Draft

Does Requiring Only Men to Register for the Draft Violate the Constitution?

by Adam Liptak

A Supreme Court challenge to the male-only requirement to register for the draft is an odd coalition of the ACLU and the anti-feminist National Coalition for Men. If successful, it could end one of the last legal sex-based distinctions in federal law. 

As with Vietnam in the 1960s, COVID-19 is Exposing Racial Fault Lines in the U.S.

by Emily L. Quint Freeman

The author risked prison to try to break the connection between the U.S. war in Vietnam and domestic racism. 

Social Distancing Won’t Happen Until Governments Order It

by Edward J.K. Gitre

To truly confront this threat we need to think bigger, to the greatest challenge the United States has had to face in the modern era, and yet overcame: World War II.

What Dreams of Canada Tell Us About Race in America

by April Rosenblum

At a time when American casualties in Vietnam were disproportionately African American, most of those who successfully made it to Canada to resist the draft were white.

Grover Cleveland Bergdoll and the Long Reach of World War I’s Jingoism

by Dirk Langeveld

Although it presented an extreme case, the Bergdoll saga demonstrates how the sentiments that had brought about “liberty measles” in 1917 were still alive and well more than two decades later.

The first time the U.S. considered drafting women — 75 years ago

by Pamela D. Toler

As legislative debate about drafting women in 1945 shows, if the military need is great enough, women will be drafted no matter how uncomfortable lawmakers are with the prospect.

Review of Bruce Dancis’s “Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison During the Vietnam War”

by Murray Polner

Dancis and many in his like-minded allies once believed they could bring about permanent, serious and nonviolent change.