My current project, Suffer Little Children: Health, Harm, & U.S. Foreign Policy, examines how U.S. citizens, often together with people outside of the United States, challenged U.S. foreign policy by emphasizing the negative health impacts on children abroad and by appealing to Americans’ sense of responsibility for their government’s actions. Two of the case studies include the Committee for the Responsibility to Save War-Burned and War-Injured Vietnamese Children (COR) and Voices in the Wilderness.

This project will consider the following questions: Which children were worthy of protection from harm? How did campaigners’ use of children compare? What change, if any, was there from a campaign during the Cold War to one after its end? What change, if any, was there in how activists envisioned the U.S. government’s and Americans’ role in the world? Did the U.S. government talk about the bombing of civilians, particularly children, differently in the late 1960s and the 1990s? How did activists’ and the U.S. government’s use of children as propaganda compare?