“Our continuous task must be to make war visible, vivid, an inescapable part of the country’s self-consciousness, as inescapable a subject of study as it is a reality.” Marilyn Young, 2011

Historian and activist Marilyn B. Young died at her home in New York on February 19. A longtime professor at New York University, she was a towering figure in the history of US foreign relations, a celebrated critical historian of the Vietnam War and US intervention overseas. But her prominence as a scholar was matched by the strength of her political convictions, and by her unwavering use of her public platform to fight misogyny, US empire, and unending war.

Young’s political consciousness was sparked as a teenager in Brooklyn. She was sixteen when the funeral for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg was held in her neighborhood, at the IJ Morris funeral home on Church Avenue in Brownsville. Though the chapel — the biggest in the city — held only 500 people, some 10,000 gathered there, filling the streets around the neighborhood landmark, and around Young’s apartment building.