Hershberger, Mary

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Hershberger, Mary

PERSONAL:

Female. Education: M.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Columbus, OH. Agent—c/o Author Mail, New Press, 38 Greene St., 4th Fl., New York, NY 10013. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Capital University, Columbus, OH, faculty member in history department.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Binkley-Stephenson Award, Organization of American Historians, 2000, for essay "Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s."

WRITINGS:

Traveling to Vietnam: American Peace Activists and the War, Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 1998.

Jane Fonda's War: A Political Biography of an Antiwar Icon, New Press (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor to journals, including the Journal of American History.

SIDELIGHTS:

A university history professor, Mary Hershberger has a particular expertise in the Vietnam War era. Her first book, Traveling to Vietnam: American Peace Activists and the War, explores how the opposing sides experienced and subsequently remember the war; it tells the stories of a number of peace missions to the war-torn country. The book was described by Z Magazine reviewer Jerry Lembcke as "a poignant image of how differently the Americans and Vietnamese experienced the realities of the war." Lembcke concluded that "Traveling to Vietnam should be on every reading list on the war and antiwar movement."

Hershberger next focused on the antiwar activism of celebrity Jane Fonda—nicknamed "Hanoi Jane"—in Jane Fonda's War: A Political Biography of an Antiwar Icon. Hershberger describes how Fonda became involved with the antiwar movement and the motivation behind her infamous and polarizing 1972 visit to North Vietnam. Daily Yomiuri contributor Jane O'Dwyer called the book "a timely and wellresearched biography not only of Fonda, but of the movement against the Vietnam War" and "a richly illustrated and in-depth picture of the peace movement." In the London Review of Books, Rick Perlstein commented that this "careful, straightforward account helps us put together the pieces to understand" the politics behind the Vietnam War. Phil Shannon, a reviewer for Green Left Weekly, described Jane Fonda's War as "engaging, entertaining and, especially on the Vietnam War, spirited. Hershberger is expert, objective and no less impassioned on the war than Fonda."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Daily Yomiuri (Japan), June 12, 2006, Jane O'Dwyer, "The Meaning of ‘Hanoi Jane’ in Symbolism and Reality," review of Jane Fonda's War: A Political Biography of an Antiwar Icon.

London Review of Books, November 17, 2005, Rick Perlstein, "Operation Barbarella," review of Jane Fonda's War.