Rate My Professor Christian Appy

Christian G. Appy is a Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he also serves as Director of the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy. He holds a BA in American Studies from Amherst College and a PhD in American Studies from Harvard University. Appy's academic interests center on the Vietnam War, U.S. foreign policy, twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. history, and nuclear weapons. His seminal works include Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (University of North Carolina Press, 1993), an examination of the social history of American combat soldiers; Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (Viking, 2003), a comprehensive oral history incorporating perspectives from Vietnamese and American combatants, policymakers, antiwar activists, and journalists, which received the Massachusetts Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2004; American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (Viking, 2015), analyzing the war's enduring impact on American culture, identity, and foreign policy from the 1950s through the Obama era; and he edited Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945-1966 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).

Appy has been honored with the Chancellor’s Medal (2017), Distinguished Teaching Award (2013), Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award (2019), Spotlight Scholar (2015), and served as University of Massachusetts Distinguished Lecturer (2016-17) and Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer (2016-18). His articles have appeared in prominent publications including The New York Times (“What Was the Vietnam War About?,” 2018), Boston Review (“Exceptional Victims,” 2018), and TomDispatch (multiple pieces on Vietnam and nuclear issues). He has contributed chapters to edited volumes such as Amherst in the World (2020) and American Literature in Transition: 1940-1950 (2017). Currently, Appy is authoring a book on Daniel Ellsberg, tentatively titled Ellsberg’s Mutiny: War and Resistance in the Age of Vietnam, The Pentagon Papers, and Nuclear Terror, drawing on Ellsberg’s papers acquired by the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at UMass Amherst.