About: Marilyn B. Young

Marilyn B. Young (April 25, 1937 – February 19, 2017) was a historian of American foreign relations and professor of history at New York University. She graduated from Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn in 1953 and Vassar College in 1957. Her doctoral work at Harvard University was supported by an anonymous full scholarship to learn Chinese and to pursue research in the field of United States relations with East Asia. She did her doctoral work under the direction of Ernest R. May, a scholar of American foreign relations, and John King Fairbank, an historian of China. Her doctoral dissertation became her first book, The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy, 1895–1901, which examined the American Open Door Notes and the international diplomacy of the Boxer Uprising. She taught at