The Emergence of Peace History

Abstract

The four books reviewed here provide clear evidence that research and writing about past peace movements constitute an emerging subfield of history. Although each covers only aspects of the last generation of peace movement activity-two on the Vietnam antiwar movement and its antecedents and two on the peace movement in the 1980s-they are symptomatic of a continually widening interest in peace history, which began to develop modestly in a systematic way only thirty years ago.1 These works also suggest scholars' diverse approaches to these movements. Finally, they raise questions about the relationships between the study of peace movements and other social movements in history. Amy Swerdlow's full account of Women Strike for Peace (WSP) fills an important gap in the history of the American peace movement in the 1960s. Other historians have detailed the transformation of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) from its founding in the late 1950s to its role as a leading voice against the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s, but virtually nothing