Today's guest is the director of the University of Virginia's Nau Center for Civil War History - Caroline E. Janney. Recognized for excellence in teaching, Caroline is also an award-winning scholar. Her many publications include Burying the Dead But Not the Past: Ladies' Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation, and Ends of War: The Fight of Lee's Army after Appomattox, all from UNC Press, where she is also coeditor for the Civil War America series. Caroline bleeds Blue and Orange for UVA and grew up just up the road from Charlottesville in Luray, Virginia, tucked in amongst the Blue Ridge Mountains. Join us for an entertaining chat with one of the top scholars of the Civil War - we'll talk walking Civil War battlefields as a kid with her grandfather, Cooter's Place, working summers for the National Park Service, Bodo's Bagels, coffee snobbery, George Winston, and much more.
Enjoy, and thanks for listening!
Shoutout to BBQ Exchange in Gordonsville, Virginia!
Rec.: 10/10/2025
Published on: October 14, 2025Today's guest is the USAF Air Command and Staff College's Paul "PJ" Springer. PJ has a great story - from the farm fields of Iowa to Aggieland to Maxwell AFB, Paul had dreams of being a physicist, but the end of the Cold War and a couple of good experiences in history courses at Texas A&M put him on the righteous path. Paul has written widely on Civil War POWs, military technology, among many other subjects. Versatile in his research interests and committed to the professional development of military officers through the use of history, PJ is one of a kind. Join us for a fun chat with PJ Springer - we'll talk growing up in Iowa, getting shot, robots and military technology, the serendipity of research, call signs, and making your own bacon. Get your favorite beverage and settle in - enjoy!
Shoutout to Fat Man's Smokehouse BBQ in Montgomery, Alabama, and check out Mad Science Bacon Lab!
Rec.: 09/04/2025
Published on: September 23, 2025We're back! Our summer hiatus is over, and it's good to get back to recording. And Season 6, no less! Our opening episode is a fun chat with Jack Bowsher, a historian of the Burma Campaign in the Second World War. Jack is Head of History at the Katherine Warington School in Hertfordshire, UK. Jack's books include Forgotten Armour: Tank Warfare in Burma, and Thunder Run Meiktila 1945: The Greatest Combined Arms Manoeuvre Battle of World War II . He is the co-host (with Robert Lyman) of The Forgotten War Podcast, and speaks widely on the Burma Campaign. You'll not find many more passionate about teaching history and knowledgeable about the Burma Campaign than Jack Bowsher. Join us for deep dives on tanks, watching war movies as a kid, Spike Milligan, Newcastle FC, building dioramas during Covid, and even working for the NHS!
Thanks as always for listening!
Rec.: 08/28/2025
Published on: September 16, 2025We wrap up Season 5 with the gentleman historian Sebastian Cox. Seb just retired from we won't say how many years as Head of the Royal Air Force's Air Historical Branch. Long active in the UK, European, and American official history communities as well as rarely missing a Society for Military History conference over the past 30+ years, Seb came to airpower history by happenstance after doing a thesis on the Vietnam War at King's College, London. A random job application to the RAF Museum at Hendon began what would become an over forty-year career with RAF history. We've wanted to get Seb on for a while now, so we're glad to finally chat with him.
Join us for our delightful chat with Seb Cox - we'll talk having a grandfather who was a concientious objector in the First World War, a father who served in Europe during the Second World War, growing up building Airfix kits and watching 633 Squadron on telly, establishing the Bomber Command Memorial in London, RAF casualty reports from WW2, PG Tips tea, seeing The Who at Wembley Stadium, and receiving an O.B.E. at Buckingham Palace. Stories abound!
Thanks for the support - We'll start recording Season 6 later this summer!
Rec.: 04/15/2025
Published on: April 29, 2025We return to the CGSC well with an in-person, in-the-studio chat with Amanda Nagel, the pride of Strasburg, North Dakota, and currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Military History at the US Army Command and General Staff College at Ft.Leavenworth, Kansas. Amanda was in Statesboro to deliver the keynote address for the opening of Brian's fantastic exhibit More Than A Name in the Georgia Southern University Library, which documents the service of African American soldiers from Bulloch County, Georgia, who served in the First World War (it was a great event!). As an expert on African Americans in the US military, Amanda was perfect for the occasion. Her first book, "He thinks he is a soldier": Race, Empire, and the United States, 1898-1926, will be published by the University of Virginia Press.
It was great to have Amanda with us at Georgia Southern - join us for a fab chat about Lawrence Welk, high jumping, making the move to Mississippi, African Americans in the Army in the early 20th century, teaching in professional military education, jazz oral histories, and more!
Shout-out to J. Rieger and Co. in Kansas City - Amanda swears by their burnt ends!
Rec.: 04/01/2025
Published on: April 22, 2025Today's guest is Lt. Col. Patrick Naughton, author of Born from War: A Soldier's Quest to Understand Vietnam, Iraq, and the Generational Impact of Conflict (Casemate). Born and raised in Hawaii, Patrick is a 28-year veteran of the US Army and US Army Reserves, serving first an NCO, then earning his commission through ROTC at UNLV. Among his many duties, Patrick has served as unit historian for just about every unit he's been with. He has been a Fellow at the Simons Center for Ethical Leadership and Interagency Cooperation and was awarded the Army's General Douglas MacArthur Leadership Award in 2012. He has written for Military Review, Journal of America's Military Past, the Army History Magazine, and Naval History Magazine, among others.
Patrick plans to retire to the Boston area and pursue a PhD in history - if you have suggestions for programs, let Patrick know!
Join us for a very interesting chat with Patrick Naughton. We'll talk "going mainland," fathers and sons, the Old Vegas Strip, Sublime, and writing history of the recent past.
Shout-out to Tin Kitchen Southern Smokehouse in Weston, Kansas!
Rec.: 03/14/2025
Published on: April 8, 2025Our guest today is the Irish Texan - Jonathan Carroll of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst! Born and raised in County Kildare, Jonathan joined the Irish Army at 17, serving in the Reserve for over twelve years. Along the way, he earned his BA in Civil Law and an MA in Military History and Strategic Studies at Maynooth University, then made the bold move to work with Friend-of-the-Pod Brian Linn at Texas A&M (where his dissertation won the Society for Military History's Edward M. Coffman Award). Jonathan has published in The Journal of Military History, Defence Forces Review, and War in History, and is author of Beyond Black Hawk Down: Intervention, Nationbuilding, and Insurgency in Somalia, 1992-1995 (forthcoming soon from Kansas). Jonathan does staff rides with Sandhurst and also guides with Stephen Ambrose Historical Tours in Normandy.
Join us for a St. Patrick's Day chat with Jonathan Carroll - we'll talk celebrating the Snake-Ridding Saint, teaching at Sandhurst, life's twists and turns, finding a good topic, Buc-ee's, Pink Floyd, and more! So pour yourself a Guinness and enjoy!
Shout-out to Johney Gurkha's in Aldershot and Cilantro in Bryan, Texas!
Rec.: 03/17/2025
Published on: April 1, 2025Today's guest is our friend and colleague from Georgia Southern University - Bennett Parten. A historian of African American history and the American South in the 19th century, Ben is a leading scholar of emancipation during the Civil War. His first book, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation, was just published by Simon & Schuster. Ben has also written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books and is Associate Editor of Agricultural History, which is housed at Georgia Southern University. From humble roots in Royston, Georgia, to a PhD from Yale, Ben's story is a good one.
Join us, as we discuss working-class upbringing, having good mentors, taking on William Tecumseh Sherman, trade publishing, Ty Cobb, and more!
Shout-out to Sandfly BBQ in Savannah!
Rec.: 03/03/2025
Published on: March 25, 2025Today's guest is one of the brightest historians of the Post-Vietnam US Army, and he's Irish! Please welcome to the pod David Fitzgerald, a Senior Lecture in History at University College, Cork. Born and raised in Cork, David spent some time at University College, Dublin, before returning to his home county, where he directs UCC's online MA in Strategic Studies program. His work includes Learning to Forget: US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Practice from Vietnam to Iraq (Stanford) and most recently Uncertain Warriors: The United States Army between the Cold War and the War on Terror (Cambridge).
Join us for a fun chat with David Fitzgerald - we'll talk about Six Nations Rugby, how armies "learn," hurling, the challenges of online graduate programs, The Frames, and more - Enjoy!
Shout-out to The Mutton Lane Pub in Cork!
Rec.: 03/06/2024
Published on: March 18, 2025Today's guest has an inspiring story - Jason Higgins comes from working-class roots in Southeastern Arkansas, where he took a chance on going to college, then hit his stride through hard work, raising a family, and discovering a passion for telling people's stories. From the University of Arkansas-Montecello, where he earned a BA in English AND History, Jason headed to Stillwater, Oklahoma, to take an MA in English at Oklahoma State, studying Lewis Puller's memoir Fortunate Son. That work caught the attention of Christian Appy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, so Jason packed up the family and headed East. Now an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Virginia Tech History Department and Libraries, Jason is doing fantastic work on veterans and incarceration and veteran oral histories while sharing with students his enthusiasm for teaching and writing.
Jason is author of Prisoners after War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration (UMass) and co-editor with John Kinder of Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History (UMass), and was lead for an NEH grant "Crossing Divides Connecting Veterans, Teachers, and Students through Oral History."
Join us for a remarkable chat with Jason Higgins - we'll talk about being a first-generation college student, having kids in graduate school, learning the value of hard work, guitars, grant writing, AI, and, as is often the case on this podcast, the simple serendipity of life. You'll feel good after this one (as you should all our chats!).
Shout-out to Rising Silo and the band Midlife Crisis in Blacksburg, Virginia!
Rec.: 02/28/2025
Published on: March 11, 2025Today's guest is our first from France, but who went to graduate school and teaches here in the US! Marjorie Galleli is an assistant professor of history at Kansas State University in Little Apple, Manhattan, Kansas. Marjorie has a fascinating story of "coming to America" that began after visiting Boston as a kid. It's a long way from Alsaac to Kansas, but she's embraced the journey. Join us for a really interesting chat with Marjorie - we'll talk counterinsurgency, teaching military history, living in new places (some with lots of snow!), McFly, and potatoes and Coke. Enjoy!
Shout-out to Houlihan's in Manhattan!
Rec.: 02/27/2025
Published on: March 4, 2025Our guest today is former professional football player turned defense intellectual Mike Pavelec. Mike is the Director of the US Space Force Schriever Scholars Program at the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies. A historian of airpower and the history of technology, Mike has come a long way from his days as an offensive lineman with the Miami Dolphins, the Hamilton Tiger Cats, and the Calgary Stampeders. Earning his PhD atThe Ohio State University, Mike has authored several books (The Jet Race and the Second World War andAirpower over Gallippoi, 1915, to name a couple) and held appointments at several PME schools, including the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, the Air Command and Staff College, and the Naval War College. He is currently standing up Space Force's PME program at Johns Hopkins.
Join us for an enjoyable chat on playing football against Howie Long, professional military education, the history of technology,Justified, motorcycles, Tool, and much more!
Shout-out toHill Country Barbeque Market in Washington, DC!
Rec.: 02/06/2025
Published on: February 25, 2025Today's guest is Army veteran and historian of the Cold War-era Army Rob Williams. At Ft. Leavenworth, Rob writes for Army University Press and in his spare time writes on Army culture, particularly airborne culture. His first book, Airborne Mafia: The Paratroopers Who Shaped America's Cold War Army, will be published by Cornell University Press in March 2025. After seventeen years in the Army, Rob did a BA in history at UNC-Chapel Hill, then a PhD at The Ohio State University. He's an active veteran and an active scholar - enjoy our chat as we discuss jumping out of airplanes, airborne influences on the Cold War Army, taking classes with Joe Glatthaar and Wayne Lee, rugby, Dropkick Murphys, Waffle House, and much more!
Rec.: 01/30/2025
Published on: February 18, 2025Today's guest is the brilliant Jadwiga Biskupska, an Associate Professor of History at Sam Houston State University. A specialist in the war experience of Central Europe, particularly during World War II, Jadzia is the author of Survivors: A Cultural History of Warsaw under Nazi Occupation (Cambridge), among other works. She is the co-director of the Second World War Research Group-North America and will be the 2025-2026 General Harold K. Johnson Visiting Chair in Military History at the US Army War College. Join us for an engaging chat about academic parents, Polish nicknames, riding a bike and learning to swim (negative on both apparently), toast, and discovering Tex-Mex - enjoy!
Shout-out to Mr. Hamburger in Huntsville, Texas!
Rec.: 01/23/2025
Published on: February 4, 2025Today's guest became a free-lance battlefield tour guide after a career in the Royal Corps of Signals that included tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now a captain in the Army Reserve, Susie Cooper took a love of military history and battlefield staff rides to a post-military career taking everyone from school children to military officers on battlefield tours in the UK and Europe. She does tours for CGT Battlefield Tours, Anglia Tours, In the Gootsepts, Sopue's Great War Tours, Battle Honors, and The Cultural Experience (where she teams with Bill for an AMAZING Vietnam tour!), as well as field studies trips for the British Army. In addition to her Reserve duties and guiding, Susie is also a volunteer with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. If you've been anywhere from Normand to Ypres to Berlin recently, you may have encountered Susie in her preferred habitat. The downside to her many days of travel is missing her dog Charlie and changing to an artificial Christmas tree!
We'll talk women in battlefield tourism, being a career NCO then commissioning in the Army Reserve, Queen, currywurst, the value of visiting battle sites, and many other topics. Enjoy!
Rec.: 12/19/2024
Published on: January 28, 2025Today's guest is First World War and German historian Tim Grady of Chester University. Tim has done ground-breaking work on Jewish German soldiers in the First World War and is now looking at the care and burial of POW dead. His books include A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War (Yale), and his forthcoming Burying the Enemy: The Story of Those Who Cared for the Dead from the Two World Wars (also from Yale) promises to be an important work. We'll talk growing up in Seaford on the south coast of England, German archives ( sorry - he and Brian met at a conference, not in an archive), fish curry, The Clash, and working at Safeway. Enjoy!
Rec.: 12/20/2024
Published on: January 21, 2025Today's guest is the enthusiastic and fun Heather M. Haley of the US Naval History and Heritage Command. A PhD from Auburn, Heather is a scholar of LGBTQ+ in the American military. In addition to several publications with the Naval History and Heritage Command, Heather is the author of Queer in the Cold War: The Civil-Military Battle over the Lavender Scare, which is forthcoming from Cornel University Press. If you've been to recent Society for Military History conferences, you'll have seen Heather, who is very active in the SMH.
We'll talk career serendipity, imposter syndrome, cats, Badger Killers, Bob's Burgers, and much more. Enjoy!
Shoutout to Rudy's BBQ!
Rec.: 12/06/2024
Published on: December 17, 2024Our guest today leads the double life of being an academic at Trinity College, Dublin, by day and doing stand-up comedy by night! Andrew Dorman is a Research and Policy Officer with TCD's Centre for Economics, Policy, and History, and recently earned his PhD in history from Dublin City University. A specialist on soldiering in 18th century Ireland, Andrew has published with the British Journal of Military History and the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, and his first book is coming out with Broydell and Brewer in early 2025. Andrew's night gig doing stand-up has taken him to Asia, the US, and Europe, and he's twice performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Andrew has a great story—growing up in Dublin, watching war movies as a kid, then discovering history and comedy in college and deciding to pursue both! We'll talk 3-minute thesis competitions, crafting a joke, My Chemical Romance, hecklers, Ulf the Quarrelsome, among a lot of other stuff—this one is packed!
Shout-out to Friend of the Pod Zack White for putting us in touch with Andrew, and shout-out to Andrew's local in Dublin, The Stag's Head!
Rec.: 11/21/2024
Published on: December 10, 2024Our guest today is the guy who led the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection team that created the ubiquitous yellow Energy Guide labels on your appliances. Oh yeah, he's also an award-winning historian of the American Civil War. Hampton Newsome recently retired from a long career as an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Hampton did his undergraduate degree at Duke University and earned his JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He is the author of several books, including Richmond Must Fall: The Richmond-Petersburg Campaign (Kent State University Press), The Fight for the Old North State: The Civil War in North Carolina January-May, 1864 (University Press of Kansas), and most recently Gettysburg's Southern Front: Opportunity and Failure at Richmond (University Press of Kansas), which won the Emerging Civil War Book Award ad the Edwin C. Bearss Book Award for Oustanding Scholarship in Civil War History.
We'll talk being a non-academic historian, doing archival research, Civil War Roundtables, Danny Ferry, Uncle Tupelo/Wilco, among other pressing issues. We really enjoyed this one!
Shout-out to The BBQ Exchange in Gordonsville, Virginia!
Rec.: 11/14/2024
Published on: December 3, 2024Today's guest is a Canadian! Jason Ridler is a Course Developer and Lecturer with Advanced Academic Programs at Johns Hopkins University, where he designs and teaches remote courses for the Johns Hopkins Globa Secutires and Master of Liberal Arts programs. Jay earned his PhD in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada and has published in Diplomacy and Statecraft, Small Wars and Insurgencies, and Defense and Security Analysis, among others. His books include the well-received Mavericks of War: The Unconventional, Unorthodox Innovators and Thinkers, Scholars, and Outsiders Who Mastered the Art of War (how's that for a subtitle!), published with Stackpole in 2019. An avid writer, Jay is also a novelist - his The Brimstone Files series is available from Nightshade Books. If you are hitting the writing wall, take a look at his Undefeated: Stay a Writer Against the Odds.
We'll talk Canadian military history, what makes one a "maverick" in history, luchadors, the Von Erics, being in a punk band, and, oddly, the best BBQ in Decatur, Georgia!
Shout-out to Pho City in Sacramento!
Rec.: 11/05/2024
Published on: November 26, 2024Today's guest is the thoroughly amazing Mary Elizabeth Walters of the USAF Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell AFB in Alabama. A native of Cheraw, South Carolina, Mary Elizabeth fell in love with history doing oral histories with D-Day Pathfinders for National History Day, but she had no idea that would lead to living in Albania, studying refugee crises from Kosovo and Afghanistan, and now teaching theory of war and strategy to Air Force majors. We'll talk cows, hippie parents, National History Day, host mothers in Albania, the Wayne Lee Experience at UNC, moving from the university world to professional military education, and more. Enjoy our entertaining chat with Mary Elizabeth Walters!
Rec. 10/08/2024
Published on: October 29, 2024We've been wanting to do this for a while now, as we're always pushing our BBQ chops on you, dear loyal listeners, so we talked with a legit pitmaster - Mary Beth Brown of Dolan's BBQ down the street from Georgia Southern University here in Statesboro, Georgia. Along with her sister Lazar Brown Oglesby, Mary Beth is the owner and pitmaster of one of the best BBQ places in Southeast Georgia. A Georgia Southern University graduate experienced in the restaurant and hospitality industry, Mary Beth has proved that "Girls Can 'Que, Too!" She was kind enough to sit down with us while we had lunch outside on the Dolan's porch (complete with Statesboro Pick-Up Truck Traffic on Main Street!). We'll talk things BBQ - business, life choices, being a woman pitmaster and BBQ restaurant owner, and sauce - as well as Dwight Yokum, paying your dues early on, cooking through a hurricane, and further confirmation that the best ideas can come from a cooler of cold beer enjoyed on a riverbank (a lot of parallels with military historians). We know you'll enjoy this episode as much as we did doing it.
And, we got to see the pit smoker!
Rec.: 10/08/2024
Published on: October 22, 2024Today's guest is one of the nicest and brightest new scholars in the military history community - Cameron Zinsou of the US Army Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. A native of Ft. Worth, Texas, Cameron thrived at North Texas as an undergraduate and earned his PhD at Mississippi State University. He's a World War II guy, focusing on French meanings of citizenship during the conflict. There's a lot in this one, so get ready - we'll talk growing up in Ft. Worth, early interest in Civil War history (a la Lesley Gordon), grief and loss of a sibling, the influence of Rob Citino, getting hooked on F1 after a lifetime of misguided NASCAR fandom, among many other topics. Enjoy.
Shoutout to Arthur Bryant's BBQ in Kansas City!
Rec.: 09/19/2024
Published on: October 15, 2024Today, we go Down Under to chat with the pleasant, fun, and wicked-smart Michael Finch. Mike is a Senior Lecturer in the History of War and Strategy at the Centre for Future Defence and National Security at Deakin University. A graduate of Pembroke College, Oxford University, Mike has written extensively on French colonial violence and the First World War and just published a thoughtful history of the seminal Makers of Modern Strategy books titled Making Makers: The Past, the Present, and the Study of War (Oxford, 2024).
A native of the Newcastle region of England, Mike and his family made the big move to Australia and haven't looked back. We'll talk Oz, the serendipity of archival discoveries, ACT Brumbies, Korean BBQ, being a Geordi, caravan vacations, and, yes, kangaroos. Join us for this enjoyable chat with Mike Finch while he has his morning coffee and we wait for dinner!
Don't forget - 30% off at the University Press of Kansas with code 24MILPEOPLE.
Rec.: 09/17/2024
Published on: October 8, 2024Today's guest took a non-traditional path to becoming a historian, working in the private sector while gradually becoming a researcher and writer on the Vietnam War. A native of Pennsylvania, Jay Veith served in the post-Vietnam US Army, worked in management for Proquest and other corporations, and earned a PhD at Australia's Monash University (at the encouragement of the late Jeffrey Grey) later in life. Jay's books include Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973-1975 and Drawn Swords in a Distant Land: South Vietnam's Shattered Dreams, and he is currently working on a book examining the North Vietnamese side of the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Jay has been active in supporting identifying remains of missing American servicemembers and has testified before Congress on behalf of families of missing servicemembers. If you've attended the annual Texas Tech University Vietnam conference, you've heard Jay speak on these and other Vietnam War-related topics.
Join us for an entertaining and interesting chat with Jay Veith. We'll talk being in the Cold War US Army, Rambo, researching and writing on topics raw in living memory, earning a PhD in Australia, being an "independent scholar," and the best pho in Falls Church.
Remember the 24MILPEOPLE 30%-off code at the University Press of Kansas!
Shoutout to Mission BBQ and Pho 75!
Rec.: 08/27/2024
Published on: October 1, 2024Today's guest is the host of the Mother of Tanks/Why We Fight podcast - Sasha Maggio! Sasha's background is actually in intelligence studies and psychology, but she's had an interest in military history and World War II for many years. She's held various contractor jobs with the US Army and the Department of Defense, including the Army Combined Arms Center at Ft. Leavenworth. She is currently a unit deployment manager with the US Air Force's 37th Airlift Squadron at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. She will soon begin doctoral studies in military history at Maynooth University in Ireland, focusing on non-military-related soldier crime in the US Army in Europe during World War II. A Boston native, Sasha is also a classically trained singer and a pastry chef.
We'll talk being an Army spouse, working as a defense contractor, the evolution of the successful Why We Fight podcast, touring Sicily, Larceny Bourbon, and the 1941 US Army GHQ maneuvers, among other topics.
Don't forget - 30% off at the University Press of Kansas online store with code 24MILPEOPLE.
Rec.: 09/06/2024
Published on: September 24, 2024Today's guest is Mark Folse - BBQ intellectual, shameless Alabama fan, and, by the way, historian of manhood and the Marine Corps, as well as the US Army in Afghanistan. A native of the Deep South, Mark enlisted in the Marine Corps after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and served in Afghanistan and Iraq. After four years in the Marines, Mark returned to school, earning his BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Alabama, where he worked under Friend-of-the-Pod Andrew Huebner (this is where Mark says "Roll Tide" or whatever). Now a historian at the US Army Center of Military History at Ft. McNair in Washington, DC, Mark writes on the US Army in Afghanistan for his day job but remains a historian of manhood and masculinity in the early 20th century Marine Corps. His first book, The Globe and Anchor Men: US Marines and Manhood in the Great War Era, was recently published by the University Press of Kansas (use code 24MILPEOPLE for 30% off!).
We'll talk about growing up in the South, Alabama football, serving in the Marine Corps, comparing academic and official history, and a BBQ treatise that rivals Adam Seipp's! Get settled, grab the beverage of your choice (if you aren't driving), and enjoy.
Rec.: 08/23/2024
Published on: September 17, 2024We kick off Season 5 with fellow directional-state utlitiy infielder Devlin Scofield of Northwest Missouri State University. Devlin is a historian of Germany and the First World War, and also researches on Alsatian veterans and nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Born in New York but raised in Livingston, Montana, Devlin earned his PhD at Michigan State University. So, we'll talk "Yellowstone" and Mark Dantonio, along with tattos, bears, and Austrian restaraunts in Kansas City!
Don't forget to use the 30% off code 24MILPEOPLE at the University Press of Kansas - a very generous offer from our friends out there at The Ranch in Lawrence!
It's good to be back - thanks for listening!
Rec.: 06/28/2024
Published on: September 10, 2024Our guest today is Kansas native-turned-West Texan Kelly Crager. Kelly is Head of the Oral History Project at the Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University, where he is also the Associate Archivist. Before coming to Texas Tech, Kelly was a visiting assistant professor at Texas A&M University. He holds a BA and MA degree in American history from Pittsburg State University and earned his PhD in from the University of North Texas.
Kelly is the author of Hell under the Rising Sun: Texan POWs and the Building of the Burma‐Thailand Death Railway (Texas A&M University Press). His articles have been published in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Military History of the West, and Southwestern Historical Quarterly, and he curated physical and online exhibits on The Tet Offensive and the Helicopter War in Vietnam. His current research focuses on myth and memory in the Vietnam War. Kelly is the Book Review Editor for Military History of the West, an advisor to the Dartmouth Vietnam Project, and has appeared on C-SPAN’s American History TV.
Join us for a relaxed and very interesting chat with Kelly Crager. We'll talk adolescent missteps, working in a hot dog factory, the impact of that special history teacher, doing oral history, George Strait, Shiner Boch Beer, and much more.
Shoutout to Hard Eight BBQ in Stephenville, Texas, and The Shack BBQ in Lubbock!
And a very special shoutout to our listeners - this is our 100th-numbered episode! Congrats to us and to all of you for supporting Military Historians are People, Too!
Special Discount for our listeners from the University Press of Kansas - 30% off any book purchase! Use discount code 24MILPEOPLE at the UPK website!
Rec.: 03/14/2024
Published on: April 9, 2024Our guest today is another Napoleonic-era scholar and also prolific podcaster Zack White. Zack is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Centre for Port Cities and Maritime Cultures at the University of Portsmouth. He earned a BA in History from the University of Southampton, a Postgraduate Certificate of Education in Secondary Education and Teaching from the Wessex Schools Training Partnership, and an MA and PhD in History from the University of Southampton. His thesis, “Pragmatism & Discretion: Discipline in the British Army, 1808-1818” was awarded the Wellington Prize in 2022. Zack has experience in the secondary school classroom as well. He taught History and Politics at St. Catherine’s Catholic School in Dorset.
Zack is the editor of the forthcoming An Unavoidable Evil: Siege Warfare in the Age of Napoleon (Helion) and is the editor and presenter of The Napoleonic Wars Podcast, which has over 2,000 weekly listeners in over 100 countries. Zack is the founder and the current Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Romance, Revolution & Reform, serves as the Postgraduate Liaison and Social Media Officer for the British Commission for Military History, and is the creator and editor of the online hub The Napoleonic Wars. He is the founder and chair of the Napoleonic & Revolutionary War Graves Charity, a program dedicated to war graves restoration and burying Napoleonic-era veterans when bodies are disturbed. Zack is currently researching his next project, “Sepoys and Slave Seamen: Race, Empire and the Law in British India, 1795-1830.”
Join us for a really interesting chat with one of the more busy new scholars in the military history community. We'll talk podcasting, air traffic control, Green Day, Wellington, British military justice, violins, and much more!
Special Discount for our listeners from the University Press of Kansas - 30% off any book purchase! Use discount code 24MILPEOPLE at the UPK website!
Rec.: 03/15/2024
Published on: April 2, 2024Our guest today is Napoleonic-era scholar Luke Reynolds, who is an assistant professor of history at the University of Connecticut at Stamford. He has taught at colleges and universities in greater New York City, including Hunter College and Brooklyn College. Luke holds a BA in history from Trinity College in Dublin, an MA from Hunter College in New York, an MPhil in history from Cambridge, and a PhD from the City University of New York.
Luke's first monograph, Who Owned Waterloo? Battle, Memory, and Myth in British History, 1815-1852 (Oxford University Press), won the Society for Military History 2023 Distinguished Book Award and was a runner-up for the Society for the Society for Army Historical Research's 2023 Best First Book Prize. He has also published in the Journal of Tourism History and the Journal of Victorian Culture. He is currently working on a monograph titled The Complete Battle of Waterloo: All Three Versions of J. H. Amherst's Blockbuster Spectacle.
Luke is a frequent guest on the The Napoleonic Wars Podcast, and is Committee Secretary for the Napoleonic and Revolutionary War Graves Charity. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (huzzah!).
Join us for a fun and interesting chat with Luke Reynolds. We'll talk growing up in New York City, going to school abroad, choosing between theater and history, Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's novels, the Lambs Club, and, of course, "the recent film that shall not be named."
Special Discount for our listeners from the University Press of Kansas - 30% off any book purchase! Use discount code 24MILPEOPLE at the UPK website!
Rec.: 03/08/2024
Published on: March 26, 2024Today's special Leap Year guest is World War II social historian and oral history advocate G. Kurt Piehler. Kurt is the Director of the Institute on World War II and the Human Experience at Florida State University. He has held academic appointments at the City University of New York and Drew University, and was the founding director of the Rutgers Oral History Archives and served as Director of the Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Tennessee. He was a Fulbright Lecturer in American Studies at Kobe University and Kyoto University and served as a National Historical Publications and Records Commission Fellow in Historical Editing at the Peale Family Papers in the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery (that's a mouthful!). Kurt earned his BA in History at Drew University before taking an MA and PhD at Rutgers.
Kurt is the author of A Religious History of the American GI in World War II (Nebraska), Remembering War the American Way (Smithsonian Institution Press) and World War II (Greenwood), which is part of the American Soldiers' Lives series. He edited the Encyclopedia of Military Science (2013) and The United States in World War II: A Documentary Reader (Wiley-Blackwell). He has co-edited at least five volumes, including the Oxford Handbook of World War II. Kurt is the series editor of Fordham University Press' World War II: The Global, Human, Ethical Dimension series and the Legacies of War series at the University of Tennessee Press. He is on the advisory board of the NEH-funded American Soldier Project at Virginia Tech University (Shoutout to GFOP Ed Gitre!) and a member of the editorial board of the Service Newspapers of World War II digital publication. Kurt is an active member of the Society for Military History, and he organized the 2003 annual meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the 2017 conference in Jacksonville, Florida (seriously, he did that TWICE!).
Join us for a fun and fascinating chat with the very affable Kurt Piehler. We'll talk fun shirts, Fresh Meadows, congressional internships, Pink Martini, oral history and veterans' stories, and John le Carré novels, among many other topics. This is a good one (as they all are!)!
Special Discount for our listeners from the University Press of Kansas - 30% off any book purchase! Use discount code 24MILPEOPLE at the UPK website!
Rec.: 02/29/2024
Published on: March 19, 2024Our guest today is a historian of the Civil War, the Vietnam era, and the prisoner-of-war experience - Glenn Robins in Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History and Political Science at Georgia Southwestern State University in Americus, Georgia. He formerly served as the Director of GSW University, and was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Southern Mississippi and spent one year at Brewton-Parker prior to his arrival in Americus. Glenn received his BA from Carson Newman College, an MA from East Tennessee State University, and his PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi. Glenn was a West Point Summer Fellow in 2009.
Glenn is the author of The Longest Rescue: The Life and Legacy of Vietnam POW William A. Robinson (Kentucky), and The Bishop of the Old South: The Ministry and Civil War Legacy of Leonidas Polk (Mercer). He is the editor of They Have Left Us Here to Die: The Civil War Prison Diary of Sgt. Lyle G. Adair, 111th U.S. Colored Infantry (Kent State), which was a finalist for the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award, the co-editor of America and the Vietnam War: Re-Examining the Culture and History of a Generation (Routledge) and co-author with Paul Springer of Transforming Civil War Prisons: Lincoln, Lieber, and the Politics of Captivity (Routledge: 2014). Glenn’s new book, A Debt of Gratitude: How Jimmy Carter put Vietnam Politics on the National Agenda, is forthcoming from the University Press of Kansas.
Join us for a very interesting chat with Glenn Robins. We'll talk chance and circumstance in becoming a historian, working for NASA, POWs, veterans in Congress, the Ford EXP, Eminem, and home-cooked viz retail BBQ!
Rec.: 02/15/2024
Published on: March 12, 2024Today’s guest is the amazing teacher, Civil War historian, and former Gettysburg battlefield guide Dr. Jennnifer Murray. Jennifer is a teaching associate professor of history at Oklahoma State University and was formerly an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia at Wise and served as a historian in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Jennifer was also, for several summers, a seasonal ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park and has led hundreds of battlefield tours. She earned a BS at Frostburg State University and an MA from James Madison University before being awarded a PhD from Auburn University.
Jennifer is the author of On A Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933–2013 (Tennessee), which won the Bachelder-Coddington Award in 2014, and The Civil War Begins: Opening Clashes, 1861, which is part of the US Army Center of Military History’s Campaign Series. Her current book project is a biography of General George Gordon Meade. Jennifer has participated in dozens of Civil War Roundtables and has been featured on C-SPAN and NPR. She also consulted for “Who Do You Think You Are?” Jennifer is a member of the editorial board of Kent State University Press’ Interpreting the Civil War: Texts and Contexts Series and formerly served in the same capacity at Gettysburg Magazine.
Join us for a fun and interesting chat with Jennnifer Murray. We’ll talk Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen, “Stump the Ranger,” college softball, Mrs. Maisel, and writing a massive biography of an often underrated Civil War general.
Content warning: Brian reveals he has attended a Billy Joel concert!
Shoutout to Wright’s BBQ in Johnson, Arkansas!
Rec.: 02/16/2024
Published on: March 5, 2024Today’s guest is the funny and brilliant Matthias Strohn. Matthias is Head of the Historical Analysis Program at the Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research and an Honorary Visiting Professor at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Buckingham. Matthias has also served as a senior lecturer in War Studies at the UK Ministry of Defence and a Military History Instructor at the German Staff College in Hamburg. He is a Lieutenant-Colonel in the German Bundeswehr and as a member of the German Military Attaché Reserve served in Paris, London, and Madrid. Matthias deployed to Iraq with the British Army and Afghanistan with the British Army and Bundeswehr. In 2022, he was awarded the Golden Cross of Honour, the German Armed Forces’ highest non-combat decoration.
Matthias was educated at the University of Münster before earning his MSt and DPhil at the University of Oxford. He is the author or editor of more than 20 books, including The German Army and the Defence of the Reich (Cambridge), How Armies Grow: The Expansion of Military Forces in the Age of Total War 1789-1945 (Casemate), Winning Wars: The Enduring Nature and Changing Character of Victory from Antiquity to the 21st Century (Casemate), and World War I Companion (Osprey). His forthcoming book Blade of a Sword: Ernst Jünger and the 73rd Fusilier Regiment on the Western Front, 1914–18, will be published by Osprey in 2025. Outside of his military and academic life, Matthias gives battlefield tours through The Cultural Experience.
“So join us for an energetic and wide-ranging discussion of speaking English, studying at Oxford, growing up in Muenster (the “most livable place on Earth”), being a historian while deployed, Stalingrad staff rides, pink Stetsons, and Johnny Cash!
Rec. 02/08/2024
Published on: February 20, 2024Our guest today is Ohio University PhD candidate Cody J. Billock. Cody is a Fellow at the Contemporary History Institute Fellow at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, where he is completing a dissertation titled “Huế & The Global Vietnamese Civil War, 1945-1980,” under the direction of Alec Holcombe. Cody completed his BA and MA in History at San Diego State University, working with Pierre Asselin, and has studied at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Hanoi, Vietnam. Cody is the recipient of several Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) grants and is fluent in Vietnamese. He has worked in three of the four main national archives in Vietnam.
Chatting with an advanced doctoral student is essential to what we do here on Military Historians are People, Too. Join us as we discuss growing up around Marines, high school doldrums, discovering Vietnam’s rich history, learning Vietnamese and working in Vietnam’s Nation Archives, White Buffalo, and Chakhokhbili! For our graduate student listeners - it’s great to hear from a young scholar.
Shoutout to Kiser’s BBQ in Athens, Ohio!
Rec.: 02/09/2024
Published on: February 20, 2024Today's guest is the delightful First World War scholar Dr. Jennifer Wellington. Jennifer is Assistant Professor in Late 19th/20th Century Continental and Global History at University College, Dublin, where she is also a member of the UCD Centre for War Studies. She earned a BA in English and an LLB, both with Honors, at Australian National University, Canberra. At Canberra, she was awarded the Tillyard Prize, the "oldest and most prestigious prize available to bachelor degree students of the University." She later earned an MA, MPhil, and PhD at Yale University and was awarded the Hans Gatzke Prize for Outstanding Dissertation in a Field of European History. She was a postdoctoral researcher at King's College, London, before joining the faculty at UCD. In 2022-23, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College, London.
Jennifer is the author of Exhibiting War: The Great War, Museums and Memory in Britain, Canada and Australia (Cambridge). Her essays and articles have appeared in 1914-1918 Online: The International Encyclopedia of the First World War, The Journal of Contemporary History, and Century Ireland, among many others. Jennifer is on the Editorial Advisory Board at the British Journal of Military History and a Section Editor for 1914-1918 Online. Her current research examines the history of wartime trophy-taking.
Join us for a really interesting chat with Jennifer Wellington. We'll talk about growing up in rural Australia (that narrows it down, right?), graduate studies at Yale, war museums and war art, the Priestly 11, Vegemite, and Moden Pizza in New Haven. Rec.: 02/01/2024
Published on: February 13, 2024Today's guest is a historian of the Romanian military experience Grant Thomas Harward. Grant is a historian with the US Army Center of Military History in Washington, DC. Before going to Ft. McNair, Grant was a historian with the US Army Medical Department Center of History and Heritage in San Antonio. He received his BA in History from Brigham Young University, then took an MA at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He completed his PhD at Texas A&M University, under Friend-of-the-Pod and brisket coneseur Roger Reese.
Grant is the author of Romania's Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust (Cornell), which was awarded the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is also the co-author, with Johnny Shumate, of the forthcoming book Romania 1944: The Turning of Arms against Nazi Germany (Osprey). Grant's articles have been published in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Studies in Ethnicity & Nationalism, Army History, and Air & Space Power History. In 2017, he was the Norman Raab Foundation Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. He also held a Fulbright US Student Award to Romania in 2016-2017 and an Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellowship in 2013.
Join us for a delightful and uplifting chat with Grant Harward. We'll discuss BYU quarterbacks, New Order, serving an LDS mission in Romania, the Battlefield documentary series, and the best Balkan food in DC, among many other topics. Lots packed in this one!
Shoutout to Ambar Restaurant in Arlington, VA!
Rec.: 12/28/2023
Published on: February 6, 2024Our guest today takes into the world of women and war in Habsburg Spain. Sandra Suárez García is a Margarita Salas Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Modern and American History at the University of Granada in Spain. She studied History as an undergraduate at the University of Santiago de Compostela before earning two MA degrees at the University of Granada. She earned her PhD in History and Arts at Granada with a dissertation titled "Aristocratic Property in the Kingdom of Granada (13th-16th centuries): The Vega and the Periurban Surroundings of the Capital." Her current project, "Women and War in Habsburg Spain (16th century): Theory, Law and Praxis," is part of the research project "Narrations, Discourses, and Management of Memory and the Past of Agents and Intermediaries in the Hispanic Monarchy" (Europeans always have such long titles for these big projects!). Sandra is also a member of the European Cooperation in Science and Technology Action working group titled “People in Motion: Entangled Histories of Displacement across the Mediterranean." She has published over a dozen articles in journals such as Historia Medieval and Medievalismo, and she has numerous articles currently under review in English and Spanish. She is fluent in four languages and reads a few more. She's participated in study programs in Germany, Italy, and Tunisia and was a visiting scholar at the University of Bologna (Italy).
Join us for a delightful and interesting chat - we'll discuss women, war, and the historical record in the 16th century, reading about medicinal plants, pastel de natas, growing up in Germany then going to school in Spain. This is a fun one, spiked with some intense historical stuff!
Rec.: 12/15/2023
Published on: January 30, 2024Our guest today is former British diplomat and First World War scholar Dr. Tony Cowan. While in the Foreign Service, Tony held postings to Beijing, Hong Kong, Brussels, and The Hague. He was educated at Oxford, and following his retirement, he earned a PhD in military history from Kings College, London.
Tony’s publications include ‘The Introduction of New German Defensive Tactics in 1916-1917’ in the British Journal for Military History and “A Picture of German Unity? Federal Contingents in the German Army, 1916-1917’, in Jonathan Krause, ed., The Greater War: Other Combatants and Other Fronts, 1914–1918 (Palgrave Macmillan). He is the editor of The Catastrophe of 8 August 1918, which is a translation of Thilo von Bose’s Die Katastrophe des 8 August 1918, which was part of the German semi-official Schlachten des Weltkrieges (Battles of the World War) series. Most recently, Tony published Holding Out: The German Army and Operational Command in 1917 with Cambridge University Press’ Military Histories Series.
Tony has participated in the British Army’s staff rides for the First World War, and he is a member of the British Commission for Military History, Society of Military History, and Western Front Association.
Join us for a very interesting and entertaining chat with Tony Cowan. We'll talk reading Thucydides in Greek, the Hong Kong hand-over, command and the German Army, Augustiner Beer, and other "terrible confessions."
Rec.: 12/12/2023
Published on: January 23, 2024Today’s guest is historian and closet economist Clifford J. Rogers. Cliff is Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Before arriving in West Point, he was a Fulbright fellow at the Institute for Historical Research in London and an Olin Fellow in Military and Strategic History at Yale. He was also a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Wales, Swansea. Cliff triple-majored in Economics, History, and Policy Studies for his BA at Rice University, and earned his MA and PhD in History from The Ohio State University.
Cliff is the author of War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III, 1327-1360 (Boydell and Brewer) and Soldiers’ Lives through History: The Middle Ages (Greenwood), among other works. He has twice won De Re Militari’s Verbruggen Prize, once for War Cruel and Sharp and again for Soldiers’ Lives, and also received that association’s Bachrach Medal. Cliff is the recipient of the Royal Historical Society’s Alexander Prize Medal and has been awarded the Army Historical Foundation’s Distinguished Writing Award on three occasions.
In addition to his monographs, Cliff has edited and co-edited multiple volumes, including the Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology, which received the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award. He has published articles in The Journal of Medieval History, War in History, English Historical Review, and the Journal of Military History, among many others. His article “The Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years War” was awarded the Society for Military History’s Moncado Prize. Cliff co-founded The Journal of Medieval Military History and serves as co-Senior Editor of the digital West Point History of Warfare. In 2016, he received the George C. Marshall Foundation Prize for the Use of Digital Technology in Teaching Military History for his work on that project.
Join us for a deep chat about forks in the road, Dungeons and Dragons, Van Morrison, and New York BBQ. Cliff unwittingly delivers a master-class on military revolutions and revolutions in military affairs - you won’t be disappointed.
Shoutout to Smoky Rock BBQ in Rhinebeck, New York!
Rec.: 11/10/2023
Published on: December 12, 2023Today's guest is Russian/Soviet historian and maroon-blooded Aggie Roger Reese! Roger is Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at Texas A&M University. He specializes in the social history of the Imperial Russian and Soviet militaries and has written seven books on the Russian armed forces. He received his BA in history from Texas A&M and moved to Austin to earn his MA and PhD from the University of Texas. Following his commissioning from Texas A&M, Roger served in the United States Army from 1981-1984.
Roger's many books include Stalin's Reluctant Soldiers: A Social History of the Red Army, 1925-1941 (Kansas), Why Stalin's Soldiers Fought: The Red Army's Military Effectiveness in World War II (Kansas), and The Imperial Russian Army, in Peace, War, and Revolution, 1856-1917 (Kansas). The latter won the World War One Historical Association's Norman B. Tomlinson, Jr. Book Prize. His most recent book is Russia's Army: A History from the Napoleonic Wars to the War in Ukraine (Oklahoma).
Roger's articles have been published in leading journals that include the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, War & Society, and the Journal of Military History. In 2003, he was awarded The Society for Military History's Moncado Prize for the outstanding article in military history for "Red Army Professionalism and the Communist Party, 1918-1941." He sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, and Histories. Roger is an exceptional teacher and received Texas A&M's University Distinguished Achievement Award in the Area of Teaching in 2009.
Join us for a very interesting chat with Roger about the Russian military through time, researching in post-Cold War Russian archives, being in the Aggie Corps of Cadets, Aggie football, Willie Nelson, Tolstoy, and the common theme it seems of this podcast - serendipity.
Shoutout to Fargo's Pit BBQ in Bryan, Texas (though Roger claims his brisket is the best around)!
Rec.: 11/03/2023
Published on: December 5, 2023Today's guest is the highly intellectual and equally highly satirical Philipp Stelzel. Philipp is an Associate Professor of History and Graduate Director for History at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Before finding his academic home at Duquesne, Philipp taught at Duke University and Boston College, and also served as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Munich. He earned his BA in History from Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich, an MA in History from Columbia University, and a PhD in Modern European Transnational and Global History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Philipp is the author of History after Hitler: A Transatlantic Enterprise (Penn) and has published articles in History Compass and Central European History. He has worked with the American-German Institute and the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. Philipp is also the author of the brilliant tongue-in-cheek cocktail commentary on academia titled The Faculty Lounge: A Cocktail Guide for Academics (Indiana). Philipp has received funding from the German Historical Institute, the Fulbright Foundation, and the American Historical Association, among others.
Join us for a deep dive into German history, Shirley Horn, lederhosen, Birkenstocks, and, yes, cocktails.
Shoutout to Q Shack in Durham, North Carolina!
Rec.: 10/25/2023
Published on: November 28, 2023Our guest to the generous and brilliant Andrew A. Wiest. Andy is a Distinguished Professor of History and Founding Director of the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is also the current General Buford "Buff" Blount Professor of Military History from 2023-2025 at USM. He served as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Warfighting Strategy at the United States Air Force Air War College and a Visiting Senior Lecturer in the War Studies Department at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, England. Andy received his BS and MA degrees in History from Southern Mississippi and earned his Ph. from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Andy is the author of seventeen books (that's right - seventeen!), including two best-sellers: Boys of 67: Charlie Company's War in Vietnam (Osprey) and Vietnam's Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN (NYU Press). The Boys of 67 was also released as Brothers in War, a documentary film by Lou Reda Productions for National Geographic Television, which received an Emmy nomination. Vietnam's Forgotten Army won the Society for Military History's Distinguished Book Award. Andy also authored Charlie Company's Journey Home: The Boys of '67 and the War They Left Behind; The Forgotten Impact on the Wives of Vietnam Veterans (Osprey/Bloomsbury), and he has published books on the First and Second World Wars, edited or co-edited several volumes, and published more than a dozen articles and book chapters. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and many other news publications.
Andy has twice received the University of Southern Mississippi Excellence in Teaching Award and was awarded the Mississippi Humanities Council Teacher of the Year Award in 2002. In 2021, he was inducted into the Hattiesburg Publish School District's Hall of Fame. He leads an annual WWII study abroad program to London and Normandy and has developed an award-winning Vietnam Study Abroad Program.
Join us for a remarkable and enjoyable chat with Andy Wiest. We'll talk growing up in the South, working and traveling with Vietnam veterans, founding a major center for the study of war and society, Dirty Manhattans, Electric Light Orchestra, and the sad naps from being a lifelong Minnesota Vikings fan. This is why we do this podcast.
Shoutout to Leatha's BBQ in Petal, Mississippi!
Rec.: 10/13/2023
Published on: November 14, 2023Today's guest is the in-demand Radical War guy, Matthew Ford! Matthew Ford is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor specializing in war and security at the Swedish Defence University (the Försvarshögskolan) in Stockholm. A former West Point fellow and visiting scholar at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, Matthew is an Honorary Historical Consultant for the Royal Armouries Museum. He was a Strategic Analyst for the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at the UK Ministry of Defence and served as Deputy Head and Director of Teaching and Learning at the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex. Matthew received his BA in Philosophy at the University of Reading and an MA and PhD in War Studies from King's College, London.
Matthew is the author of Weapon of Choice: Small Arms and the Culture of Military Innovation (Oxford) and, with Andrew Hoskins of the University of Glasgow, Radical War: Data Attention and Control in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford). His current book project is tentatively titled "War in the Age of the Smartphone" and is set to be published by Oxford in 2025. Matthew has published in many of the top journals in the field, including the Journal of International Security, International History Review, the Journal of Strategic Studies, and War in History. He is the founding editor of the British Journal for Military History.
Join us for a fun but intense chat with Matthew Ford. We'll talk attending job fairs, the pros and cons of being a bureaucrat and an academic, warfare in the 21st century, moving to Sweden, the Rugby World Cup, Stanley Tucci, and The Smiths, among many other topics. Strap yourself in for this one!
Rec.: 10/20/2023
Published on: November 7, 2023Today's guest is the energetic and enthusiastic Jason Herbert. Jason is a Tribal Liaison with the United States Forest Service in Colorado. He is also the creator and host of Historians at the Movies, a podcast that features historians talking about movies ranging from Pretty Woman to Con Air. Jason is an experienced high-school teacher, having taught US History, World History, and economics at the Pine School and the Highlands Career Institute in Florida. He also served as an ethnographer for the Seminole Tribe of Florida. Jason received his PhD in History from the University of Minnesota, where he completed a dissertation titled "Beast of Many Names: Cattle, Conflict, and the Transformation of Indigenous Florida, 1519- 1858." He took his MA and BA in History from Wichita State University and an AA in General Studies from Tallahassee Community College.
Jason has published articles in the Florida Historical Quarterly, Ohio Valley History, and Chronicles of Oklahoma. He has also published in the American Historian and Smithsonian magazine. His scholarship has been supported by Florida Atlantic University and the Huntington Library, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the American Historical Association, the Agricultural History Society, and the Newberry Renaissance Consortium. Jason excels in front of a classroom - he's won teaching awards at the University of Minnesota, Wichita State University, and the Highlands Career Institute. Additionally, he was nominated for the Gilder Lehrman National History Teacher of the Year Award.
Join us for a fast and furious chat with Jason Herbert. We'll talk undergraduate woes, Kentucky and Indiana, Lyle Lovett, Black Sails, Whataburger, and a little Hemingway.
Shoutout to Front Range BBQ in Colorado Springs!
Rec.: 10/11/2023
Published on: October 31, 2023Whether this is your first Military Historians are People, Too, or you are a long-time listener, you are in for an amazing story with today's guest, Robert K. Brigham. Bob is Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations and Faculty Director of the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Vassar College. Bob also taught at Southern Vermont College and the University of Kentucky. He earned his BA from SUNY College at Brockport, an MA from the University of Rhode Island, and his PhD from the University of Kentucky, directed by the late George Herring.
Bob has authored or co-authored ten books, including Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam (PublicAffairs), Is Iraq Another Vietnam? (PublicAffairs), Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy (PublicNLF'srs), and Guerilla Diplomacy: The NLF's Foreign Relations and the Vietnam War (Cornell). His forthcomingAdoptee'sThis is a True War Story: An Adoptee's Bob'sr (University of Chicago Press). Bob's research has been funded by the Rockefeller, Mellon, Ford, and Smith Richardson foundations and the National Endowment for Humanities. He has held endowed lectureships and visiting professorships at Johns Hopkins University, Cambridge University (Clare College), Brown University, and University College Dublin.
Bob is an accomplished teacher and has received teaching awards at the University of Kentucky, Southern Vermont College, and the Semester at Sea Program. Vassar College's Alumnae/i Association presented Bob with its Outstanding Faculty Award in 2019. The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations recognized his dedication to the profession earlier this year when the organization awarded him the Peter L. Hahn Distinguished Service Award.
Join us for a truly remarkable chat with Bob Brigham. We'll talk discovering birth parents, the serendipity of being interested in Vietnam, how so many of us had no idea how to become a history professor, teaching at sea, Beamish Stout, Bruce Springsteen, Hallberg-Rassy sailboats, Korean BBQ, and other essential matters.
Shoutout to Korpot Korean Food & Drink in Poughkeepsie, New York!
Rec.: 09/29/2023
Published on: October 24, 2023Our guest today is Sarah Parry Myers, author of the new book Earning Their Wings: The WASPS of World War II and the Fight for Veteran Recognition (UNC Press). Sarah is an Associate Professor of History at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. She joined the faculty at Messiah after spending three years at St. Francis University in Loretto, Pennsylvania, where she also served as the director of the Keirn Family World War II Museum. She received her BA in History Education at the University of Missouri-Rolla and an MA in History at Missouri State. Sarah completed her PhD at Texas Tech University.
A specialist in gender and the military, Sarah is the author of “‘The Women Behind the Men Behind the Gun’: Gendered Identities and Militarization in the Second World War” in The Routledge Handbook of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military, ed. Kara Dixon Vuic (Routledge) and “Battling Contested Air Spaces: The American Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II,” in Gender and the Second World War: The Lessons of War, edited by Corinna Peniston-Bird and Emma Vickers (Palgrave). Her first book, Earning Their Wings: The WASPs of World War II and the Fight for Veteran Recognition was published in Sept. 2023 with UNC Press.
In 2020, Sarah was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Dialogues on the Experience of War Grant for her project “We are Veterans Too: Women’s Experiences in the U.S. Military.” She is active in the Society for Military History, the American Historical Association, and The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, among other professional associations.
Join us for a delightful chat with the delightful Sarah Myers. We'll talk WASPs, financial exigency in higher ed, growing up in Missouri, being a Swiftie, not taking a class from Friend of the Pod John McManus, and yes, washing feet!
Shoutout to Borough BBQ in Gettysburg!
Rec.: 09/15/2023
Published on: October 17, 2023Today's guest is the delightful Joy Porter. Joy is Professor of Indigenous and Environmental History at the University of Hull. She is a principal investigator of the Treatied Spaces Research Group and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow. Joy is also the principal investigator for the Arts and Humanities Research Council's project "Brightening the Covenant Chain: Revealing Cultures of Diplomacy Between the Iroquois and the British Crown." Joy was a Fulbright Scholar at Dartmouth College and has also held visiting professorships at Paris Diderot University and The Clinton Institute, Dublin. She started her career as a Senior Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, and she also spent eight years as a Senior Lecturer and Associate Dean at Swansea University. Joy was educated at the University of Nottingham, where she received her MA and PhD.
Joy has more than 38 publications to her credit, including her fascinating recent monograph Trauma, Primitivism, and the First World War: The Making of Frank Prewett (Bloomsbury). Her other monographs include Native American Environmentalism (Nebraska), Native American Indian Freemasonry: Associationalism & Performance in America, (Nebraska) and To Be Indian: The Life of Seneca-Iroquois Arthur Caswell Parker (Oklahoma), which won a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award. Joy also won the 2006 Writer of the Year Award from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers for the Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature. Her forthcoming book is titled Canada's Green Challenge (McGill-Queen's). Joy is a lead editor of the Cambridge University Press book series, Elements in Indigenous Environmental Research. She is also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a National Teaching Fellow.
Join us for a fun, quirky, and very interesting chat with Joy Porter. We'll talk growing up in Derry during The Troubles, interdisciplinary approaches to military history, the compulsion to write, John Prine, soldier trauma in the First World War, and fish tacos, among other topics!
Shoutout to Deckhand Dave's in Juneau, Alaska!
Rec.: 09/08/2023
Published on: October 10, 2023Our guest today is the introspective yet outgoing Samuel Fury Childs Daly. Sam is an Associate Professor of African and African American Studies, History, and International Comparative Studies at Duke University. From 2016-17, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers University. Sam earned his BA in African Studies and History at Columbia University, an MA in Historical Research Methods from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and an M Phil in African Studies from King’s College, University of Cambridge. He returned to the US to complete his PhD in History at Columbia University.
Sam is the author of A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge). The book has won several awards, including the 2020 Law and Society Association’s J. Willard Hurst Book Prize for the best book in legal history in any region or time period and the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom’s Fage & Oliver Prize for the best book on Africa published in 2020 or 2021. Sam’s articles have appeared in Law & History Review, Past & Present, Journal of African History, African Studies Review, and many others. His research has been funded by, among others, the Mellon Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, and the American Historical Association.
Sam’s current book projects include “Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa After Empire,” which is under contract with Duke University Press, and “The Good Soldier: A History of Military Desertion.”
Join us for a very interesting chat with Sam Daly. We’ll talk doing research in Nigeria, growing up in a family of extroverted performers, the intersections of war, legal studies, and military history, Bjork (a first for The Pod!), and a host of other topics!
Shoutout to the Q Shack in Durham, NC!
Rec.: 09/01/2023
Published on: October 3, 2023Our guest today is Netherlander Thijs Brocades Zaalberg! Thijs is a University Lecturer at the Universiteit Leiden and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Military Sciences at the Netherlands Defense Academy in Breda. Before moving to Leiden, Thijs worked at the Netherlands Insitute of Military History in The Hague. He is currently the coordinator for the project Comparing Extreme Violence in the Wars of Decolonization, 1945-1962, at the Netherlands Insitute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Thijs earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Groningen, spent a year at Trinity College, Dublin, and then took his PhD at the University of Amsterdam. Thijs also spent ten years as an officer in the Reserve of the Royal Netherlands Army.
Thijs is a specialist in colonial warfare, counterinsurgency, and peace operations. He is the editor, with Bart Luttikhuis, of Empire's Violent End: Comparing Dutch, British, and French Wars of Decolonization, 1945-1962 (Cornell), and is author of Soldiers and Civil Power: Supporting or Substituting Civil Authorities in Modern Peace Operations (Amsterdam), coauthor with Arthur ten Cate of A Gentle Occupation Dutch Military Operations in Iraq, 2003-2005 (Leiden), and coauthor with Frances Gouda of American Visions of the Netherlands East Indies/Indonesia: US Foreign Policy and Indonesian Nationalism (Amsterdam). He has also published over a dozen essays and articles in English and Dutch journals.
Join us for a fascinating chat with Thijs Zaalberg. We'll talk about his parents and grandparents' experience in the Second World War, his rebellious turn toward history as a career path, the Dutch military experience, Beck, The Bear, being a war diarist in Afghanistan, Grolsch, and some BBQ basics. We're on a roll with Season 4!
Rec.: 08/09/2023
Published on: September 28, 2023Our guest today is First World War gas mask aficionado Susan R. Grayzel. Sue is Professor of History at Utah State University. Before joining the faculty at USU, Sue was Professor of History at the University of Mississippi, where she also served as the Director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies. Sue received her BA in History and Literature from Harvard University and earned an MA and PhD in History at the University of California at Berkeley. She has spent time Across the Pond as the UK Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of Leeds, the Ireland Fulbright Inter-Country Lecturer at Maynooth University, and a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford.
Sue's first book, Women's Identities At War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Unversity of North Carolina Press), won the British Council Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies. Sue is also the author of Women and the First World War (Longman), The First World War: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford St. Martin's), and At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge). She has co-edited two volumes: Gender, Labour, War and Empire: Essays on Modern Britain, with Philippa Levine (Palgrave), and Gender and the Great War, with Tammy Proctor (Oxford). Sue's most recent monograph is The Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faced the Terrors of Total War (Cambridge). In addition to her monographs and edited volumes, Sue's articles have appeared in the Journal of British Studies, the Journal of Modern History, and the Journal of Women's History, to name a few, and she has written or co-written more than 20 book chapters.
Sue's research has been funded by the American Historical Association, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and she is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is equally active in service, serving as General Editor for Women, War, and Society: The Women's Work Collection of the Imperial War Museum and as an Advisory Editor for The Encyclopedia of War. She is a former member of the Editorial Board for the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Amsterdam University Press's NIOD Series.
Sue is truly a force in our profession and is one of the most generous and approachable scholars you'll ever meet. Join us for a fascinating chat about attending Harvard at age 17, Joni Mitchell's Blue album, gas masks, a prize-winning first book, "Hotty Totty," and other seemingly random subjects! Check it out!
Rec.: 08/08/2023
Published on: September 19, 2023To kick off Season 4, we welcome to The Pod Paul Huddie of University College, Dublin. Paul is a European Research Council Project Manager at University College, Dublin, for European Research Council initiatives, including the Age of Civil Wars project. He is also a member of the UCD Centre for War Studies. He previously served as Research Programmes Administrator at UCD and was a lecturer at the University of West London. Paul received his BA and MA degrees at University College Dublin and his PhD at Queen’s University, Belfast.
Paul is the author of The Crimean War and Irish Society (Liverpool) and the forthcoming Military Charities in Victorian and Edwardian Britain & Ireland: A New Directory (Pen & Sword). He has published articles in British Journal for Military History, Mariner’s Mirror, Women’s History Review, and Irish Economic and Social History. Paul is at the forefront of military welfare history, and in 2023 he co-edited a special edition of War & Society on the subject with Amy Carney. He is working on an edited volume with Amy Rutenberg and Anndal Narayanan, titled Military Welfare History: The Third Field of Warfare History. Paul’s work has been supported by the Dublin City Council, the Royal Historical Society, and the British Association for Victorian Studies. In 2013, he was awarded the Crimean War Research Society’s President’s Trophy.
A former Irish Defense Forces Reservist, Paul is an Executive Member of the Irish Association of Professional Historians and the coordinator of the International Network for Crimean War Studies and the new Military Welfare History Network.
Join us for a rainy-day-in-Dublin chat with Paul Huddie - we’ll talk attending a rugby school in Dublin, being a bookie runner as a kid, the field of military welfare history studies, Fun Lovin’ Criminals, Dermott Kennedy, among other pertinent issues!
Rec.: 07/26/2023
As we prepare to kick off Season 4, by popular demand and return of the favor today Brian interviews Bill! Bill Allison is Professor of History and former chair of the Department of History at Georgia Southern University. He started his academic career as an assistant professor at the University of St. Francis (Indiana) and then spent several years at Weber State University. Bill earned a BA and MA in History at East Texas State University and took his PhD at Bowling Green State University, where he started as a diplomatic historian before embracing military history. He has done several stints in professional military education, first as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Strategy and International Security at the USAF Air War Colle,ge followed by a Distinguished Professorship in Military History at the USAF School for Advanced Air and Space Studies. From 2012-2014, he was General Harold K. Johnson Visiting Chair in Military History at the US Army War College.
Bill is the author of several books, including My Lai: An American Atrocity in the Vietnam War (Johns Hopkins), Military Justice in Vietnam: The Rule of Law in an American War (University Press of Kansas), and The Gulf War, 1990-1991 (Palgrave). His first book, American Diplomats in Russia: Case Studies in Orphan Diplomacy, 1916-1919 (Praeger) was published in 1997. He is co-author with Janet Valentine and the late Jeffrey Grey of American Military History: A Survey from Colonial Times to the Present (Routledge), which is now in its third edition.
Bill's professional service is a sign of his dedication to our profession. He is a former Trustee and Vice-President of the Society for Military History and was awarded the Society's Edwin Simmons Award for Distinguished Service in 2019. He has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Military History and is series editor for Routledge's Critical Moments in American History Series and Modern War Studies at the University Press of Kansas. In 2014, he was awarded the Department of the Army's Meritorious Public Service Medal. In June 2023, Bill served as the Program Director at the Society for Military History Summer Seminar in Military History, held at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, and he is a current member of the Department of the Army's Historical Advisory Subcommittee.
Join us for a fun and interesting chat with one of the co-hosts of Military Historians are People, Too! We'll talk growing up in East Texas, Vietnam, music, guitars, blocked algebra memories, reinventing yourself, and Rudy's BBQ in Texas!
Rec.: 08/18/2023
Published on: September 5, 2023To close out Season 3 (and our 75th overall episode!), our guest today is retired US Army colonel Charles R. Bowery, Jr. Charles, the Executive Director of the US Army Center of Military History and Chief of Military History at Ft. McNair in Washington, DC. He oversees all historical matters in the Department of the Army and the twenty-nine Army museums, including the National Museum of the United States Army. He also advises the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Army and other Army Senior Leaders on historical background relevant to events and projected actions affecting the Army. This included advising the recent Naming Commission.
Charles earned a BA in History at the College of William and Mary and his MA in History at North Carolina State University. He is currently finishing his PhD in History at George Washington University, with a dissertation titled “Black Officers in Army Green: African American Officers in the All-Volunteer Army, 1973-2020.” Charles is the author of The Richmond-Petersburg Campaign, 1864-1865 (Praeger) and Lee and Grant: Profiles in Leadership From the Battlefields of Virginia (American Management Association). He is also the co-editor with Ethan S. Rafuse of The Army War College Guide to the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign (University Press of Kansas).
Charles has conducted staff rides at American Revolution, Civil War, and American World War I & II battlefields. He has been awarded the Meritorious Civilian Service Award, the Legion of Merit, the General Douglas MacArthur Leadership Award, and the General George C. Marshall Award. Charles is also a retired colonel in the United States Army, where he taught history at West Point but spent much of his career as a Master Army Aviator (helicopters!) and Parachutist. His deployments included Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He has earned numerous commendations, including three Bronze Star medals.
This is a very interesting and informative episode. Join us as we chat with Charles about growing up in rural Virginia near the Seven Days battlefields, making career choices, flying helicopters, the Tom Glavine, INXS, and the myriad challenges facing Army historians today.
75 episodes! Thanks, everyone, for the support and for listening!
Rec.: 07/28/2023
Our guest today is charming international relations-cum-military historian Huw Bennett! Huw is a Reader in International Relations in the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University in Wales. He was previously a Reader and then Lecturer in International Politics and Intelligence Studies at Aberystwyth University and a Lecturer in Defence Studies at King’s College London at the Joint Services Command and Staff College. He was educated at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, earning a degree in International Politics and Strategic Studies, a Master’s in Strategic Studies, and a PhD in International Politics.
Huw has written two books. The first, Fighting the Mau Mau: the British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency, was published by Cambridge in 2012, and his most recent book, Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966-1975, will be released by Cambridge in October 2023. Huw also co-edited The Kenya Papers of General Sir George Erskine, June 1953 to May 1955, with David French (The History Press for the Army Records Society, 2013). Huw’s articles have been published in War in History, the Journal of Strategic Studies, the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and Defense and Security Analysis, to name a few. His work has been supported by the British Academy, The Leverhulme Trust, the Irish Research Council, and the Economic and Social Research Council.
Huw’s involvement in the profession is considerable. He is an editorial board member at The British Journal for Military History, Studies in Contemporary Warfare, and War and the British Empire. He is also the Co-Editor in Chief of Critical Military Studies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The Higher Education Academy and has appeared on BBC World News, Good Evening Wales, Radio France International, and many others.
Join us for a fun but, at times, deep chat with Huw Bennett. We’ll talk growing up half-Welsh in Surrey, living in Wales, the emotional toll of writing about atrocity, reading War and Peace, the delights of Spaghetti Ice, Barbi, Nirvana, and more!
Shoutout to Joe’s Ice Cream and Coco Gellato in Cardiff!
Rec.: 07/20/2023
Published on: August 15, 2023Today’s guest is the delightful historian of the military welfare state Jennifer Mittelstadt. Jen is Professor of History at Rutgers University. She completed her BA in History at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and her MA and PhD in History at the University of Michigan. Before joining the faculty at Rutgers, she was an Assistant Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Penn State University and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. In 2017-2018, Jen was the Harold K. Johnson Chair in Military History at the US Army War College.
Jen is the author of From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945-1964 (North Carolina) and The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Harvard). With Premilla Nadasen and Marisa Chappell, she is the co-author of Welfare in the United States: A History with Documents (Routledge) and also The Military and the Market (Penn), co-edited with Mark R. Wilson. Her articles have been published in the Journal of Women’s History, Journal of Policy History, and International Labor and Working-Class History, and she has contributed to numerous edited volumes. In addition, Jen has written for Jacobin, War on the Rocks, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and Vox.
Jen’s research has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. Her Guggenheim funding supported her current research project, examining grassroots right-wing participation in US foreign policy. Jen is a member of the Coordinating Council on Women’s History, and she is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer.
In addition to her academic scholarship, Jennifer has co-produced at least four documentary films, including The War and Peace of Tim O’Brien, an official selection of the Sarasota Film Festival, Newport Beach Film Fest, and the St. Louis International Film Festival.
Join us for a whirlwind chat with Jen Mittelstadt. We’ll talk Milwaukee, writing Muppets books, the fate of getting into history, Stevie Wonder, amicus briefs, and even our first mention of the Italian edition of Vogue magazine! Thanks for listening!
Rec.: 07/25/2023
Published on: August 8, 2023Our guest today is the fun and brilliant Alison Fell. Alison is Dean of the School of Histories, Languages and Cultures at the University of Liverpool. Before taking on the role of Dean at Liverpool, she was Professor of French Cultural History and Director of the Leeds Humanities Research Institute at the University of Leeds. She has also taught at Oxford and Lancaster, and in 2014-15 she was Visiting Professor at the Institute for Historical Research, Université de Lille in France. Alison earned her BA and MA in French Studies at the University of Birmingham, then took her PhD in French Historical/Cultural Studies there as well.
Alison has been a major part of the resurgence in First World War Studies. She is the author of two monographs: Women as Veterans in Britain and France after the First World War (Cambridge: 2018) and Women Warriors: The Cultural Politics of Armed Women, 1870-1945 (Cambridge 2023). She is also the co-editor of four volumes, including First World War Nursing, The Women's Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-1919, and Making Waves: French Feminisms and Their Legacies 1975-2015. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of War and Culture Studies and the European Journal of Nursing History, and she has contributed widely to other edited volumes. Her current project is a collaboration with Mark Connelly and Stefan Goebel that examines transnational responses to the memory of the Battle of the Somme.
Alison has been part of seven Arts and Humanities Research Council projects, and her work on Belgian refugees in the UK during and after the First World War was featured in the 2020-2021 Imperial War Museum exhibition "Refugees: Forced to Flee." She received the University of Leeds Vice Chancellor’s Award for Impact and was also recognized as a Woman of Achievement at Leeds. She has consulted and appeared on radio and television programs on the BBC, IRC, and Radio 4. Finally, she is active in the International Society for First World War Studies, a committee member for the Society for the History of War, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
We are thrilled to end our summer hiatus with a delightful chat with Alison Fell. We'll talk farming, women as veterans, walking the Somme battlefield, Dolly Parton, Atomic Kitten, being a dean, and the mystery novels of Caimh McDonnell, among other topics!
Don't forget to get your MHPTPodcast Swag!
Rec.: 07/14/2023
Published on: August 1, 2023Our guest today is Napoleonic Era naval historian Evan Wilson! Evan is an associate professor in the John B. Hattendorf Center for Maritime Historical Research at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, where he also co-directs the Graduate Certificate in Maritime History. He was previously the Associate Director of International Security Studies at Yale University and a Caird Senior Research Fellow at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut. He earned a BA in History at Yale University, an MPhil in Modern European History from Cambridge, and a PhD in History from the University of Oxford.
Evan is the author of The Horrible Peace: British Veterans and the End of the Napoleonic Wars (University of Massachusetts Press - use promo code MAS073!) and A Social History of British Naval Officers, 1775–1815 (The Boydell Press). He is also the co-editor of numerous volumes, including Navies in Multipolar Worlds: From the Age of Sail to the Present (Routledge) with Paul Kennedy, Eighteenth-Century Naval Officers: A Transnational Perspective (Palgrave), with Jakob Seerup and AnnaSara Hammar, and Strategy and the Sea: Essays in Honour of John B. Hattendorf (The Boydell Press) with N.A.M. Rodger, J. Ross Dancy, and Benjamin Darnell. His articles have appeared in The Mariner’s Mirror, the Journal of Military History, the English Historical Review, and the Journal for Maritime Research, among others. In 2018, Evan was awarded the Sir Julian Corbett Prize in Modern Naval History by the Institute of Historical Research. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and sits on the Editorial Board of the University of Massachusetts Press's monograph series Veterans.
Finally, we're showing some more love for naval history and the Napoleonic Era! Join us for a very interesting chat with Evan - we'll talk Partick O'Brian novels, veterans of the Napoleonic wars, teaching at a prep school then at a senior-level professional military education institution, Radiohead, and other topics, all while Bill and Brian can't seem to get their Rapid Fire questions straight!
Shoutout to Ralph's BBQ in Weldon, North Carolina, located just off I-95 at exit 173!
Rec. 05/16/2023
Published on: June 20, 2023What a treat today! Our guest is Second World War historian and author James Holland. James is a prolific author of both fiction and non-fiction, a media personality, and an occasional battlefield tour guide. James earned a BA in History at St. Chad’s College, Durham, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Research Fellow at Swansea University. He has authored fourteen books on the Second World War, including Brothers in Arms: One Legendary Tank Regiment's Bloody War from D-Day to VE-Day (Bantam Press) and Normandy '44: D-Day and the Battle for France (Bantam Press), which was a Military History Matters Book of the Year in 2020. James' first history book was Fortress Malta: An Island Under Siege 1940–43 (Orion). Additionally, he has written books on the Second World War and Burma, the Battle of Britain, the Dam Busters, North Africa, and the Sicily/Italy campaigns. His forthcoming book is The Savage Storm: The Brutal Battle for Italy, 1943 (Atlantic Monthly Press). Additionally, he has written eight books on the Second World War for children and nine novels, many of which are part of the popular Jack Tanner series.
He is co-founder and program director of the Chalke Valley History Festival and he has his own collection at the Imperial War Museum. He also worked with the National Army Museum to develop an exhibit based on Brothers in Arms. James has presented and written programs for the BBC, National Geographic, The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, and the PBS documentary series Pritzker Military Presents. A few of the documentaries James has been part of were short-listed for BAFTAs! He is the co-host with Al Murray of the incredibly popular We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast (600 episodes strong!), which if you have any interest in the Second World War you should check out.
James is dedicated to bringing the history of the Second World War to as wide an audience as possible. We'll talk about doing the work of a historian, the process of writing, "Chik Lit," Ian Botham, podcasting, the Italian Campaign, the Beatles . . . What didn't we talk about? Join us for a wonderful chat with the energetic and prolific James Holland!
Shoutout to the Horseshoe Inn in Ebbesbourne Wake, Wiltshire!
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Rec.: 05/22/2023
Published on: June 13, 2023Our guest today is James J. Kimble. Jim is Professor of Communication & the Arts at Seton Hall University and is a scholar of war rhetoric and propaganda. From 1997-2005, he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication at George Mason University, where he was the Director of Forensics and Speech. He completed his BSEd in Communication & Political Science at the University of Nebraska and an MA, in Rhetoric & Communication at Kansas State University enroute to a PhD in Rhetoric & Political Culture at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Jim is the author of two books, Mobilizing the Home Front: War Bonds and Domestic Propaganda (Texas A&M University Press) and Prairie Forge: The Extraordinary Story of the Nebraska Scrap Metal Drive of World War II (University of Nebraska). The latter won the Nonfiction Book of the Year Award from the Nebraska Center for the Book. He has co-edited two books, Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms (Abbeville Press) with Stephanie Plunkett, and The 10¢ war: Comic Books, Propaganda, and World War II, with Trischa Goodnow. Jim has also written three documentaries for the Norman Rockwell Museum, and Produced/Directed/Written another, titled Scrappers: How the Heartland Won World War II (with T.R. Rondinella). He has authored more than two dozen articles and chapters, and he is the founding editor of the journal Home Front Studies. Finally, Jim served as a guest curator for the Norman Rockwell Museum international traveling exhibition.
Jim is a Senior Fellow at the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies, a Fulbright Scholar, and the recipient of the National Communication Association’s Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award. His research has reached academic and popular audiences. Jim's work on the identity of Rosie the Riveter appeared in People magazine, the New York Times, and on the television show Mysteries at the Museum, ultimately hitting over 1.3 billion media hits worldwide.
Join us for a fun and very interesting chat with Jim Kimble. We'll talk Rosie the Riveter, war propaganda art, starting an academic journal, Mrs. Maisel, and the Alan Parson's Project! Shoutout to Taco John's!
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Rec.: 05/22/2023
Published on: June 6, 2023Our guest today is the brilliant and entertaining Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy. Andrew is Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the former Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. From 2015-2022 he was the Vice President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Andrew also spent thirteen years at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, where he served as the Chair of the Department of History and held the Rosebush Professorship. Andrew attended Columbia University before earning a BA, MA, and PhD in History from Oriel College at Oxford University.
Andrew is the author of The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University (University of Virginia Press), and is the co-editor with John Ragosta and Peter Onuf of The Founding of Thomas Jefferson’s University (University of Virginia Press) and European Friends of the American Revolution with John A. Ragosta and Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (forthcoming, University of Virginia Press). Andrew is perhaps best known for The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the Revolutionary War and the Fate of Empire (Yale University Press), which won numerous awards, including the George Washington Book Prize, The Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award in US History, the National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution’s Excellence in American History Book Award, and the New-York Historical Society Annual American History Book Prize. His first book, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania), has now gone through its third printing. In addition, Andrew is widely published in many of the top journals in the field.
Andrew is an award-winning teacher and he has held numerous visiting professorships and fellowships. Most recently, he was a Visiting International Fellow at the Wilberforce Institute at Hull University. In 2016-17, he was the Sons of the American Revolution Visiting Professor at King’s College, London. Andrew is a fellow of the American Antiquarian Society and, of course, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Andrew first researched in an archive when he was only 15, and has never looked back. Join us as we chat about growing up in the US and the UK, the American War for Independence, the Grenadier Guards band, hosting Presidents at Monticello, and Virginia wines!
Our guest today is the dapper, copiously quaffed, and brilliant Ian Andrew Isherwood. Ian is Associate Professor of War and Memory Studies in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Gettysburg College. He previously served as the Assistant Director of the Civil War Institute and chair of the Civil War Era Studies program. He is currently the Harold Keith Johnson Chair of Military History at the US Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. Ian earned his BA at Gettysburg College, his MA at Dartmouth College, and his PhD from the University of Glasgow’s Scottish Centre for War Studies.
Ian is the author of Remembering the Great War (Bloomsbury) and the co-editor, with Steve Trout, of Serpents of War: An American Officer's Story of World War I Combat and Captivity (forthcoming, University Press of Kansas). His articles have been published in War and Society, First World War Studies, War, Literature and the Arts, The Journal of Military History, and War in History. He is currently working on a book titled The Battalion: Citizen Soldiers on the Western Front, which is a history of a Kitchener volunteer battalion in the Great War. Ian is a member of the International Society for First World War Studies and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
He is also the creator and co-lead of The First World War Letters of H.J.C. Peirs, a centennial First World War digital history project. Ian is beyond dedicated to his students. In 2019, he was recognized as the outstanding faculty mentor of undergraduate research in the humanities at Gettysburg, and he has taken his students to Europe for field research on several occasions.
Join us for a really fun and interesting chat with Ian Isherwood. We'll talk beer can collections, First World War memoirs and diaries, teaching at a liberal arts college and a major PME institution, life writing, Tom Waits, C. S. Lewis, and wearing t-shirts in public - that's a lot of ground!
Shoutout to Chubby's BBQ!
Rec.: 05/04/2023
Published on: May 23, 2023Our guest today is retired British Army Major General Ashley Truluck. Ashley brings together his military experience and lover for military history in a variety of ways, including being active in the Society for Army Historical Research and battlefield tourism. He attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and holds a BA in International Studies, History, and Procurement. His many assignments and commands included time with the Royal Corps of Signals, The Brigade of Gurkhas, the 3rd Armoured Divisional Signal Regiment, and the General Staff. Ashley’s military service took him around the world, and he retired at the rank of Major General. He was awarded Companion of the Order of the Bath and Commander of the Order of the British Empire (both firsts for Military Historians are People, Too!). From 2020-2021, he served as the High Sheriff of Wiltshire (also a first!), a position he used to promote the Wiltshire Community Foundation.
Ashley is an experienced sailor and traveler, and avid hill walker. Since his retirement from the military, he has held numerous administrative posts in the private sector. He is chairman of the Society for Army Historical Research, which awards the prestigious Templar Medals, and frequently serves as a battlefield tour guide for The Cultural Experience, a UK-based historical tour company. He has led tours in Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain, and Malta. Finally, Ashley is involved with the Chalke Valley History Festival, which is the largest festival dedicated to history in the world.
Join us for a fascinating chat about the British Army, Wellington, having James Holland for a neighbor, Napoleonic battlefields in Spain, Ed Sheeran, curry, and command and control! You can follow Ashley on Twitter @Truluck_Wilts.
Shout-out to the Queen's Head in Broad Chalke, Wiltshire!
Rec.: 04/20/2023
Published on: May 16, 2023We're going nuclear today with Jayita Sarkar! Jay is a Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow. Before settling down in Scotland, she was an Assistant Professor at Boston University and a Niehaus Fellow at Dartmouth College. She was also a Fellow with Harvard University’s Weatherhead Initiative in Global History, an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy, and a Stanton Postdoctoral Fellow, all also at Harvard. She received her Ph.D. in History from the Graduate Institute Geneva, an MA at the University of Paris IV, Sorbonne, and a BA and MA in Political Science and International Relations at Jadavpur University.
Jay is the author of Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell), which was a 2023 Honourable Mention for the Best Book Award of ISA Global Development Studies Section. Her articles have appeared in Cold War History, the Journal of Cold War Studies, the Journal of Strategic Studies, and the Journal of Global Security Studies, among others. Her 2018 article in Nonproliferation Review entitled “U.S. Technological Collaboration for Nonproliferation: Key Evidence from the Cold War” (With J. Krige) won the 2018 Doreen and Jim McElvany Nonproliferation Award. Her second book, Atomic Capitalism: A Global History, is under contract with Princeton University Press.
Jay has received grants from the Stanton Foundation, The Hoover Institution, The Swiss National Science Foundation, and the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, to name just a few. She was recently granted a British Academy Award to support “Partition Machine,” an upcoming conference she has organized on territorial partitions. Jayita sits on the Editorial Board of Cold War History, the Editorial Advisory Board of Global Nuclear Histories Book Series at McGill-Queen’s University Press, and the Board of Directors of the Arms Control Association. She is a member of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. On top of all that, she’s a polyglot who speaks Bengali, English, and French fluently with a little German, Hindu and Urdu thrown in for good measure.
Join us for a delightful and really interesting chat with Jay Sarkar - we'll talk India's nuclear policy, Glasgow v. Edinburgh, Scottish Straight Cats, Diego Maradona, and Pink Martini, among many other topics!
Rec.: 04/21/2023
Published on: May 9, 2023Our guest today is Andrew J. Huebner, who clearly didn't think through the idea of recording live in the Odysea Waterfront Lounge at the Hilton Bayfront in San Diego, in the middle of the Annual Meeting of the Society for Military History! Thankfully, most military historians avoid bars, pubs, etc. (NOT!). But we had a great chat and the sound turned out ok, so thanks for your patience with the sound quality on this one!
Andrew is Professor of History at the University of Alabama. He earned his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and his PhD from Brown University. Andrew was a visiting professor at Brown from 2004-2006 and a lecturer in History and English at Harvard during the same span. Since 2017, he has been an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer.
He is the author of Love and Death in the Great War (Oxford), which won the President’s Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era (UNC), a Nota Bene selection of Chronicle of Higher Education. He is co-editor with John Giggie of Dixie’s Great War (Alabama), and forthcoming titles The Cambridge History of War and Society in America (with Jennifer Keene), and Race and Gender at War (Alabama) with Friend-of-the-Pod Lesley Gordon. Andrew is also the co-author with Alan Brinkley and John Giggey of a popular American history textbook, The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People. In addition, his work has appeared in the Journal of American History, Film and History, The Sixties, American Studies, and Journalism History. His current project, Buffalo Soldiers and the Making of the United States Empire, s under contract with Liveright/W.W. Norton.
Andrew has given talks all over the United States, is a frequent guest on history podcasts, and contributor and advisor to public history projects. He's a busy guy, but one of the most humble and enjoyable historians you'll come across. Join us for our chat with Andrew, as we discuss New Jersey, gender theory (or not), Modest Mouse, and even presidential aspirations, all while Andrew multi-tasks talking with us, enjoying a beer, AND watching the Alabama-San Diego State Sweet 16 match-up over our shoulders on the big bar TV (spoiler - the game didn't end well for Andrew)!
As always, thanks for listening, please subscribe on whatever podcast service you use to Military Historians are People, Too, and all podcasts you enjoy, and don't forget to check out our Swag Store on Zazzle! Rec.: 03/24/2023
Published on: May 2, 2023Our guest today is the artsy, funny, and brilliant Kate Clarke Lemay. Kate is a historian at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. She was the lead historian for the signature exhibitions America’s Presidents and Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence. and is currently curating a major exhibition titled 1898: American Imperial Visions and Revisions, which will open on April 28, 2023! Kate also serves as director of PORTAL, the National Portrait Gallery's Scholarly Center. She was Assistant Professor of Art History at Auburn University at Montgomery and Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Brigham Young University. Kate earned a BA in Art History and French from Syracuse University and a PhD in Art History and American Studies from Indiana University.
Kate's publications include Triumph of the Dead: American WWII Cemeteries, Monuments and Diplomacy in France (Alabama, 2018), which was awarded a Terra Foundation in American Art publication. In 2019, she published the eponymous catalog for the Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence exhibit with Princeton University Press. The book received the 2021 Smithsonian Secretary’s Prize for Excellence in Research as well as the 2020 Amelia Bloomer Book Award from the American Library Association. Kate was a guest editor for a special issue on transatlantic diplomacy and war cemeteries for The International Journal of Military History and Historiography.
Kate is a Fulbright Scholar and her work has been supported by the Terra Foundation in American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the Caen Mémorial Museum in France. She is a Presidential Counselor to the National WWII Museum, an advisor to the National Women's Suffrage Monument Foundation, and sits on the Advisory Board of the Association of Historians of American Art’s Panorama Journal.
Join us for a fun and interesting chat with Kate Lemay. We'll talk Delaware, boarding school, researching at the American Battlefield Monuments Commission offices in France, suffering Friend-of-the-Pod Brian Linn's critique of Imperial Visions and Revisions, Foo Fighters, and being BBQ-adjacent. Speaking of which, shout out to Dinosaur BBQ in Syracuse, New York!
As always, subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your pods, and check out the Swag Store on Zazzle! Rec.: 04/14/2023
Published on: April 25, 2023Our guest today is the guitar-playing, hiking, marathon-running, American Studies guy-turned-historian David Kieran! Dave is an Associate Professor and the Colonel Richard R. Hallock Distinguished Chair in Military History at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia. Before coming to Columbus State, he was associate professor and chair of the history department at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, PA, where he also served as coordinator for the American Studies program. Dave was also a visiting assistant professor in the American Studies Department at Franklin & Marshall College and in the History Department at Skidmore College. He earned a BA in English from Connecticut College and a PhD in American Studies from George Washington University.
A scholar of the post-Vietnam American military, Dave is the author of Signature Wounds: The Untold Story of the Military’s Mental Health Crisis (NYU Press) and Forever Vietnam: How A Divisive War Changed American Public Memory (University of Massachusetts Press). He has also edited or co-edited several volumes, including The War of My Generation: Youth Culture and the War on Terror (Rutgers University Press) and At War: The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Rutgers University Press), with Edwin A. Martini. David’s articles have been published in War & Society, the Journal of American Studies, and the Journal of War and Culture Studies, and he has contributed to numerous edited volumes. Finally, he has written for the Washington Post, Psychology Today, and Slate. His new project is tentatively titled How the Army Saved Itself: Maxwell R. Thurman and the Army’s Post-Vietnam Metamorphosis.
Dave has two awesome dogs, has run over a dozen marathons, and has more guitars than Bill, which is a sore point with Bill. Join us for a great chat about interdisciplinary approaches to doing history, interviewing retired generals, running marathons, mental health issues in the American military, Bruce Springsteen, Alabama white sauce, acoustic viz electric guitars - and more!
And forgive Bill's kitchen renovation noise! Military Historians have kitchens, too!
Shoutout to Smoke Bourbon and BBQ in Columbus!
Rec.: 04/06/2023
Published on: April 18, 2023Our guest today is Civil War scholar Lesley Gordon. Lesley is the Charles G. Summersell Chair of Southern History at the University of Alabama. Prior to moving to Tuscaloosa, she was a professor of history at the University of Akron, and she started her academic career at Murray State University. Lesley received her BA from the College of William and Mary, and her M.A. and PhD from the University of Georgia.
Lesley’s first book General George E. Pickett in Life and Legend (UNC Press) was a History Book Club Selection. She published “This Terrible War”: The Civil War and its Aftermath with Daniel E. Sutherland and Michael Fellman in 2003 and the book is now in its third edition. In 2014, Lesley published A Broken Regiment: The 16th Connecticut’s Civil War (LSU Press). She has also co-edited four volumes, including Intimate Strategies of the Civil War: Military Commanders and Their Wives, with Carol K. Bleser (Oxford), and Race and Gender at War: Writing American Military History, with Friend-of-the-Pod Andrew Huebner, which is forthcoming with the University of Alabama Press. She has also written more than a dozen essays and articles.
Lesley is extremely active in her field and she is currently the president of the Society of Civil War Historians. She chairs the editorial board at the University of Alabama Press and served on the editorial board of The Journal of the Civil War Era. She is a current member of the advisory board for Civil War Times. Since 2009, Lesley has been an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer.
Join us for a fun and fascinating chat with Lesley Gordon. We'll talk girls drawing Civil War soldiers in middle school, being a tour guide at Mark Twain's home, sports bandwagons, Noah Wyle, writing biography, a little Alison Krause, and Daisy Joines & The Six, so tune in!
Check out the MHPTPodcast Swag Store on Zazzle!
Rec.: 03/14/2023
Published on: April 11, 2023Today's guest is Martin Thomas. Martin is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for Histories of Violence and Conflict at the University of Exeter in the UK. He was also the first director of Exeter's Centre for the Study of War, State, and Society. Before joining the faculty at Exeter, Martin taught at the University of the West of England in Bristol for eleven years. He has held visiting professorships and fellowships at Sciences Po. Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies. Martin received his BA and PhD from Oxford University.
Martin is the author of ten books and dozens of articles and book chapters. His many publications include The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire with co-author Andrew Thompson, Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France, 1882-1956 (Oxford) with co-author Richard Toye in 2017, and The Civilianization of War: The Changing Civil–Military Divide, 1914–2014, with Andrew Barros (Cambridge). Martin's solo publications include Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and their Roads from Empire (Oxford), Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers, and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918-40 (Cambridge), and The French Empire at War, 1940-45 (Manchester).
Martin was awarded the Philip Leverhulme prize for outstanding research in 2002 and currently holds a three-year Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship. He has also been a fellow of the Independent Social Research Foundation. Martin has been a member of the editorial boards of the International History Review, Intelligence and National Security, Diplomacy & Statecraft, War & Society, French Historical Studies, and Cambridge’s Studies in the Social & Cultural History of Modern Warfare.
Join us for a really interesting chat with Martin Thomas. We'll talk teaching global history, the nature of colonial violence, old French ladies with baskets of hand grenades, League One football, and Little Feat!
Be sure to check out the MHPTPodcast Swag Store on Zazzle!
Rec.: 03/13/2023
Published on: April 4, 2023By popular demand, we are finally interviewing each other! Today, Bill convinced Brian to sit down with him in Bill's American Military Experience class at Georgia Southern University for a live recording, in front of students no less!
Brian K. Feltman, not to be confused with the notorious other Brian Feltman from Georgia, is Professor of History (newly promoted!) at Georgia Southern University. He is a scholar of Modern Germany and the First World War and teaches courses on the same at Georgia Southern. He earned his BA and MA from Clemson University and his PhD from The Ohio State University.
Brian is the author of The Stigma of Surrender: German Prisoners, British Captors, and Manhood in the Great War and Beyond (University of North Carolina), which won the Society for Military History’s Coffman Prize, and with Matthias Reiss co-edited Prisoners of War and Local Women in Europe and the United States, 1914-1956: Consorting with the Enemy (London: Palgrave, 2022). He has several essays in edited collections as well as articles in Gender & History, the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, and War in History. He is currently working on a book-length project titled Sacrifice on Display: The Culture of Everyday Remembrance in Germany, 1914-1933.
Brian is active in the German Studies Association and the Society for Military History, and is a Fellow of the Society for First World War Studies. He has held several fellowships and grants, including the Thyssen-Heideking Postdoctoral Fellowship at the German Historical Institute & Universität zu Köln, an Albert’s Researcher Reunion Grant also at the Universität zu Köln, a Deutscher Akademischer Austaush Dienst (DAAD) Grant at the Free University of Berlin, and several research support grants from Georgia Southern University.
Join us for what you asked for! We'll talk growing up in rural Upstate South Carolina, discovering German history, networking as a graduate student, and BBQ in Valdosta, Georgia, and we even let students ask some questions!
Rec.: 03/22/2023
Published on: March 30, 2023Our guest today is former journalist and now historian Vanya Eftimova Bellinger. Vanya is Assistant Professor of Strategy and Policy Development at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. She previously served as an assistant professor at Air University’s Global College of Professional Military Education and a visiting assistant professor at the US Army War College. Vanya received her BA in Public Relations and Communications at Sofia University, St. Kliment Ohridski, in Sofia, Bulgaria, and her MA in Military History at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont. She recently defended her dissertation for the PhD in History at King’s College, London. But before all that, Wanya spent twenty years as a journalist for Bulgarian and German media, including stints with Economedia and Bulgarian National Television, as well as a journalism fellowship at the Free University of Berlin.
Vanya is the author of Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War (Oxford University Press). Her Journal of Military History article, “The Other Clausewitz: Findings from the Newly Discovered Correspondence between Marie and Carl von Clausewitz’” was awarded the Society for Military History’s Moncado Prize. She recently published “Lieber and Clausewitz: The Understanding of Modern War and the Theoretical Origins of General Orders No. 100” in the Journal of Civil War Era and “When Resources Drive Strategy: Understanding Clausewitz/Corbett’s War Limited by Contingent” in Military Strategy Magazine. Vanya sits on the Military Strategy Magazine’s Editorial Advisory Panel and frequently contributes to War on the Rocks and The Strategy Bridge.
Vanya’s journalism experience makes her an energetic go-getter. We’ll talk about growing up with ‘technical intelligentsia” parents in Bulgaria, the fame of being on a Bulgarian Sunday morning news program, working in the German archives, Bulgarian moussaka, and the band Ostava, plus a little Clausewitz. Join us for a fun and fascinating chat with Vanya Bellinger!
And Check out our new @MHPTPodcast Swag Store!
Rec.: 03/13/2023
Published on: March 28, 2023Our guest today is the prolific scholar and Arsenal supporter Gary D. Sheffield. Gary is Visiting Professor at the Humanities Research Institute of the University of Buckingham and Professor Emeritus at the University of Wolverhampton, where he set up the First World War Programme. He was previously Chair of War Studies at the University of Birmingham and Professor of Modern History at King's College London. He also served as Land Warfare Historian on the Higher Command and Staff Course at the Joint Services Command and Staff College. Gary earned his undergraduate and MA degrees in History at the University of Leeds and went on to take his PhD at King’s College, London.
Gary’s list of publications is extensive. He is the author or editor of more than 15 books. His book Forgotten Victory: The First World War – Myths and Realities was a bestseller. Gary’s contribution to The British General Staff: Innovation and Reform earned him a share of the Templer Medal in 2003. The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army was selected as a military book of the year by The Times and shortlisted for the Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature. Among Gary’s numerous other books are Leadership in the Trenches: Officer-Man Relations, Morale and Discipline in The British Army in the Era of the First World War, The Somme: A New History, A Short History of the First World War, and The First World War in 100 Objects. He is currently completing a project titled Civilian Armies: British and Dominions Soldiers’ Experience in the Two World Wars, which will be published by Yale University Press.
Gary is a member of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts, he sits on the Advisory Boards of the Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, the Academic Advisory Panel of the National Army Museum, and the Academic Advisory Board of the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Trust. He also served as the President of the International Guild of Battlefield Guides and the Honorary President of the Western Front Association. Finally, Gary frequently appears on television and documentaries, writes for the press, and speaks to podcasters like us.
We can't thank Gary enough for taking the time with us. Join us for a delightful chat about reading military history as a kid, Tony Adams, battlefield tours, curries, and Bob Dylan. You'll enjoy this one.
Check out the @MHPTPodcast Swag Store!
Rec.: 03/03/2023
Published on: March 21, 2023Today's guest is David Morgan-Owen. Dave is a Reader in the History of War in the Defence Studies Department at King's College, London. From 2019-2021, he served as Academic Programme Director for the Intermediate Command and Staff Course (Land) and the MA in Military and Security Studies. He received all of his degrees from the University of Exeter and has a park bench on campus named in his honor after having spent so many years there (not really, but we could start a campaign?). He has held fellowships at the Modern War Institute at West Point, the National Museum of the Royal Navy, and the National Maritime Museum. Dave is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy. In 2016, he won the Julian Corbett Prize in Modern Naval History.
Dave's first book The Fear of Invasion: Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880-1914 (Oxford) was awarded the Templer Medal for best first book from the Society for Army Historical Research in 2017. In 2020, he co-edited with Louis Halewood Economic Warfare and the Sea: Grand Strategies for Maritime Powers (Liverpool). Dave's articles have appeared in the English Historical Review, The Journal of Modern History, War in History, and War & Society, among others. His current project examines how the First World War challenged ideas of Britain as a ‘sea power’, and what these discussions meant for the prosecution of the conflict.
Dave's greatest accomplishment, however, is having convinced Season I guest Aimée Fox to become his partner, and along with Aimée is one of MHPT UK Podcast Dog Freddie's Human Feeding Units. Join us for an interesting and fun chat with David Morgan-Owen. We'll talk about rolling cannonballs on HMS Victory, being Jeremy Black's chauffeur, having tea with Sir Michael Howard, Riddle in the Sands, and Oasis, as well as some good military history. Check it out!
Rec.: 02/17/2023
Published on: March 14, 2023Our guest today is one of the leading historians of the American soldier John C. McManus. John is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of US Military History at the Missouri University of Science & Technology. He earned a BA in Sports Journalism and an MA in History from the University of Missouri, then received his PhD in History from the University of Tennessee (Bill says UT-Austin has the correct shade of orange; John, not surprisingly, disagrees). While at Tennessee, he served as the Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of War and Society and was also a participant in Tennessee's Normandy Scholars Program. John has taught at Missouri S&T for several years and in 2014 became Missouri S&T’s first Curators’ Distinguished Professor, an honor bestowed by the University of Missouri System. In 2018-2019, John was the Leo A. Shifrin Chair of Naval and Military History at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis.
John is the author of more than a dozen books, including: The Deadly Brotherhood: The American Combat Soldier in World War II; Deadly Sky: The American Combat Airman in World War II; Alamo in the Ardennes: The Untold Story of the American Soldiers who made the Defense of Bastogne Possible; Grunts: The American Infantry Combat Experience: World War II through Iraq; September Hope: The American Side of a Bridge Too Far; The Dead and Those About to Die, D-Day: The Big Red One at Omaha Beach; and Hell Before Their Very Eyes: American Soldiers Liberate Concentration Camps in Germany, April 1945. Most recently, John has been busy writing a trilogy on the Pacific War. The first book, Fire and Fortitude, won the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History. It was followed by Island Infernos: The US Army’s Pacific War Odyssey, 1944. The trilogy will end with To the End of the Earth: The US Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945, which will be published in May 2023. For us podcast nerds, John is a frequent co-host with Al Murray and James Holland on the popular We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast. Follow John on Twitter @JohnCMcManus3!
Join us for a fascinating chat with John McManus. We'll discuss growing up in St. Louis, U2, writing, and toasted ravioli. Shout-out to Pappy's Smokehouse in St. Louis!
Rec.: 12/19/2022
Published on: March 7, 2023Today’s guest is historian and ballet dancer Allison Finkelstein. Allison is Senior Historian at Arlington National Cemetery. She is an alumna of the College of William and Mary and earned her PhD in History at the University of Maryland at College Park. Allison previously worked as a historian for the US Citizenship and Immigration Services History Office & Library and as a Historical Consultant for the American Battle Monuments Commission and the US Vietnam War Commemoration Office. From 2017-2018, she served as the Chair of the Arlington World War I Commemoration Task Force. In 2020, The National Alliance of Preservation Commissions (NAPC) recognized her work on the Clarendon War Memorial with the Excellence Award in Best Practices: Public Outreach/Advocacy.
Allison is the author of Forgotten Veterans, Invisible Memorials: How American Women Commemorated the Great War, 1917-1945, which is part of GFOP Steve Trout’s War, Memory, and Culture Series at the University of Alabama Press. The book won the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference’s 2022 Arline Custer Memorial Award for the best book written in the Mid-Atlantic region. Her articles have been published in Buildings & Landscapes: The Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum and World War I Remembered, the National Park Service’s book of essays on the First World War. Allison and her work have been featured in the Washington Post and the New York Times, and she has appeared on several media outlets.
Join us for a feel-good chat with Allison as we discuss growing up visiting battlefields in Virginia, public history, Gilbert & Sullivan, being in the recent Kennedy Center production of Giselle, and a singer-to-listen-to-for-the-rest-of-your-life choice that caused Brian and Bill to fall out of their chairs! Shoutout to Rocklands BBQ in Alexandria and Pierce's BBQ in Williamsburg!
Rec.: 02/16/2023
Published on: February 28, 2023Our guest today is Ricardo Herrera. Rick is a Visiting Professor in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He received his BA from the University of California, Los Angeles (also known as UCLA) and his PhD in History from Marquette University. Before joining the Army War College, Rick was Professor of Military History in the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) at the US Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC) in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He also served six years at the Combat Studies Institute of the US Army Combined Arms Center in Fort Leavenworth. Rick has had a long career in professional military education, but he began as an Assistant Professor of History and then as Chair of the Department of History and Geography at Texas Lutheran University in Seguin, Texas. He moved on to Ohio, serving as an Assistant Professor of History at Mount Union College. But before all of that, Rick served as an Armor and Cavalry officer in the US Army.
Rick is the author of Feeding Washington’s Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778 (University of North Carolina Press). His first book, Liberty and the Republic: The American Citizen as Soldier, 1775-1861, appeared with New York University Press. He is currently editing a collection of letters and a journal tentatively titled A Most Uncommon Soldier: The Letters and Journal of Edward Ashley Bowen Phelps, 1846-1848, which will be published with the University Press of Kansas. In addition, Rick has published numerous book chapters and prize-winning articles.
If you want to know how to apply for research fellowships, ask Rick; he’s received a bucket-full. In 2021-2022, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Maynooth University Arts & Humanities Institute at the National University of Ireland. He was a Residential Research Fellow at The Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington in Mount Vernon, Virginia, from 2016-2017. Rick held a Residential Research Fellowship at the David Library of the American Revolution in 2014-2015 and a Society for the History of the Early American Republic/Mellon Faculty Research Stipend in Early American History in 2005. In 2020, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society - we think that’s a big deal.
Join us for a wonderful chat with Rick about growing up in LA, Woody Strode, George Washington, leading staff rides, The Blasters, and what makes a proper Manhattan! Shoutout to Q39 BBQ in Kansas City!
Rec.: 02/09/2023
Our guest today is Dr. Anna Lois McKay (that's pronounced McKai!). Anna is the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Liverpool, where she is working on a project titled "Prisoners’ Progress: Imperial Circulations of War Captives, 1793–1815.” She is a specialist on 18th-Century prison hulks, prisoners of war, and forced migration. In 2021-22, Anna was a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of English at University College Cork. She was the Alan Pearsall Fellow in Naval and Maritime History at the Institute of Historical Research, London in 2020-2021. She earned a BA in English and Related Literature from the University of York in 2012, and an MA in 18th-Century Studies also from the University of York in 2014. Her PhD, awarded in 2020, was an Arts and Humanities Research Council joint project between the University of Leicester and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
Anna is the author of "‘Allowed to die’? Prison Hulks, Convict Corpses and the Inquiry of 1847,” which appeared in Cultural and Social History in May 2021 and won the Royal Historical Society's Alexander Prize in 2022. Her article “Floating Hell” was published in BBC History Magazine in September 2022. Her work has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the European Research Council, the Society for Nautical Research, and the Economic History society. Anna is an Early Career Member of the Royal Historical Society and has been awarded The Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions awarded her a Postdoctoral Fellowship Seal of Excellence. Anna has conducted archival research in the United Kingdom, Australia, Bermuda, and Canada, and her work has allowed her to conduct fieldwork in dockyards, prisoner-of-war depots, and penal colony sites around the world.
We'll discuss prisoner theater, writing a play, the nomad-like existence of post-docs in the UK, chess-boxing, Peaky Blinders, among many other topics. Join us for a fun and fascinating talk with Anna McKay!
Rec.: 12/02/2022
Published on: February 14, 2023Today's guest is the prolific, experienced, fan of the Rolling Stones and recently announced 2023 Society for Military History Samuel Eliot Morrison awardee Brian McAllister Linn! Brian is Professor of History and Ralph R. Thomas Class of 1921 Professor in Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. Brian has been at Texas A&M since 1989, but he had visiting positions at Old Dominion and Nebraska before landing in College Station. He attended the University of Hawaii for his BA and earned his MA and PhD at The Ohio State University.
Brian has held far too many fellowships to mention them all, but here are some of his recent accomplishments: He was a Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences Fellow in 2019, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow in 2018-2019, and a Fulbright Distinguished Professor at the University of Birmingham in the UK in 2016. Brian also held a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellowship, and a Bosch Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin.
To say that Brian is a prolific scholar is an understatement. In 2016 he published Elvis’s Army: Cold War GIs and the Atomic Battlefield (Harvard), which won the US Army Historical Foundation's Best Book Award and US Military History Group's Captain Richard Lukaszewicz Memorial Book Award. The Society for Military History has recognized Brian's work with its prestigious Distinguished Book Prize twice: for The Philippine War, 1899-1902 and Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Pacific, 1902-1940 (which also won the US Army Historical Foundation's Best Book Award). His most recent book, Real Soldiering: The U.S. Army in the Aftermath of War, 1815-1940, will be published by the University Press of Kansas in 2023. Brian has also published more than 40 essays, chapters, and articles, including the just-published “Forty Years On: Master Narratives and US Military History (War & Society, 2022), which includes a shout-out to Military Historians are People, Too!
Brian’s service to the profession has been immense. He currently sits on the editorial boards of Battlegrounds: Cornell Studies in Military History, War and Society, and the Journal of Strategic Studies. Brian is a past president and trustee of the Society for Military History, which recognized his service with its Edwin M. Simmons Memorial Service Award in 2012.
We'll talk Hawaii, the state of military history today, Gaylord Perry, Stones versus Beatles, and Fulbright-ing. Join us for a much-anticipated chat with Brian Linn! And a big shout-out to Carney's Pub in Bryan, Texas!
Rec.: 12/02/2022
Published on: February 7, 2023Our guest today is Dr. Erin R. McCoy, and we are talking with her live from the campus of the University of South Carolina-Beaufort! Erin is an Associate Professor of English & Interdisciplinary Studies and is a past Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at USC-Beaufort. Erin earned a BA in English from Wingate University, located in the conveniently named town of Wingate, North Carolina. She has an MA in English from Clemson University and a PhD in Humanities from the University of Louisville. Before coming to USC-Beaufort, she held visiting and adjunct positions at USC-Upstate, Indiana University Southeast, and Jefferson Community and Technical College in Louisville.
Erin is the author of Tour of War: A Cultural Historiography of the Viet Nam War. In addition, she has published more than a dozen peer-reviewed articles and essays and she is a prolific writer of fiction and poetry. Erin has received the USC Research Initiative for Summer Engagement award on several occasions. In 2015 she won the award for “Wounds of War: Healing from the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia, in 2017 “Exploring War: Healing from the Vietnam War in Australia,” and in 2019 “Tours of War: Completing an Introductory Cultural History of the Viet Nam War.” In 2020, she was awarded the James R. Bennett Award for Literature and Peace by the College English Association. Erin is popular with the students here at USC-Beaufort. In 2016 she was recognized as the Faculty Advisor of the Year (SSV/Student Life), in 2015 she was the Professor of the Year, and she also serves as the Faculty Advisor for the Sand Shark Veterans Association on campus. Since coming to USCB, she has advised more than 60 undergraduate theses.
If you want to know more about the Vietnam War and popular culture, then Erin is your go-to source. We'll talk about traveling in Vietnam, trip tattoos, English viz History, Guess Who, Randy Travis, and much more. We are thrilled to be here at USC-Beaufort to kick off Season 3 of Military Historians are People, Too - join us for a fun chat with the equally fun Erin McCoy!
Rec.: 11/14/2022
Published on: January 31, 2023Welcome to the final episode of Season 2 and our 50th overall episode! We can’t thank all of you enough for listening to, sharing, subscribing to, and supporting Military Historians are People, Too! As we often say, we’ll keep doing it if you keep listening. Season 3 is coming at the end of January!
Our special 50th-episode guest is Gregory A. Daddis, who has been bugging us for months to be on the show. Greg is the USS Midway Chair in Modern US Military History and the Director of the Center for War and Society at San Diego State University. Before taking the position at Sand Diego State, he spent five years just north up the California coast at Chapman University, where he was Professor of History and Director of the MA Program in War & Society. Greg earned a BS from the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he commissioned armor. While in uniform, Greg earned his MA in History from Villanova University and his PhD from UNC-Chapel Hill, working under the expert guidance of Prof. Dick Kohn. While at UNC, he was also Professor of Military Science and led UNC’s ROTC program.
Greg served for 26 years in the Army, retiring as a colonel. He is a veteran of Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom and was awarded the Bronze Star, the Legion of Merit, and the Meritorious Service Medal during his time in uniform. Greg wrapped up his Army career serving as the Chief of the American History Division in the Department of History at West Point.
Since leaving West Point, Greg has positioned himself as one of the leading historians of the Vietnam War. He is the author of five books, including most recently Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines (Cambridge). He authored a trilogy on the American war in Vietnam with Oxford University Press: No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War, Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam, and Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam. His first book was Fighting in the Great Crusade: An 8th Infantry Artillery Officer in World War II (Louisiana State University Press). Greg’s articles have been published in the major journals in the field, including The Journal of Strategic Studies, The Journal of Cold War Studies, and The Journal of Military History. He has also written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among other media outlets. Greg was also an adviser to Florentine Films for Ken Burns-Lynn Novick’s documentary, The Vietnam War, which appeared in 2017.
We could go on, and on, and on, and even mention Greg’s upcoming research Fulbright to Oxford University in Spring 2023, but we won’t. You’ll not find a more generous, affable, California-Hipster-dressed scholar in the military history community. We’ll talk New Jersey, a grandfather’s WW2 footlocker, the Beatles, gender theory, Batman (the 1966 TV series!), and much more in between. Also - special 50th-episode guest appearances! Join us for a delightful and thoughtful chat with Greg Daddis!
Rec.: 12/09/2022
Published on: December 20, 2022Our guest today is the infectiously inspirational Harry Franqui-Rivera. Harry is Associate Professor of History and Coordinator of History and Global Languages at Bloomfield College in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Before landing at Bloomfield, Harry held visiting and adjunct positions at Marist College, Skidmore College, Lehman College (City University of New York), and he was a Research Associate at CENTRO - The Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, City University of New York. Harry earned his BA in History at the Mayagüez Campus of the University of Puerto Rico, completed an MA in US Military/Diplomatic History at Temple University, then earned his PhD in History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Harry is the author of Soldiers of the Nation: Military Service and Modern Puerto Rico, 1868-1952 (University of Nebraska Press), and he has authored numerous essays and articles, including “A New Day Has Dawned for Porto Rico’s Jíbaro’: Manhood, Race, Military Service and Self-Government during WWI” in Latino Studies (2015). Harry is currently working on two book projects, Fighting on Two Fronts: The Experience of the Puerto Rican Soldiers in the Korean War and Patriotism and Resistance: The Puerto Rican Experience during the Vietnam War. He is a frequent contributor to Centro Voices, Latino Rebels, NBC News, and The Huffington Post, and he also frequently appears on Spanish and English-language television and radio. Harry is a Board member and Executive Director of the New York Chapter of the National Puerto Rican Agenda and has served on the Council of the Latin American Studies Association.
Harry has an amazing story - growing up in Puerto Rico, dropping out of school, serving in the military, returning to school, then chasing a girl to Philadelphia, which serendipitously put him in friend-of-the-pod Jay Lockenour's graduate seminar at Temple University. The rest, as they say, is "history." We thoroughly enjoyed our chat with Harry Franqui-Rivera - your day will be better for listening to his story.
Rec.: 11/18/2022
Published on: December 13, 2022So what does a graduate student think of all this? Let’s find out! Our guest today is Hayley Hasik, a PhD candidate at Southern Mississippi University. Her dissertation is titled “The Helicopter War: Unraveling the Myth and Memory of a Vietnam War Icon,” and she is slated to graduate in May 2023. Her doctoral advisor is friend-of-the-pod and our very first guest on Military Historians are People, Too! Heather Stur! Haley earned her BA in History and English at Texas A&M University-Commerce and her MA in Public History at Stephen F. Austin State University. With Eric Gruver, Haley is coauthor of “Warrior for Freedom and Souls: Navigator, POW, Minister,” which appeared in War, Literature, and the Arts, and “He Missed, I Didn’t: Tears of an American World War II POW,” in Sound Historian.
Haley helped start and served as the Coordinator of the East Texas War and Memory Project at TAMU Commerce from 2012-2015, which conducted and preserved dozens of veteran oral histories from the region. She also has extensive experience with fundraising, public outreach, and media, including her blog “From Combat to Cultural Icon: Unraveling the Legacy of the Helicopter in the Vietnam War.” In the summer of 2022, she was a Seminar in Military History Fellow at the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War & Democracy at the National WWII Museum, a joint project with the Society for Military History. Her numerous fellowships include a University of North Texas Special Collections Research Fellowship in 2021.
Haley has delivered more than 20 conference papers and is already active in professional service. In 2022, the Society for Military History appointed Hayley as the SMH’s Mark Grimsley Social Media Fellow. You can follow Hayley on Twitter @HayleyHasik.
Join us, especially you graduate students, for an engaging and fun chat with Hayley Hasik - East Texas, Christmas trees, dog parks, Reba McEntire, the job market, and helicopters, and listen as Brian and Bill reveal way too much!
Hayley’s recommendations:
Rec.: 11/04/2022
Published on: December 6, 2022Today's guest is the hard-working fellow podcaster Philip Shackelford! Philip is the Director of the College Library at South Arkansas Community College in El Dorado, Arkansas. Before joining South Arkansas Community College, Philip held internships and positions at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, the University of Akron, and the Twinsburg Public Library in Twinsburg, Ohio. He earned a BA and MA in History and his MLIS from Kent State University at Kent State.
Philip serves on the Executive Committee of the Arkansas Library Association (ArLA) and was president in 2021. His 2018 article in the ArLA journal Arkansas Libraries won the ArLA LaNell Compton Prize. He also received the ArLA Emerging Leader Award in 2019. Aside from his work as a Library Director, Philip remains an active scholar. He is the author of Rise of the Mavericks: The US Air Force Security Service and the Cold War, which the US Naval Institute Press will publish in April 2023. Amazingly, he has written 30 published book reviews since 2015. Philip is also a podcaster. He is the creator and host of the Modern Scholar Podcast, one of the best academic podcasts out there - we can't recommend Modern Scholar enough!
Join us for a fascinating chat about homeschooling, getting interested in military history, being a musician with a brother who is a Nashville violin/fiddle prodigy known as the Jimi Hendrix of Violin, podcasting, AND (wait for it!) vegan BBQ alternatives! Join us as we are far outside of our comfort zone with the pleasant and enjoyable Philip Shackelford!
Follow Philip and Modern Scholar Podcast on Twitter @modscholarpod.
Rec.: 10/28/2022
Published on: November 29, 2022Today’s guest is environmental historian Tait Keller. Tait is an Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. He is also the former Director of Environmental Studies and Sciences at Rhodes. Tait received his BA in History from the University of Rochester and earned his MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University and his PhD in History from Georgetown as well. Tait’s first book, Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2016. In 2018, he co-edited Environmental Histories of the First World War (Cambridge University Press) with Richard P. Tucker, J.R. McNeill, and Martin Schmid. That volume was awarded a Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award in 2019. Tait’s second book, A Global Environmental History of the Great War, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.
Tait’s work has been supported by a plethora of prestigious grant organizations, including the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research, and the German Academic Exchange Service. Tait has given talks in Africa, India, Turkey, Germany, England, and other sites worldwide. Tait is a nationally certified instructor with Krav Maga Alliance (KMA). When he’s not leading his department or writing the environmental history of conflict, he teaches at Endurance Krav Maga in Memphis.
Journey, the Incredible Hulk, unexploded WW1 ordnance, management software for higher education (very exciting!), tattoos, and the love we have for our dogs - we cover a lot of ground in this episode. Join us for a delightful chat with Tait Keller!
Shout-out to the Bar-B-Q Shop and Central BBQ in Midtown Memphis!
Rec.: 10/21/2022
Published on: November 22, 2022Today's guest is BBQ pit master (and military historian), Dr. Robert Wettemann. Bob is an associate professor of History at the United States Air Force Academy. He served as the Director of the Air Force Academy’s Center for Oral History from 2010-2014 and was the Max F. James Distinguished Researcher in Character and Leadership Development at the USAFA Center for Character and Leadership Development. Prior to moving to Colorado Springs, Bob was an associate professor of history at McMurray University (Go Warhawks!), where he served as the director of the public history program. He also worked with the Command Historian’s Office of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command. He is a proud alum of the History Department at Oklahoma State University, and he went on to earn his MA and PhD in History at Texas A&M University.
Bob is the author of Privilege vs. Equality: Civil-Military Relations in the Jacksonian Era, 1815-1845 (Praeger Security International) and has written numerous other essays and articles. He recently completed another manuscript titled The Patriot: An American Golf Odyssey, which was done in cooperation with the Folds of Honor Foundation. He is currently working on a book-length project titled “Rhino Tanks and Sticky Bombs: American Ingenuity in World War Two.”
Bob is dedicated to his students and the profession. His many awards for service include several for mentoring students, including the 2017 Stephen L. Orrison Award for Mentoring Excellence from the Department of History at the USAFA. He is a frequent presenter at meetings of the Society for Military History and remains active in the public history world.
Join us for a fun chat with Bob Wettemann, recorded just as Hurricane Ian missed our Statesboro Studio and began dumping rain on our Spartanburg Remote Production Facility (all safe), while Bob remains a kid at heart as F-16s buzzed USAFA. We'll cover a whole range of topics, from growing up in Stillwater, Oklahoma to the wonders of the 940s section of the Dewey Decimal System, from watching fire with Aaron Franklin to Bob's work with the Folds of Honor Foundation. Good stuff. Enjoy!
Rec.: 09/30/2022
Published on: November 15, 2022Today on The Pod we talk with David Silbey! David is the associate director of the Cornell in Washington program and a senior lecturer at Cornell University. He joined Cornell after spending the first decade of his career at Alvernia University in Reading, Pennsylvania, where he reached the rank of associate professor. David received his BA in History from Cornell University and his MA and PhD in History from Duke University.
David has published numerous book chapters and articles, but his ability to produce books and edited volumes is enviable. His work includes The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War, 1914-1916 (Taylor & Francis), A War of Empire and Frontier: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902 (Hill & Wang), and The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China: A History (Hill & Wang). His latest book is The Other Face of Battle: America’s Forgotten Wars and the Experience of Combat, which he co-authored with friend-of-the-pod Wayne E. Lee, Anthony E. Carlson, and David L. Preston (Oxford University Press). In 2023, our friends at the University Press of Kansas will publish Wars Civil and Great: The American Experience in the Civil War and World War I, a volume David edited with Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai.
David is a TV star! He has appeared on The Science Channel, the BBC, The National Geographic Channel, The History Channel, and A&E. He is also generous in his service to the military history community. He is a Trustee of the Society for Military History and former Chair of the SMH Education Committee and created the SMH mentoring program for graduate students. He was National Security Fellow at The Jamestown Project at Harvard University from 2005-2007. Since 2018, David is the Series Editor for Battlegrounds: Studies in Military History at Cornell University Press, which Bill says is an "awesome" series that complements rather than competes with Modern War Studies at the Univesity Press of Kansas!
Join us for a great chat with the ever-positive David Silbey. We complain about vampire students but then move on to discuss The Police, being an academic brat, the Bedlam reading room at the Imperial War Museum, and being a series editor. Check it out!
Rec.: 10/06/2022
Published on: November 8, 2022Our guest today is Jay Lockenour. Jay is a Professor of History at Temple University, where he has been on the faculty since July 1996. He served as the Chair of the Department of History from 2014-2020, and the director of the MA program from 1996-2001 and again in 2005. Jay is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy at Temple and sits on the University’s Advisory Board, Center for the Advancement of Teaching. He started his academic career as a visiting assistant professor at Franklin and Marshall College and he was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the United States Air Force Academy in 2013-2014. Jay received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley and earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.
Jay is the author of two monographs, Soldiers as Citizens: Former Wehrmacht Officers in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945-1955 (University of Nebraska Press, 2001) and Dragonslayer: The Life and Legend of Erich Ludendorff (Cornell, 2021). His articles have been published in the Journal of Military History and The German Studies Review. His article “Black and White Memories of War: Victimization and Violence in West German War Films of the 1950s” won the Society for Military History’s Moncado Prize. Jay’s research has been supported by the German Academic Exchange (DAAD), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and many others. He is a highly decorated teacher and has won four teaching awards at Temple.
Jay has been part of the digital scene for decades. He was an editor for H-German back in the list serv’s early days and served as the host of the New Books in Military History podcast from 2009-2019. Join us as we discuss with Jay making career choices, learning German, doing research in Germany, Porsches, and The Clash!
Shout-out, by the way, to the National BBQ and Grilling Association in Douglas, Georgia!
Rec.: 09/15/2022
Published on: November 1, 2022Today Bill recorded live from a Historical Methods class at Georgia Southern University. For the record, Brian is doing a Huey Lewis - he's "working for a living" teaching a class, so Bill was left without a minder (very dodgy). Apparently, students in this class expressed an interest in history podcasting, so they got in touch with us (which may not have been the best decision). To show how the Military Historians are People, Too! podcast works, Bill is interviewing one of the students in the class - Jahnyiah Davis. Jahnyiah is a McNair Scholar and History Major at Georgia Southern University from Perry, Georgia (also home to Georgia State Fair!). We'll talk about her background, how she came to Georgia Southern, why she decided to major in history, and, of course, her BBQ preference!
Special thanks to Prof. Cathy Skidmore-Hess for inviting Bill to invade her class and to her students for their interest in podcasting! So, enjoy this Bonus Short with an undergraduate history major! We hope the class got something out of it and that you will, too.
Rec.: 10/25/2022
Published on: October 25, 2022Our guest today is Dr. Stephanie Hinnershitz, a Senior Historian at the Institute for War and Democracy at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. Steph joined the World War II Museum team after serving as the American History and Diversity Studies Fellow at the United States Military Academy at West Point and then Research Advisor for the Air Command and Staff College School of Professional Education at Maxwell AFB in Alabama. She did tenure-track stints at Valdosta State University and Cleveland State University as well. Steph earned her BA in History from Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania, her MA in American and International History at Temple University, and her PhD in American History at the University of Maryland.
She is a prolific scholar. Her first book, Race, Religion, and Civil Rights: Asian Students on the West Coast, 1900-1968 (Rutgers University Press). She followed that monograph with A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South (UNC Press), which won the Silver Nautilus Award for Journalism and Investigative Reporting. Her most recent book is Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor in World War II (University of Pennsylvania Press), which won the Philip Taft Labor History Award from the Labor ad Working Class History Association and Cornell University Labor Relations School. Steph’s work has been funded by the Army Heritage and Education Center, the Social Science Research Council, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, the Office of Diversity at the United States Military Academy at West Point, the Library of Congress, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Steph has transcended the academic world to the world of public history, has experienced being laid off from a tenure-track position, managed an academic marriage, and recently went to Poland on a WW2 Museum tour, her first trip to Europe! She's a first-generation college graduate as well - we had a blast talking with Steph (a little Beyoncé, too!). You'll enjoy it! And a shout-out to Brenda's Bar-Be-Que Pit in Montgomery, Alabama!
Rec.: 10/07/2022
Published on: October 25, 2022Today's guest is David R. Stone. Dave is the William E. Odom Professor of Russian Studies in the Strategy and Policy Department at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, RI. Dave joined the Naval War College after spending sixteen years at Kansas State University, where he was the Picket Professor of History from 2008-2015. He was educated at Wabash College (AB in History and Mathematics) and Yale University (PhD in History) and has held Fellowships with the Yale International Security Studies Program and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Dave is a busy scholar. His works include: Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union, 1926-1933 (University Press of Kansas), which won the Best First Book Prize of the Historical Society in 2001 and was the co-winner of the Shulman Prize of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies the same year; A Military History of Russia: From Ivan the Terrible to the War in Chechnya (Praeger Security International); and The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (University Press of Kansas). He has edited or co-edited three additional volumes and his articles have appeared in many of the top journals in his field. His article “Misreading Svechin: Attrition, Annihilation, and Historicism” (Journal of Military History) won the Society for Military History’s Moncado Prize in 2012.
Dave sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Slavic Military Studies and the Editorial Board of the University Press of Kansas’ Modern War Studies Series. His recognition for teaching excellence includes the Presidential Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from Kansas State University. Dave is also involved with The Great Courses series, starring in two courses: World War II: Battlefield Europe and War in the Modern World.
Join us for a very interesting chat about learning Russian, working in Russian archives, the current war in Ukraine, and more mundane topics, such as The Grateful Dead, The Americans, and, of course, BBQ - shout-out to Dave's local favorite The Flatts Smokehouse in South Kingstown, Rhode Island!
Rec.: 09/22/2022
Published on: October 18, 2022Our guest today is the enthusiastic Dr. Elizabeth Shesko, who is an Associate Professor of History at Oakland University in Oakland County, Michigan. Liz specializes in Latin American History with a special interest in military service and conscription in Bolivia. She received her AB in Spanish and English at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and went on to earn a PhD in History from Duke University. After completing her PhD, Liz was a postdoctoral research associate and Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in History and Latin American Studies at Bowdoin College and also taught at an American School in Guatemala. Her first book, Conscript Nation: Coercion and Consent in the Bolivian Barracks, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her work has also appeared in edited volumes as well as the Hispanic American Historical Review and International Labor and Working-Class History.
Liz has held numerous Foreign Language and Areas Studies (FLAS) Grants for Spanish, Portuguese, and Aymara. She is a frequent presenter at the meetings of the Latin American Studies Association, and the American Historical Association, among many others.
Join us for a fascinating chat with our first Latin Americanist! Liz discusses language, working in Bolivian archives, the Chaco War, eating guinea pig, the faux pas question of Butch Cassidy's whereabouts (thanks for that, Bill!), and the future of Post-Coach K Duke basketball! And just for Liz - a shout-out to Woodpile BBQ Shack in Clawson, Michigan!
Rec.: 09/02/2022
Published on: October 11, 2022Our guest today is the absolutely delightful Susannah Ural! Susannah J. Ural is a professor of history and co-director of the Dale Center for the Study of War & Society at the University of Southern Mississippi. She also directs USM’s Center for Digital Humanities. Susannah was previously the Charles W. Moorman Distinguished Alumni Professor of the Humanities at USM and the Blount Professor of Military History at the Dale Center. Before coming to USM, Susannah was an associate professor at Sam Houston State University. She earned her BA in History and Political Science at the University of Vermont and her MA and PhD in History at Kansas State University.
Susannah is a prolific scholar of the American Civil War. Her books include Hood’s Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy's Most Celebrated Unit (Louisiana State University Press); Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades: Soldiers and Families in America’s Civil War (Osprey); The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861-1865 (NYU Press). She also edited a collection of essays titled Civil War Citizens: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in America’s Bloodiest Conflict (NYU Press), and her work has been published in the Journal of Military History, The Journal of the Civil War Era, and America’s Civil War.
Susannah was awarded the Mississippi Historical Society’s Merit Award for her work on the Beauvoir Veteran Project and the Edwin H. Simmons Award for service to the Society for Military History. In addition, she has received teaching awards from Kansas State, Sam Houston State, and USM. Susannah has been a member of the Society for Military History’s Board of Trustees since 2019. She is the former chair of the Editorial Board at The Journal of Military History and currently serves on the Editorial Board of The Journal of the Civil War Era. Her digital history work includes the fascinating Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. We could go on, but the point is that Susannah Ural is in the know when it comes to the Civil War.
We'll discuss why unit history is important, the use of digital history, Brett Favre and his current woes, quiet-time near the deer feeder in the backyard, and, of course, BBQ. Join us for a fun and interesting chat with Susannah Ural! Shout-outs to Lucky Rabbit fleamarket in Hattiesburg and Adams Nursery and Garden Center in Petal, Mississippi! And follow Susannah on Twitter @susannahjural!
Rec.: 09/23/2022
Published on: October 4, 2022Our guest today is the very generous and enthusiastic Steve Trout. Steve is a Professor of English at the University of Alabama - yes, the one in Tuscaloosa - where he recently stepped back from serving as Chair of that Department. Before moving to Tuscaloosa, he was Chair of the Department of English at the University of South Alabama, where he founded and co-directed the Center for the Study of War and Memory. Steve began his career at Fort Hayes State University in Kansas, serving as Chair of the Department of English and interim Dean of Graduate Studies and Research. He earned a BA and MA in English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and then a PhD in Modern British Literature at the University of Kansas.
Steve is a prolific scholar and has contributed to broadening the military history field. He is the author of three books: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Angel Fire: War, Remembrance, and an American Tragedy (University Press of Kansas), On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919-1941 (University of Alabama Press), and Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War (University of Alabama). He has also edited four volumes, including Portraits of Remembrance: Painting, Memory, and the First World War, with Margaret Hutchingson (University of Alabama Press). He has published more than two dozen articles and essays, and he edits the War, Memory, and Culture series for the University of Alabama Press. Steve’s many awards include the 2017 Mid-America Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Study of Midwestern Literature and the 2020 Southwest Book Award for The Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Angel Fire. We are thrilled to have Steve with us today - military history, war memory, crossing academic disciplines, and, of course, BBQ!
Rec.: 08/19/2022
Published on: September 27, 2022Our guest today is Dr. Amy Rutenberg. Amy is an Associate Professor of History at Iowa State University and serves as the Coordinator for the Secondary Social Studies Education Program. Amy previously taught at Appalachian State University before making the move to Ames, but she started her teaching career with a five-year stint at Ardsley High School in New York. She earned a BA from Tufts University, an EdM at Harvard University, and her PhD from the University of Maryland at College Park. She brings a unique perspective to teaching and remains a champion of social studies education at the secondary level.
Amy is also an accomplished scholar. She is the author of Rough Draft: Cold War Military Manpower Policy and the Origins of Vietnam Era Draft Resistance (Cornell University Press) and is currently working on a project titled In the Service of Peace: Peace Activism and Military Service in Post-Vietnam War America. Her articles have appeared in Cold War History, The Journal of African-American History, the Atlantic, and the New York Times, and she has contributed essays to several edited volumes. Amy’s work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the United States Army Military History Institute, the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, and the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, to name a few. She has given academic papers all over the country and frequently participates in workshops for secondary education teachers. Amy is a trustee of the Society for Military History. She recently became the secondary education editor at the University of Kansas Center for Military, War, and Society Studies’ Teaching Military History website.
Amy brings a passion for teaching and research and has much to say about the challenges facing history programs in higher education, the challenges academic couples face, Tom Petty, and, to Bill's delight, brisket! Join us for a very interesting chat with Amy Rutenberg!
Rec.: 08/26/2022
Published on: September 20, 2022Our guest today is Kurt Hackemer, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of South Dakota, where he is also, incidentally, a Professor of History. Kurt received his MA and PhD from Texas A&M University after earning his BA in History at the University of Chicago. Kurt is the author of To Rescue My Native Land": The Civil War Letters of William T. Shepherd (University of Tennessee Press) and The U.S. Navy and the Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex, 1847-1883 (Naval Institute Press). He has contributed to a variety of edited volumes, and his articles have been published in the Journal of Military History, Civil War History, the Journal of the Civil War Era, and Civil War Times, among many others.
At the University of South Dakota, he was named the Truman & Beverly Schwartz Distinguished Faculty Award from the College of Arts & Sciences and the Regents Award for Research Excellence. To better help students at USD, Kurt entered the dark world of university administration, where he has worn many hats, including Associate Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, interim Director of Diversity, interim Registrar, acting Chair of the Department of American Indian Studies, and Chair of the History Department!!!!!!! And now, after serving as interim Provost, he's THE Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs (Brian wonders why Kurt failed to duck in time)!
And, oh yeah, he’s also in the USD pep band. Kurt has a distinguished record of service to the Society for Military History - he is the current webmaster and editor for the SMH Headquarters Gazette. In 2003, the SMH honored his service with its Victor Gondos Memorial Service Award (Now the Edwin H. Simmons Award).
Kurt's great story includes Germans, much to Brian's delight. Join us as we discuss the field of military history, the humanities, balancing research and administration, and living in South Dakota!
Rec.: 07/17/2022
Published on: September 13, 2022Today's guest is Dr. Reina Pennington, who is joining us from her amazing place in Vermont with her German Shepard Gunner. Reina recently retired from Norwich University in Vermont, where she was a Charles A. Dana Professor of History and the Director of the Studies in War and Peace Program. After completing her BA in Soviet Area Studies at the University of Louisville, Reina began a career as an Air Force intelligence officer, serving as a Soviet analyst with F-4 and F-16 fighter squadrons, the Aggressor Squadrons at the USAF Fighter Weapons School, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Alaskan Air Command. Following her service with the Air Force, Reina earned an MA and PhD in History from the University of South Carolina. After a one-year stint at UNC Wilmington, she joined the faculty at Norwich in 1999.
Reina is the editor of Amazons to Fighter Pilots: A Biographical Dictionary of Military Women (Greenwood Press) and the author of Wings, Women, and War: Soviet Airwomen in World War II Combat (University Press of Kansas). She has also published numerous essays in edited volumes, and her articles have appeared in, among others, the Journal of Military History and the Journal of Slavic Military Studies. Reina is an award-winning teacher, and her service to the profession is extensive. She sits on the editorial boards of the University of Nebraska Press’ Studies in War, Society, and the Military series and the Journal of Slavic Military Studies. She is a former trustee of the Society for Military History and former chair of the Department of the Army Historical Advisory Committee.
Like many of us, Reina sort of fell into history. She's got an interesting story, has a good source of brisket near her 20 acres in Vermont, and has the coolest Peter Løvig Nielsen-designed Danish teak mid-century modern desk in her study (Bill is experiencing envy). So join us for our chat with Reina Pennington!
Rec.: 08/10/2022
Published on: September 6, 2022Since June 2021, Dr. Sarandis (Randy) Papadopoulos is a Senior Strategy Analyst with the US Navy Staff. He previously served as the Secretariat Historian in the Department of the Navy since 2010 and was a historian with the Navy Heritage Command from 2000-2010. Randy is also an experienced teacher, having taught courses on a range of military history and international relations topics at George Washington University and the University of Maryland at College Park. He received his BA in History from the University of Toronto before earning an MA in Military and Naval History from the University of Alabama. Randy then received his PhD from George Washington University, working with Ronald Spector.
Randy is principal co-author with Alfred Goldberg, et al, of Pentagon 9/11 (Washington: USGPO, 2007), which is a must-read for anyone interested in the Sept. 11 attacks. Most recently, he co-edited Conceptualizing Maritime and Naval Strategy: Festschrift for Captain Peter M. Swartz, United States Navy (ret.) (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2020). He has also authored more than a dozen articles and essays on naval power and submarine warfare. Randy’s dedication to the discipline of military history is unsurpassed. He has served as Vice President & Trustee of the Society for Military History, and currently serves as the Society for Military History’s delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies. The Society for Military recognized Randy’s service to the organization in 2022 by awarding him the Edwin H. Simmons Award for service to the Society for Military History. He has also received the Department of the Navy Award for Distinguished and Superior Civilian Service, and the Navy Civilian Service Achievement Medal. Randy is also active in the US Commission on Military History and has held the offices of vice-president and president of that organization.
Randy has been the long-time organizer of the Military Classics Seminar in the DC area, which often meets at Ft. Myers. If you attend the Society for Military History annual conference, you'll see Randy, often!
So tune in - Randy has the inside take on official military history, "For All Mankind," and techno-pop, and shares his Greek-Canadian-US background, and learning German the hard way. Check it out!
Rec.: 07/20/2022
Published on: August 2, 2022As listed on his own webpage, Colonel JP Clark is “an army officer and historian.” He is a new instructor in the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations, at the US Army War College in Carlisle, PA, where he also served as Director of National Security Affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute in 2018-2019. Prior to serving at the War College, Colonel Clark did two stints as a uniformed instructor in the Department of History at the US Military Academy at West Point. He completed a BS in Russian-German Language with a concentration in Systems Engineering. He later earned an MA and PhD in history from Duke University and also has a master's degree in Strategic Studies from the US Army War College.
JP started his military career as an armor officer and served in northern Iraq, but shifted to the Strategist MOS, in which he has severd for several years. Among other appointments, he did stints in the Immediate Office of the Secretary of the Army and the Army Transition Team for the Chief of Staff-designate, and was an exchange officer with the Initiatives Group of the British Army’s Chief of the General Staff. JP is the author of Preparing for War: The Emergence of the Modern U.S. Army, 1815-1917 (Harvard University Press, 2017) and Striking the Balance: U.S. Army Force Posture in Europe, 2028 (Strategic Studies Institute, 2020), which he co-wrote with C. Anthony Pfaff. JP has also authored numerous articles and essays in such publications as Parameters, Military Review, War Room, The Strategy Bridge, British Army Review, The Three Swords, War on the Rocks, Strategos, and Armor, and is a podcaster himself with the Army War College's excellent pod War Room.
JP is an experienced researcher, military educator, and soldier, and we’re going to try to get to all of it. And in case you are wondering - yep, Fury and Kelly's Heroes are go-to-war film choices! He's even bringing the kids up on Blackadder AND Monty Python. Enjoy our chat with JP Clark!
Rec.: 07/18/2022
Published on: July 26, 2022Debbie Gershenowitz is an executive editor at the University of North Carolina Press, where she both acquires and edits manuscripts. It is worth mentioning that Debbie works out of UNC's “northern office” in NYC. Debbie earned a BA in History from Clark University and an MA in the same discipline at Indiana University. Her historical interests are extensive, and include but are not limited to black history, borderlands, military history, women, gender, and sexualities, and Latinx history. She favors bottom-up histories that give voice to underrepresented people and institutions. Debbie oversees four series at Chapel Hill, including the New Cold War History series.
Before joining UNC press in 2019, Debbie spent more than seven years as Senior Acquisitions Editor for American and Latin American History at Cambridge University Press after serving Senior Editor in History & Law at NYU Press for ten years. She also served as an acquisitions editor for Palgrave MacMillan’s History list and was a reference editor for Scribner. Debbie started her career working in journals, first at the American Historical Review, then with Perspective Publishing in the UK.
If you are an academic, you have likely seen Debbie at one of the many conferences she attends each year, and she also provides a great service to our profession by frequently participating in publishing roundtables at conferences around the country. Debbie has played a tremendous role in shaping military history published by university presses, and we are excited to hear what she has to say about the academic press business. Pay close attention - Big 10 expansion, David Bowie, the Hartford Whalers, and Brooklyn hipsters sneak into the conversation!
Rec.: 07/11/2022
Published on: July 19, 2022Today's guest is retired Indian Air Force General Dr. Arjun Subramanium. Arjun is the President’s Chair of Excellence & Mentor at National Defence College, New Delhi, and a former Air Vice Marshal of the Indian Air Force. He commissioned as a fighter pilot in the Indian Air Force in 1981 and accumulated more than 3000 flying hours in fighter aircraft, including all variants of the Mig-21 and Mirage-2000. He is a graduate of the Defence Services Staff College and the National Defence College, New Dehli, and also served as senior faculty at the National Defence College. Arjun earned his B.A. in History and Humanities at Jawaharlal University, a Masters in Defence and Strategic Studies at the University of Madras, and a Ph.D. in Defence and Strategic Studies at the University of Madras.
Arjun has published widely, including A Military History of India Since 1972: Full Spectrum Operations and the Changing Contours of Modern Conflict (University Press of Kansas, 2021), Full Spectrum: India’s Wars 1972-2020 (Harper Collins, 2020), India’s Wars: A Military History 1947-1971 (Harper Collins, 2016, Published in the US with US Naval Institute Press in 2017). He also writes op-eds for a variety of publications, including India Today, Times of India, Indian Express, and The Tribune.
Arjun has held visiting professorships at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University, Ashoka University, and the Jindal School of International Affairs. In addition, he held fellowships at Harvard University’s Asia Center, the University of Oxford’s Changing Character of War Programme, and the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University in Boston. He's also done his own podcast - Wars and Warriors! Arjun brings an array of diverse experiences and perspectives on military history to the table, and has solid recommendations on Indian food, beer, and film, as well as a surprise BBQ preference and brief review of Top Gun! Follow Arjun on Twitter @rhinohistorian! We are delighted and honored to have our first general officers and fighter pilot on the pod!
Rec.: 05/31/2022
Published on: July 12, 2022Our guest for this very special LIVE recording of Military Historians are People, Too! is Jonathan S. Jones. Jonathan is an Assistant Professor of History at Virginia Military Institute, where he also serves as Deputy Director in the Adams Center for Military History & Strategic Analysis. Before joining the faculty at VMI, Jonathan was the Inaugural Postdoctoral Scholar in Civil War History at Penn State University’s George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center. Jonathan earned his BA at Dallas Baptist University, then an MA at Texas Christian University, and finally at SUNY Binghamton, where he completed a doctoral dissertation titled “Opium Slavery: Veterans and Addiction in the American Civil War Era.” That dissertation won the Anne C. Bailey Dissertation Award from the Society of Civil War Historians and was a finalist for the Southern Historical Association’s C. Vann Woodward Prize. He is currently working on turning his dissertation into a book, which is under advanced contract with the University of North Carolina Press. Jonathan’s articles have appeared in the Journal of the Civil War Era and Psychiatric Times, and he has also written for the Washington Post, VICE, The Civil War Monitor, and Slate, among others.
We want to thank a few people and organizations who helped make this live event possible. Fran Aultman, the office manager in the Department of History at Georgia Southern University handled all of our logistics and we appreciate her help. Our guest, Jonathan Jones, is with us courtesy of a Teagle Foundation Grant, organized by our colleague Dr. Felicity Turner - we appreciate the part she and the Teagle Foundation played in making this happen and for bringing Jonathan Jones to campus.
So join us for a great chat with Jonathan Jones in front of a student audience - we'll cover growing up playing video games in a small town outside of Ft. Worth, getting interested in the Civil War, teaching, and his interest in drugs (in relation to Civil War soldiers - come on, people!). Of course, BBQ will be on the menu!
Rec. 04/12/2022
Published on: July 6, 2022Today's guest is Dr. Sabrina Thomas, an Associate Professor and the David A. Moore Chair of American History at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Before joining the faculty at Wabash College, Sabrina held a dissertation fellowship at Middle Tennessee State University. She received her BA in History at Colorado State University, earned an MS in Counseling at Butler University, and completed her Ph.D. in History at Arizona State University, working under Season 1, Episode 6 guest Kyle Longley!
Sabrina is a specialist in US Foreign Policy with a transnational focus on the intersections of race, gender, nation, and war. She is particularly interested in children born as a result of international conflict. She published her first book, Scars of War: The Politics of Paternity and Responsibility for the Amerasians of Vietnam, with the University of Nebraska Press in 2021 and was nominated for the prestigious Bancroft Book Prize from the American Historical Association. Her articles have appeared in Diplomatic History and the Journal of American-East Asian Relations, and she has received significant funding for her research, including a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sabrina is also approaching the completion of a second monograph titled The Soul of Blood and Borders: Brown Babies, Black Amerasians and the African American Response.
Sabrina is active in a number of professional organizations, including the Association for Asian American Studies, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the American Historical Association, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the National Council for Black Studies. She is an active board member of the Tim Lai Foundation.
Sabrina bounced around a bit before finally deciding to pursue history as a career - she played volleyball at Colorada State University and coached at the collegiate level and also worked as an academic-athletic advisor at several schools before returning to Arizona State to pursue advanced study in history. She's got a remarkable story - she's a horse AND dog person, has an opinion on image licensing in collegiate athletics, loves BBQ, and has good things to say about teaching at an all-male college. She's also an amazing historian exploring one of the more underexplored consequences of American wars. So join us for a fun chat with Sabrina Thomas!
Rec.: 05/17/2022
Published on: July 5, 2022Our guest today is Dr. Tanya L. Roth. Tanya is an Upper School History Teacher at the Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School (MICDS) in St. Louis, Missouri. She completed a BA in History and BA in English at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, and went on to earn her Ph.D. in History at Washington University in St. Louis.
Tanya is an accomplished teacher. She served as the J. Evan Philips Chair of Distinguished Teaching in History at MICDS for 2017-2020, and she has been selected to participate in teaching workshops organized by the American Bar Association/Federal Judicial Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a veteran of the West Point Summer Seminar in Military History and participated in the Oxbridge Teacher Seminar, “Why History Matters,” at the University of Cambridge.
Tanya also publishes regularly, and her works have appeared in Contingent magazine and the Washington Post. She contributed an essay titled "An Attractive Career for Women: Opportunities, Limitations, and Women's Integration in the Cold War Military," to Douglas Bristol, Jr., and Heather Marie Stur’s edited volume Integrating the U.S. Military: Minorities and Women Since World War II. The University of North Carolina Press published her first monograph, Her Cold War: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945-1980, in 2021, which received the Society for Military History’s Coffman Prize for the Best First Manuscript in 2019. Tanya’s research has been funded by the Gerald Ford Presidential Foundation, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, and the Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation, and the American Association of University Women.
Tanya teaches high school students, dabbles in the world of American Girl Dolls, and would gladly have Roy Kent on her soccer team - and pork seems to be outrunning brisket in the Great BBQ Debate!
Rec. 05/26/2022
Published on: June 28, 2022Today's guest is Adam R. Seipp, a Professor of History and Associate Dean in the Graduate and Professional School at Texas A&M University. Adam received all his degrees at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and before joining the faculty at Texas A&M he did visiting stints at UNC and Duke. He is the author of two monographs, Strangers in the Wild Place: Refugees, Americans, and a German Town, 1945-52 (Indiana 2013), and The Ordeal of Peace: Demobilization and the Urban Experience in Britain and Germany, 1917-21 (Routledge, 2009). He has also co-edited two volumes, Modern Germany in Transatlantic Perspective, with Michael Meng, (Berghahn 2017) and The Berlin Airlift and the Making of the Cold War, with John Schuessler and Thomas Sullivan (Texas A&M University Press, forthcoming, Fall 2022). In addition, Adam has presented his work in at least nine countries, published more than a dozen book chapters, and placed articles in some of the leading journals in his fields, including War and Society, Journal of Contemporary History, Journal of Military History, Central European History, and War in History.
His research has been supported by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C., among others. His current book project is Base Politics, Local Politics, and the Cold War Transformation of Germany, 1945-1995, a social history of the American military presence in Germany. Adam is active in the Society for Military History, the German Studies Association, and the American Historical Association. Adam is using his position in the Dean’s Office at A&M to broaden opportunities available to PhDs in the liberal arts, and we are excited to talk to him about his work and views on the future of the discipline.
Join us for a truly engaging chat with Adam Seipp - musicals, Son Volt, and the most eloquent and impassioned BBQ treatise to date!
Rec. 04/15/2022
Published on: June 21, 2022Our guest today is Ed Gitre, an assistant professor of history at Virginia Tech University. He joined Virginia Tech as a Visiting Assistant in 2014 and went tenure track in 2017. Before joining Virginia Tech, he was an instructor at Seattle University and a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Ed received his BA at the University of Michigan, an MA in Theological Studies from Evangel University in Springfield, Missouri, an MA in History from the University of Manchester (UK), and a Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University.
He is the director of the American Soldier in WWII Project, a crowd-sourcing project that has led to the transcription and digitization of thousands of pages of WWII soldiers’ commentaries on their war experiences. Under Ed’s direction, the project has received multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Perhaps most impressively, the project has been made possible by the commitment of tens of thousands of volunteers from around the globe. The project has blown up on the internet and has been discussed in multiple publications, including Stripes and the Washington Post.
In addition to his work with the American Soldier in WWII Project, Ed is completing two book projects: “Breaking the Chain: World War II and the Battle over White Supremacy” & “The Lonely Crowd: David Riesman, Jr. and America’s Conformity.” He has presented and published his work widely, and it’s safe to say that Ed is changing our conceptions of history is done in the digital age.
Born and raised near Ft. Worth, Texas, Ed has a unique story and also has strong views on BBQ. Join us for a fascinating chat with Ed Gitre!
Rec. 04/07/2022
Published on: June 14, 2022Michelle Moyd is the Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor of History and the Associate Director of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society (CRRES) at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is a specialist in the history of Eastern Africa and she wears a lot of hats at IU. Michelle received her undergraduate degree at Princeton University, her MA at the University of Florida, and a second MA and a PhD at Cornell University. Before pursuing her PhD, Michelle spent 8 years in the Air Force as an intel officer, serving in Germany and Somalia.
She is the author of Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East and she is the co-editor, with Yuliya Komska and David Gramling, of Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language. Michelle has also authored more than a dozen articles and essays, including contributions to First World War Studies, Radical History Review, and some excellent edited volumes: Santanu Das’ Race, Empire, and First World War Experience and Tammy Proctor and Susan Grayzel’s Gender and the Great War. Her latest book, Africa, Africans, and the First World War, is currently under contract with Cambridge University Press.
Michelle’s work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, and the International Research Center Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History, Humboldt University, Berlin, and the Institute for Historical Studies at UT Austin. Michelle has her finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the profession beyond the military history field and she is on the editorial boards of the Journal of African Military History, the Journal of Military History, First World War Studies, Central European History, and the British Journal of Military History, and Ohio University’s African Military Histories series. She contributed to an essay forum on the impact of COVID-19 on scholars of European History edited by Christian Goeschel, Dominique Reill, and Lucy Riall in the journal Central European History (Vol. 54, Issue 4, December 2021), that discussed among many things her COVID lockdown Facebook diary. Her public service ranges from giving public lectures to fighting to keep Nazis out of Bloomington’s Farmers’ Market. Michelle has presented her work all over the world, and we are most appreciative that she will be adding our little podcast to her amazing list of media appearances!
Rec. 03/18/2022
Published on: June 7, 2022Today's guest is the affable and beardless Michael S. Neiberg. Mike holds the Chair of War Studies in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, PA. Before moving to the Army War College full time, he served there as the Harold K. Johnson Visiting Professor. From 2005 to 2011, Mike was Professor of History and the Co-Director of the Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Southern Mississippi. He spent the first seven years of his career in the Department of History at the United States Air Force Academy. A native of Pittsburgh, Mike attended “that school up north,” the University of Michigan, as an undergrad, and he completed his MA and PhD in History at Carnegie Mellon.
Mike is a prolific scholar. He has authored more than a dozen books, including When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance (Harvard 2021), The Treaty of Versailles: A Concise History (Oxford, 2018), The Path to War: How the First World War Created Modern America (Oxford, 2017), Potsdam: The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe (Basic Books, 2015) which won the Harry Truman Prize, The Blood of Free Men: The Liberation of Paris, 1944 (Basic Books, 2012) which won the Madigan Award, Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of War in 1914 (Harvard, 2011), The Second Battle of the Marne (Indiana University Press, 2008) which won the Tomlinson Prize for best English-language book on World War I, and Fighting the Great War: A Global History (Harvard University Press, 2005) which won the Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award in 2006. In addition, Mike has published numerous articles and essays in edited volumes and he has presented his work all over the world. Mike’s work has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Harry Truman Presidential Library, The Spencer Foundation, among many others. He is a frequent speaker at museums and universities across the United States and beyond, and he appears frequently on television (C-SPAN), radio. And - wait for it! - podcasts!
Mike is a writing machine and he is always on the go. We are happy that he was able to be with us. You can follow Mike on Twitter at @MichaelNeiberg. Join us for a chat about teaching, choosing a research topic, uses of history, and Pittsburgh toilets (yes, you read correctly)!
Rec. 02/25/2022
Published on: May 10, 2022Peter Johnston is the Head of Collections and Research at the Royal Air Force Museum in London, a position that requires him to be an active researcher and work with the academic and military communities, and get to play with really cool airplane stuff! Before joining the RAF Museum, Peter was the Head of Collections, Research, and Academic Access at the National Army Museum in London (where he also got to play with really cool stuff!). He has also worked as a researcher for the Centre for Social Justice, and his work primarily involved researching governmental policies and their impact on UK veterans as they transitioned back into civilian life. Peter also served as a research assistant for the British Library’s Propaganda, Power, and Persuasion exhibit back in 2013. He’s a teacher as well. He held a visiting lecturer position at the University of Westminster and was an assistant lecturer at the University of Kent. Peter earned his undergraduate and MA degrees in History at the University of Durham and then a PhD at the University of Kent. His doctoral dissertation examined the British armed forces in the Falklands War.
Peter’s first book, British Forces in Germany, 1945-2019: The Lived Experience was published in 2019. He has also published on propaganda associated with military recruitment and museum collections. Peter has a considerable media presence, and his commentary has been featured on BBC, in The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Express, BBC Breakfast, and Good Morning Britain.
You can follow Peter on Twitter @PeteAJohnston. Peter’s roles as a researcher and a curator give him some valuable insight into what’s going on with military history and public history, and we’re thrilled to have him joining us from across the pond. So join us for a truly fascinating chat that involves Spitfires, Airfix Kits, Chinooks, Six Nations Rugby, the Bekonscot Model Village, and, of course, the BBQ Question!
Postscript - Peter delighted in Italy's victory over Wales in the Six Nations Rugby!
Rec.03/16/2022
Published on: April 26, 2022Joyce Harrison is Editor-in-Chief at the University Press of Kansas. She has nearly thirty years of experience in the publishing industry, and she has done it all: contracts and subsidiary rights, foreign rights, acquisitions, and editor in chief. Joyce started as an assistant editor at the University of Chicago Press, and has served as an acquisitions editor at the University of Michigan Press, the University of South Carolina Press, the University of Tennessee Press, and Kent State University Press. She was editor-in-chief at the University Press of Kentucky before moving to The Ranch at Lawrence in 2016.
Growing up near Baltimore, Joyce earned a BA in music with a concentration in music history at Towson University in Maryland, and she went on to earn an MA in musicology at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Before joining the university press world, she started a PhD program in music history and theory at the University of Chicago and remains an avid jazz and classical music fan.
Joyce is always willing to share her insights into the publishing industry and has done so in several venues, including panels at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Society for Military History, and the Southern Historical Association, among others. Joyce has served in various capacities with the Association of University Presses, including helping organize University Press Week and hosting webinars with agents.
Joyce is an amazing resource on scholarly book publishing and the direction and trends of military history. Join us for a very interesting and entertaining chat with Joyce Harrison - including the challenges of working with Bill as Series Editor for Modern War Studies and, of course, the BBQ discussion!
Rec. 02/18/2022
Published on: April 19, 2022Dr. Vanda Wilcox is an independent scholar who makes her home in Milan, Italy. She received her bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from the University of Oxford. After finishing her Ph.D., she held a two-year junior research fellowship at Oxford. Vanda moved to Rome in 2008 and accepted adjunct positions at John Cabot University and Trinity College (Connecticut) Rome campus. She spent the next twelve years in Rome before relocating to Paris. In Paris, she taught for NYU and the Council for International Educational Exchange. Vanda is the author of The Italian Empire and the Great War (Oxford 2021), and Morale and the Italian Army during the First World War (Cambridge 2016). She is also the editor of Italy in the Era of the Great War (Brill 2018), and she has written more than a dozen refereed articles and essays.
Vanda has presented her research all over Europe and the United States, and she is heavily involved in numerous professional organizations, including the International Society for First World War Studies, the Society for Military History, and the Association for the Study of Modern Italy.
Vanda and her family have lived in Rome, Paris, and now Milan, where she continues her historical research and also offers research services for other scholars. She is a sewist, a baker, a gamer, a one-time scriptwriter, and an AS Roma supporter - and a cat person (Byron). Follow Vanda on Twitter @Vanda_Wilcox. We hope you enjoy our chat with Vanda Wilcox!
Rec. 02/10/2022
Published on: April 12, 2022Dr Stuart Mitchell is a Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He earned a BA in Journalism and Contemporary History from Queen Mary University of London in 2006. He then earned an MA in the History of Warfare at King’s College, London in 2007 and went on to complete his PhD at the University of Birmingham in 2014. Stuart specializes in the history of the British Army during the First World War and is now looking at the development of insurgencies and counterinsurgency practices. His book first book, titled Counterinsurgency: Theory and Reality (Casemate 2021), was co-authored with Daniel Whittingham. Stuart also has a collection of essays titled A Military Transformed? Adaptation and Innovation in the British Military, 1792-1945, which he co-edited with Michael LoCicero and Ross Mahoney, and has published several articles and essay, as one would expect from Sandhurst senior lecturer!
Stuart is a frequent lecturer around the UK and in Europe, including talks at the Portuguese Defence Academy and Uzbekistan’s National Defense Academy. Along with Friend-of-the Pod Jonathan Boff, Stuart was heavily involved in Operation Reflect, the British Army’s commemoration of the centenary of the First World War, supporting all three major battlefield studies in 2014, 2016, and 2018, putting to use his extensive experience supporting civilian and military tours across the Western Front and Normandy battlefields. Stuart was also a member of the editorial team that founded the British Journal of Military History, the first open-access journal specializing in war studies in the UK.
Growing up in Staffordshire just outside of Birmingham, Stuart spent his first six months of life living above a pub! And, he still knows how to pull a pint. A long-time Aston Villa supporter, Stuart can be found in the supporter stands at Villa Park on Trinity Road in Birmingham. Follow Stuart on Twitter @SBTMitchell - good stuff! Recently on a Fleetwood Mac kick, Stuart also is a cat person (next cat name - Cat Von Clawswitz!) - we accept him thusly and hope you enjoy Stuart Mitchell!
Rec. 02/09/2022
Published on: April 5, 2022Kara Dixon Vuic is the Benjamin W. Schmidt Professor of War, Conflict, and Society in Twentieth-Century America at Texas Christian University. She received her BA in History and English at Marshall University and her MA and PhD from Indiana University. Before making the move to TCU, she held faculty positions at Bridgewater College in VA and Highpoint University in NC. She is the author most recently of The Girls Next Door: Bringing the Home Front to the Front Lines (Harvard University Press, 2019). Her first book Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War (Johns Hopkins, 2010) won the Lavinia L. Dock Book Award, American Association for the History of Nursing (2010), the American Journal of Nursing Books of the Year Award in History and Public Policy (2010), and was a Finalist for the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award. She also edited The Routledge History of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military (2017) and was part of the editorial team for Managing Sex in the U.S. Military Gender, Identity, and Behavior, which is set to appear with the University of Nebraska Press in May 2022.
Kara has also published numerous essays and articles, and she is the co-editor for the University of Nebraska Press’ Studies in War, Society, and the Military series. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Army Heritage and Education Center, the U.S. Army Center of Military History, the American Historical Association, and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library Foundation, among many others. Kara has written for the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and the Dallas Morning News, and she has also served as a consultant for television and radio programs. She’s a Trustee of the Society for Military History, and she has a list of invited talks and conference presentations a mile long, so we’re glad she agreed to add this interview to the list of prestigious things she’s done recently.
Join us for a great chat with Kara - Mumford and Sons, financial frugality, and yes, the BBQ question will make an appearance. Follow Kara on Twitter @KaraDixonVuic. Thundering Herd!
Rec. 02/11/2022
Published on: March 29, 2022Our guest today is the award-winning teacher and scholar Beth Bailey. Beth is a Foundation Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and the Director of the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies at the University of Kansas, which includes the amazing resource for military history instructors - Teaching Military History. She is the author of America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force, Sex in the Heartland, The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii, and From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America. In addition, she has edited or co-edited numerous volumes, including Managing Sex in the U.S. Military, which she did with Kara Vuic; Alesha Doan; Shannon Portillo.
Beth was educated at Northwestern and the University of Chicago. Before making the move to the University of Kansas, Beth taught at Barnard College, The University of New Mexico, and Temple University. She has spoken all over the world and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Indonesia. Beth’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has received the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award on two occasions, and she was elected to the Society of American Historians in 2017. In 2021, Beth was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Finally, just yesterday she was named the recipient of the 2022 Balfour Jeffrey Award in Humanities and Social Sciences, which is one of the University of Kansas’ prestigious Higuchi-KU Endowment Research Achievement Awards. Beth is the co-editor with Andrew Preston of the Military, War, and Society in Modern U.S. History series at Cambridge University Press and she is extremely active in a number of professional associations, including the Society for Military History.
Beth is one of the most respected and generous people in the field of military history, and we are pleased that she made the time to sit down with us today. She's come far from parents who sat in the flea-infested Fox Theater in Atlanta on their first date and for one who is agnostic about Kansas basketball (living dangerously like that in Lawrence!)! Follow Beth on Twitter @BethLynnBailey.
BONUS - Beth and her husband historian David Farber have one of the most spectacular prairie homes you'll ever see. Check out their Kansas Longhouse outside Lawrence.
Rec. 01/25/2022
Published on: March 22, 2022Our guest today is Medival historan Kelly DeVries. Kelly is a Professor of History at Loyola University in Maryland, and is a world-renown historian of medieval military history. He has published widely - he is the author of A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology, which won the Verbruggen Prize for the best book in medieval military history in 2007. He shared a Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award with his co-author, Michael Livingston, in 2017 for The Battle of Crecy: A Casebook. His many other publications include Joan of Arc: A Military Leader, The Artillery of the Dukes of Burgundy, 1363-1477, and Infantry Warfare in the Early Fourteenth Century: Discipline, Tactics, and Technology. These are merely a few of his numerous monographs and co-authored books. Kelly has also written more than 100 articles, that’s right, 100.
Kelly attended Brigham Young University as an undergraduate and earned his Ph.D. in Medieval Studies at The Centre of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. He was the General Mark W. Clark Visiting Chair of Military History at the Citadel in 2011-2012, and he is an Honorary Historical Consultant at the Royal Armouries, UK. He serves as editor of the Journal of Medieval Military History and as co-editor of the History of Warfare series from Brill Publishers. Kelly has held just about every possible office in the Society for Military History, including trustee. He also served as a trustee and secretary-general of the United States Commission on Military History.
Kelly has appeared on the History Channel and National Geographic Channel, and his credits include History vs. Hollywood, Barbarians, and The Plague. Kelly’s knowledge of warfare in the medieval world is unrivaled. Check out his podcast Bow and Blade, which Kelly co-hosts with Michael Livingston.
If you want to know anything about medieval military history, and where to eat in Charleston, Kelly DeVries is your go-to guy.
Rec. 01/26/2022
Published on: March 15, 2022Today's MHPT guest is Wayne Lee, the Bruce W. Carney Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (to not confuse with those other Universities of North Carolina). Wayne earned his Ph.D. from Duke University and is currently on loan to the USAF School for Advanced Air and Space Studies at Maxwell AFB, Alabama, as the Colin S. Gray Visiting Professor of Strategic Studies. At Chapel Hill, Wayne is also an Adjunct Professor in the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense and also a Research Associate in the UNC Research Laboratory in Archeology. In 2015/16, he was the Harold K. Johnson Chair of Military History at the U.S. Army War College. Prior to joining the faculty at UNC, he was an assistant professor of history at the University of Louisville.
A specialist in warfare in colonial and revolutionary America, Wayne has branched out into the world history arena with his interest in war and culture. He publishes prolifically in history and archeology, including Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina: The Culture of Violence in Riot and War, Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500-1865, and Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History. He is also the editor or co-editor of numerous volumes, including The Other Face of Battle: Combat in America's Forgotten Wars and Empires and Indigenes: Intercultural Alliance, Imperial Expansion, and Warfare in the Early Modern World. In 2007 he was among the editors recognized by the Society for Military History's Distinguished Reference Book Award for The Encyclopedia of War and American Society. In 2014, with co-authors Michael L. Galaty, Ols Lafe, and Zamir Tafilicahe, he won the Society for American Archaeology’s Scholarly Book of the Year award for Light and Shadow: Isolation and Interaction in the Shala Valley of Northern Albania.
Born in Germany to a military family, Wayne was a combat engineer officer in the US Army, serving in Germany and the First Gulf War, before deciding to pursue graduate work in history. He’s a whitewater kayaker, a traditional archery enthusiast, and does some blacksmith work. A Renaissance Man, if there ever was one - if you need a bourbon recommendation, he's the person to ask! Follow Wayne on Twitter @MilHist_Lee. Join us for an engaging chat with Wayne Lee!
Rec. 01/17/2022
Published on: March 8, 2022Today we chat with Dr. Aimée Fox, Senior Lecturer for Defence Studies at King's College, London. Aimée earned her Ph.D. at the University of Birmingham, working under Freind of the Pod Jonathan Boff, and she also served as a Teaching Fellow in the History of Warfare at Birmingham. Aimée was also a Visiting Scholar at the Australian Defence Force Academy at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. Her first book, Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914-1918, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018, winning the Templer Medal for Best First Book as well as the British Army Military Book of the Year for 2018.
Aimée has also published her work in The English Historical Review, War & Society, and War in History, and she is editing a scholarly edition of the papers of Major General Guy Dawnay for the Army Records Society. Her research has been funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and she has held fellowships from the Australian Defence Force, The Australian War Memorial, The Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare at the US Marine Corps University, and the Royal British Legion. Having only finished her Ph.D. in 2015, Aimée has already been elected a Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy, and she is a Trustee of the Society for Military History. She served on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Military History and is presently a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the British Journal for Military History. Perhaps most impressively, she’s got more than 8,000 Twitter followers @DrAEFox.
She is currently pursuing two research projects: first, an exploration of the importance of social relations, gossip, and informal networks to the process of innovation, and the ways in which the social politics of military organizations help or hinder innovation with a particular focus on the role of command and leadership; and secondly, an examination of the emotional mobilization of women during the First World War, exploring how intimacy, feelings, labor, and family were co-opted and exploited by the British military and the ways in which this was negotiated and contested by women. Along with Michael Finch and David Morgan-Owen, Aimée also has a forthcoming edited collection of outstanding essays titled Framing the First World War: Knowledge, Learning and Military Thought, to be published by the University Press of Kansas as part of Modern War Studies.
What a delightful chat with the equally delightful Aimée Fox! We'll discuss what is an Essex Girl, taking sad-naps as an Everton supporter, and BBQ in Georgia, which she has experienced! Yes, we'll talk about her work, having a 7-month old lab puppy (Freddie!), and being married to a military historian, apparently of some repute. Join us!
Rec. 01/13/2022
Published on: March 1, 2022Our guest today is Tammy Proctor, Distinguished Professor of History and former Chair of the History at Utah State University in the lovely Cache Valley in Northern Utah. A native of Kansas City, Missouri, Tammy earned undergraduate degrees in Journalism and History at the University of Missouri, then a MA and PhD in History at Rutgers. Her previous university positions include the H.O. Hirt Professor of History at Wittenberg University in Ohio and Assistant Professor at Lakeland College in Wisconsin. Tammy is a war and society scholar of The Great War, focusing on civilian/non-combatant experiences and gender. Her many books include Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War (NYU Press), Civilians in a World at War, 1914-1918 (NYU Press), Gender and the Great War (co-edited with Susan Grayzel, Oxford University Press), and An English Governess in the Great War: The Secret Brussels Diary of Mary Thorp (co-authored with Sophie de Schaepdrijver, Oxford University Press). Tammy is also a scholar of the Scouting movement and has published several works on that topic, including Scouting for Girls: A Century of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (Praeger) and On My Honour: Guides and Scouts in Interwar Britain (American Philosophical Society). Her current research is on American humanitarian aid to Europe during the war. Among many awards, Tammy was named Researcher of the Year for 2019 by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Utah State University, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Belgium in 2004-2005, and is a Fellow of the International Society for First World War Studies. She served on the Utah World War I Centennial Commission and the Utah State University War Memorial Planning Committee. Very, very busy!
Join us for our chat with Tammy about getting into history, how World War I became her focus of study, being a Department Head, Kansas City, hiking in Utah, and dealing with the cold and snow in the Cache Valley. And, of course, BBQ, and Tammy's favorite Girl Scout cookie! Enjoy as well Tammy deftly deflecting Bill's "Girl Scouts are Fascists" bait and a cut of an extended Girl Scout cookie discussion between Brian and Bill during the break. Smart cookies.
Rec. 01/11/2022
Today's guest is a junior scholar who just published her first book, with Cambridge no less! Annie Tracy Samuel is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. (magna cum laude) in history from Tel Aviv University and a B.A. in history and political science from Columbia University. She specializes in the modern history of Iran and the Middle East.
Annie's scholarship has been published in International Security, Diplomatic History, and Harvard’s International Security Discussion Papers series, and her commentary on current events has been featured by The Hill, Lawfare, CNN, The Atlantic, and ABC News Channel 9. She has presented her work at the Middle East Studies Association, Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, and the American Historical Association, and she has participated in policy briefings at the U.S. Departments of Defense and State. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, Annie served as a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She has been interviewed by numerous media outlets, including The Huffington Post and the Harvard Political Review.
Her book on Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the Iran-Iraq War, entitled The Unfinished History of the Iran-Iraq War: Faith, Firepower, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, was just published by Cambridge University Press in November 2021. She is neck-deep into her second book project, titled The Long Road to Jerusalem: Iran, the Revolutionary Guards, and Israel-Palestine.
Annie is also president of the Southeast Regional Middle East and Islamic Studies Society and has earned several teaching and research awards, including a Ruth S. Holmberg Grant for Faculty Excellence at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Visiting Fellow at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, and a research grant from the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa and the Moroccan-American Cultural Center.
A sport-climbing enthusiast and gear-head with a Prius, Annie brings a fresh and new perspective to Middle Eastern studies and the neglected Iran-Iraq War and its impact on the Middle East. Join us!
Rec. 01/05/2022
Published on: February 15, 2022Today's guest is Megan Kate Nelson, a 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History finalist for her outstanding book The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020), which also earned the following mentions:
Wow!
Some years ago, Megan left the academic world to become a full-time writer after teaching U.S. history and American Studies for several years at Texas Tech, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. She earned her B.A. in History and Literature from Harvard and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa. Megan is primarily a historian of the American Civil War, the U.S. West, and popular culture. She has written related pieces for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Preservation Magazine, and Civil War Times. Megan's column on Civil War popular culture, "Stereoscope," appears regularly in Civil War Monitor. She is also the author of Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (Georgia, 2009) and Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Georgia, 2012). A recent electee to the Society of American Historians, Megan's latest project is Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, which Scribner will publish in March 2022. We've seen galleys - what a story!
Megan is also an avid cyclist and cocktail enthusiast - we'll also ask her about BBQ preferences. And her Twitter feed is worth your enjoyment - @megankatenelson, as is her blog Historista is both provocative and instructive for historians and anyone interested in history. Join us as we enter unchartered territory taking with a Pulitizer finalist!
A little Calusetwizian Electronic Friction - Brian's mic went out halfway through. He showed his genius in quickly switching to the built-in computer mic - he'll suddenly get a little louder!
Rec. 12/21/2021
Published on: February 8, 2022Today's guest is Great War scholar Jennifer Keene. Jennifer is Professor of History and Dean of the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University. She earned her Ph.D. in history from Carnegie Mellon University, after getting a B.A. and M.A. in history from Georgia Washington University. A specialist on the American soldier and veteran experience of World War I, she is the author of Doughboys, the Great War and the Remaking of America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), World War I: The American Soldier Experience (Nebraska, 2011), and The United States and the First World War (2nd edition, Routledge, 2021). She is also the lead author for Visions of America: A History of the United States (Pearson, 2010) that uses a visual approach to teaching students U.S. history. She has received numerous awards for her scholarship, including Fulbright Senior Scholar Awards to France and Australia, and a Mellon Library of Congress Fellowship in International Studies. She served as an associate editor for the Encyclopedia of War and American Society (Sage, 2005), which won the Society of Military History's prize for best military history reference book. She co-edited with Michael Neiberg Finding Common Ground: New Directions in First World War Studies (2011). She has published numerous essays and journal articles on the First World War, and has also served as a historical consultant for exhibits and films, and as an associate editor of the Journal of First World War Studies. She is also a general editor for 1914-1918 Online: An International Encyclopedia of the First World War, a fabulous digital humanities project and outstanding resource on the Great War. She served as President of the Society of Military History in 2018-2019.
As you can imagine, she was very busy during the Great War Centenary and is now burdened with the demands of deanly leadership and advocating for the Humanities at Chapman. We'll dive into both and more - the debacle that was the Abu Dhabi F1 Grand Prix, the near debacle of Bill forgetting to hit "record," the obligation to mentor junior colleagues, and remembering the late and truly wonderful Jeffrey Grey. Also - all of life's questions can be addressed via rowing. Follow Jennifer on Twitter @DrJenniferKeene - Join us for a wonderful chat with Jennifer Keene!
Rec. 12/16/2021
Published on: February 1, 2022Today we're chatting with the refined and gentlemanly Daniel Krebs. Daniel is the Harold Keith Johnson Visiting Chair in the Department of National Security and Strategy in the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA. At the War College, he offers courses on how prisoners of war impact strategic decision-making. Daniel is on loan to the War College from the University of Louisville, where he is Associate Professor of History specializing in Colonial & Revolutionary America and Military History. He received his undergraduate and M.A. degrees at the University of Augsburg in Germany before crossing the Atlantic to earn his Ph.D. from Emory University in 2007. His dissertation was awarded the 2008 Parker-Schmitt Dissertation Award for the Best Dissertation in European History by the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association. In 2005-2006, he was the Society of the Cincinnati and Friends of the MCEAS Dissertation Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In Spring 2010, he was Donald L. Saunders Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, R.I.
Daniel's research focuses on how warfare shaped colonial and revolutionary America and the Atlantic world. His first book, A Generous and Merciful Enemy: Life for German Prisoners of War during the American Revolution, was published with Oklahoma University Press in 2013, and he recently put out a nice co-edited volume with "friend of the pod" Lorien Foote titled Useful Captives: The Role of POWs in American Military Conflicts. In addition, his articles have appeared in the Journal of Military History and Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift, which is the top German-language military history journal. Daniel has published essays in some significant edited volumes. Perhaps most importantly, he contributed an essay titled "Ritual Performance: Surrender during the American War of Independence" in Hew Strahan and Holger Afflerbach's How Fighting Ends: A History of Surrender (Oxford, 2012).
Daniel has been recognized for his work with graduate students at the University of Louisville, where he served as Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of History. He also served in the German Bundeswehr and reached the rank of Lt. Col.! He's also a long-suffering supporter of F.C. Augsburg and a Peleton junkie (but we'll overlook that). Join us for our chat with Daniel Krebs!
Rec. 12/13/2021
Published on: January 25, 2022Today's guest is Alexander Watson. Alex is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a renowned scholar of the First World War and modern Germany. He was educated at Oxford University and finished his Ph.D. there in 2005 under the direction of Niall Ferguson. Watson was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge from 2008-2011 and then spent two years in Poland at Warsaw University as a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow. His first book, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918, was published with Cambridge in 2008 and won the Institute of Contemporary History and Wiener Library's Fraenkel Prize.
That was just the beginning of his time in the spotlight. His second book, Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, was published by Allen Lane/Basic Books (2014) and went on to win the Wolfson History Prize, The Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, The Society for Military History's Distinguished Book Award, and the British Army Military Book of the Year Award.
His most recent book, The Fortress: The Siege of Przemysl and the Making of Europe's Bloodlands, was also published by Allen Lane/Basic Books (2019). That book was a finalist in all of the competitions mentioned above, and it secured Watson's second Distinguished Book Award from The Society for Military History. Alex is now working on a political and sensory history of the July 1932 election in Weimar Germany. Over half of the electorate chose radical, anti-system parties of the far left and far right, effectively voting Germany's first, fragile democracy out of existence. In this watershed election, the book explores the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and even touch to better understand this violent and emotional time when the Nazis became the political power in Germany and took a decisive step on the road to establishing the Third Reich. Watch Babylon Berlin on Netflix - you'll get a sense of it.
Watson has published more than 17 additional articles and essays, and he appears on radio, television, and podcasts, and now he's slumming with us on Military Historians are People, Too!. It is no exaggeration to say that Alex is a star in the field of military history, and we are thrilled to have him on the show.
Rec. 12/09/2021
Published on: January 18, 2022Today's guest is Ron Milam, a combat veteran of the Vietnam War and Associate Professor of History at Texas Tech University. Ron earned his Ph.D. at the University of Houston "a little later life," and at Texas Tech teaches the Vietnam War and graduate and undergraduate courses in Military History. His latest teaching interest is terrorism and insurgency, which developed from his being named an Academic Fellow for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He served as a Fulbright Scholar to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and as the Academic Advisor for the semi-annual Vietnam Center-sponsored student trips to Vietnam and Cambodia. He is a founding faculty advisor to the Texas Tech Veterans' Association. He is now Executive Director of the Institute for Peace and Conflict at Texas Tech, which includes the world-renowned Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Digital Archive. The annual conferences put on by the Texas Tech Vietnam Center are a mainstay for any Vietnam scholar - Ron has been both architect and participant in these conferences for years.
Ron is the author of Not a Gentleman's War: an Inside View of Junior Officers in the Vietnam War, published by the University of North Carolina Press, and the editor of The Vietnam War in Popular Culture: The Influence of America's Most Controversial War on Everyday Life (2 volumes), published by ABC-CLIO/Praeger. He is currently working on "The Siege of Phu Nhon: Montagnards and Americans as Allies in Battle," which deals with one of the most significant battles in the late days of the Vietnam War.
Ron is a Texas Tech Teaching Academy member, recipient of the President's Excellence in Teaching Award, the Chancellor's Council Excellence in Teaching Award, the President's Excellence in Teaching Professorship. He serves on the Board of Directors of the David Westphall Veterans Foundation, which operates the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Angel Fire, New Mexico, and was appointed by Secretary of Veteran's Affairs Robert Wilke to the Veteran's Advisory Committee on Rehabilitation (VACOR).
Ron's military decorations include a Bronze Star for valor and a Bronze Star for service, an Army Commendation Medal for valor and one for service, the Vietnamese Cross for Gallantry with Bronze Palm, a Combat Infantryman’s Badge, Parachutist's Badge, and the Vietnam Service Medal with 2 stars. In 2015, Ron was inducted into the Officer Candidate School (OCS) Hall of Fame at the National Infantry Museum at Fort Benning, Georgia. He rides and collects motorcycles and is one of the most generous people in the military history world. Join us for our chat with Ron Milam!
Rec. 11/18/2021
Published on: January 11, 2022Today we chat with Dr. Jacqueline Whitt. Jackie is the Dwight D. Eisenhower Chair of National Security Studies and Associate Professor of Strategy at the US Army War College. She is also the editor-in-chief of WAR ROOM, the online journal and podcast of the Army War College. Currently, she is detailed as the Acting Deputy Director and Senior Advisor for the Organizational Learning Unit in the Office of Policy, Planning, and Resources for the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the Department of State. There, she is leading the writing and publication of the first-ever doctrine for public diplomacy and helping to stand up a new unit to support learning for organizations and individuals for public diplomacy to remain relevant and adaptable in a complex and changing information environment. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She writes about strategic theory, grand strategy, and narrative and also about the social and cultural history of the US military and, especially, the history of integrating minoritized communities into the armed forces. She has published books, articles, and chapters on a variety of topics. Her books include Bringing God to Men: American Military Chaplains and the Vietnam War (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), which won the Coffman Prize from the Society for Military History for best first manuscript and the Richard W. Leopold Prize from the Organization of American Historians, for the best book on foreign policy, military affairs, historical activities of the federal government, documentary histories, or biography written by a U.S. government historian or federal contract historian. With Kyle Longley, Jackie also published Grunts: The American Combat Soldier in Vietnam (2nd edition, Routledge, 2020). Her current research includes a book project titled “War Stories: Narrative and American Strategy since 1945,” which is under review by the University of North Carolina Press, and a book chapter titled “Managing Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and Expression” in Managing Sex: The Intersection of History and Policy in the US Military, edited by Kara Dixon Vuic and Beth Bailey (forthcoming with University of Nebraska Press, May 2022).
Before coming to Carlisle Barracks, Jackie taught at the Air War College and the US Military Academy at West Point. She is active in the Society for Military History, Model UN, and several other organizations, has been recognized for teaching excellence at the Army War College, Air War College, and West Point, and serves on the editorial board of Modern War Studies for the University Press of Kansas. She is a compulsive blogger, Tweeter, and overall social media junkie, and contributes to discussions on everything from grand strategy to LBGTQ+ issues in the military at every opportunity.
She is a lowly staff officer to the Joint Chiefs of Cats - General Sherman and Admiral Farragut - at Joint Base Whitt in Carlisle, PA, and Tweets as @notabattlechick (follow her!)
Rec. 12/02/2021
Published on: January 4, 2022Join us for a chat with Kyle Longley, Professor of History and Director of the War & Society MA Program in the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Department of History at Chapman University. Kyle began as a historian of American foreign relations and diplomatic history but has gravitated toward war and society studies both in teaching and research. A native of Texas, Kyle earned his bachelor's degree in history at Angelo State University, then an MA in history from Texas Tech, before earning his Ph.D. at the University of Kentucky. In 1995, he began a long academic posting as the Snell Family Distinguished Professor at Arizona State University. While in Tempe, Kyle published like a man possessed. His many books include The Sparrow and the Hawk: Costa Rica and the United States During the Rise of José Figueres (1997), In the Eagle's Shadow: The United States and Latin America (2003, 2nd edition 2009), Grunts: The American Combat Soldier in Vietnam (2008, 2nd edition 2020), The Morenci Marines: A Tale of Small Town America and the Vietnam War (2013), LBJ's 1968: Power, Politics, and the Presidency in America's Year of Uphaveal (2018), and the co-authored, In Harm's Way: A History of the American Military Experience (2019). He is currently writing The Forever Soldiers: Americans at War in Afghanistan and Iraq (for Cambridge University Press) and The Unlucky Ones: Lima Company and the Marines in Iraq.
Kyle is an award-winning university teacher. The Associated Students of Arizona State named him the Centennial Professor as the outstanding teacher at ASU. He was also awarded the Zebulon Pearce Award for Outstanding Teacher in the Humanities and the ASU Habitat for Humanity "Making the World a Cooler Place to Live" Teaching Award. That's some serious teaching chops.
After a brief stint as Director of the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Kyle joined the faculty in the History Department at Chapman University in 2020, where he runs the War & Society MA program. He speaks worldwide, including at Bill's mother's retirement community - Longhorn Village - in Austin (his mother loves Kyle!).
And a PS for this episode - we experienced some audio difficulties that we mostly but not completely fixed, being the amateurs that we are. Also, Dr. Longley's computer notifications "beeped" several times, attesting to his popularity. And we also corrected Dr. Longley after recording as to the correct pronunciation of Lima, Ohio! Remember, he's a Latin Americanist at heart. He's such a great guy!
We're excited to talk with him - so join us with Kyle Longley on Military Historians are People, Too!
Rec. 11/16/2021
Published on: December 28, 2021Today's guest is Great War scholar Jonathan Boff. Jonathan is a Reader in History and War Studies at the University of Birmingham, where he teaches courses on conflict from Homer to Helmand. He specializes in the First World War. He is currently an AHRC Leadership Fellow, researching a book on Money in Wartime which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2024. His last monograph, Haig's Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany's War on the Western Front, 1914-18 was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. It won the British Army Book of the Year award, and was joint winner of the World War One Association’s Tomlinson Prize. His previous book, Winning and Losing on the Western Front: The British Third Army and the Defeat of Germany in 1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2012) was short-listed for the Templer Medal and for the British Army Book of the Year award. He was educated at Merton College, Oxford and the Department of War Studies, King's College London, and spent twenty years working in finance before returning to academia. He serves on the board of advisors for the National Army Museum and Army Records Society, has worked as a historical consultant with the British Army and the BBC, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
And he is a Rugby and F1 enthusiast, so Bill is quite pleased! Follow Jonathan on Twitter @JonathanBoff!
Join us for our chat with Jonathan Boff!
Rec. 11/30/2021
Published on: December 21, 2021Jim Willbanks is one of the most interesting military historians you’ll come across. Born in Texas and a graduate of “that school” in College Station, Jim was commissioned as a young lieutenant through ROTC at Texas A&M University. He not long after found himself as an advisor with an ARVN regiment in South Vietnam during the 1972 Easter Offensive, during which he was wounded and decorated for heroism under fire. He spent twenty-three years in the Army, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel. His decorations include the Silver Star, Legion of Merit, Bronze Star with “V” and Oak Leaf Cluster, two Purple Hearts, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with two Silver Stars. If that wasn’t enough, Jim graduated from the Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC) with honors, then was selected for the inaugural class of the new Army School for Advanced Military Studies (SAMS). He earned a Ph.D. in history at the University of Kansas, beginning a long and distinguished career as a military historian and instructor in military history at CGSC, where he also served as head of the Department of Military History for several years. Jim is the author or editor of fourteen books, including A Raid Too Far (Texas A&M Press, 2014), Abandoning Vietnam (University Press of Kansas, 2004), The Battle of An Loc (Indiana University Press, 2005), The Tet Offensive: A Concise History (Columbia University Press, 2006), and most recently Danger 79er: The Life and Times of Lieutenant General James F. Hollingsworth (Texas A&M Press, 2018). A dedicated servant of the military history profession, Jim served on the Board of Trustees for the Society for Military History, the Board of Editors for the Journal of Military History, and is on the Editorial Board for Modern War Studies at the University Press of Kansas. He and his work have been highlighted in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, US News & World Report, Wall Street Journal, Army Times, Stars and Stripes, and PBS, where he consulted and appeared in Ken Burns’ Vietnam series.
Now retired, Jim remains as active in the profession as ever and is Aggie as ever. We’ll chat with Jim about being a veteran of the war he now studies, working with Ken Burns, and the value of history in professional military education. Join us!
Rec. 11/04/2021
Published on: December 14, 2021Brian and Bill chat with Lorien Foote, one of the most important historians of the American Civil War experience. Lorien is the Patricia & Bookman Peters Professor in History at Texas A&M University, moving to College Station in 2013 after several years in the History Department at the University of Central Arkansas. She is the author of several books, including The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners of War (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), which was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title; The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Manhood, Honor, and Violence in the Union Army (New York University Press, 2010), which was a finalist and honorable mention for the 2011 Lincoln Prize; and most recently Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). With Daniel Krebs of the University of Louisville, she has also recently published a collection of essays on the American POW experience, titled Useful Captives: The Role of POWs in American Military Conflicts (University Press of Kansas, 2021), which includes a mighty fine essay “Down, but Not Out: Manhood and the American Prisoner-of-War Experience in World War,” by one Brian Feltman. She is the creator and principal investigator of a groundbreaking Digital Humanities Project, “Fugitive Federals,” which traces the escape and movement of over 3000 Union POWs during the American Civil War.
Brian and Bill chat with Lorien about how she came to be a Civil War historian, what drew her to issues of masculinity and POW experience in history, and what it’s like to be a woman in a field still dominated by male academics. We’ll also discuss what’s going on in Aggieland and find out the best BBQ in College Station. So, join us for our conversation with Lorien Foote!
rec. 11/09/2021
Published on: December 7, 2021Join Brian and Bill as they chat with Rob Citino, the Samuel Zemurray Stone Senior Historian at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. Dr. Citino earned his Ph.D. from Indiana University and is an award-winning scholar of German military history and World War II, who has published numerous books, including The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943, Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942, and The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years' War to the Third Reich, as well as numerous articles covering World War II and 20th-century military history. His book awards include the New York Symposium on Military History's Arthur Goodzeit Prize and the American Historical Association's Birdsall Prize. He has twice been honored with the Distinguished Book Award by the Society for Military History. Dr. Citino has taught at Eastern Michigan University (where in 2007 ratemyprofessor.com named him the "Number 1 Professor in the Country") and the University of North Texas, and has also held the Charles Boal Ewing Visiting Chair in Military History at the US Military Academy and the prestigious General Harold K. Johnson Chair of Military History and Strategy at the US Army War College. In 2021, the Society for Military History awarded Dr. Citino its Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for Scholarly Achievement.
We'll talk to Rob about how one gets from Cleveland to Bloomington, Indiana, why the Wermacht, becoming a minor MTV celebrity, being the senior historian at the fabulous National World War II Museum in New Orleans, and playing guitar and buying vinyl records. Join us!
Rec. 10/26/2021
Published on: November 30, 2021Join Brian and Bill as they chat with Heather Marie Stur, one of the most cutting-edge Vietnam War and war and society studies historians in the United States. Dr. Stur earned a Ph.D. in History at the University of Wisconsin after earning a B.A. and M.A. in History at Marquette University. She is the Moorman Distinguished Alumni Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she is also the Director of Graduate Studies in History and the Co-Director of the Dale Center for the Study of War & Society. She is the author of Saigon at War: South Vietnam and the Global Sixties (Cambridge 2020), The U.S. Military and Civil Rights Since World War II (ABC-CLIO 2019), and Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (Cambridge 2011). She is also co-editor of Integrating the U.S. Military: Race, Gender, and Sexuality Since World War II (Johns Hopkins 2017). Dr. Stur’s articles have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, National Interest, Orange County Register, Diplomatic History, and other journals and newspapers. She has presented and lectured at conferences and universities all over the world. In 2013-14, Dr. Stur was a Fulbright scholar in Vietnam, where she was a visiting professor on the Faculty of International Relations at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Ho Chi Minh City. She is currently writing a book about the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
We’ll ask Heather about how she got interested in history, living in Ho Chi Minh City for a year, and the rise of women in the military history field. We might find out her favorite Vietnamese street food as well, so join us!
Rec. 10/28/2021
Published on: November 23, 2021