Professor Christian Appy’s latest article, “Exceptional Victims,” was recently published in the Boston Review’s landmark issue, "Fifty Years Since MLK”

“The new exceptionalism is born of the vilification of the antiwar movement and the veneration of U.S. troops as heroic victims.”

Building on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s antiwar speech in 1967 at Riverside Church, Appy traces the rise of a new form of American exceptionalism created in the aftermath of defeat in Vietnam—a national identity increasingly founded on a sense of national victimhood, ritualized reverence for military service, and the demonization of antiwar activists. You can find the full article here.