral history of draft and military counselors during the Vietnam-War era. The second is a history of the long 1960s in America’s heartland, with a particular eye toward the ways social and political movements intersected in Iowa and its environs. I am trying to get at the question of what made the 1960s “The Sixties” in places other than major cities or in the American South.

I also co-coordinate the secondary social studies education program and am happy to answer questions from students considering the profession of teaching.