Armistice Day, 1918

ARMISTICE DAY, 1918 by ROBERT GRAVES

What's all this hubbub and yelling, Commotion and scamper of feet, With ear-splitting clatter of kettles and cans, Wild laughter down Mafeking Street?

O, those are the kids whom we fought for (You might think they'd been scoffing our rum) With flags that they waved when we marched off to war In the rapture of bugle and drum.

Now they'll hang Kaiser Bill from a lamp-post, Von Tirpitz they'll hang from a tree.... We've been promised a 'Land Fit for Heroes'--- What heroes we heroes must be!

And the guns that we took from the Fritzes, That we paid for with rivers of blood, Look, they're hauling them down to Old Battersea Bridge Where they'll topple them, souse, in the mud!

But there's old men and women in corners With tears falling fast on their cheeks, There's the armless and legless and sightless--- It's seldom that one of them speaks.

And there's flappers gone drunk and indecent Their skirts kilted up to the thigh, The constables lifting no hand in reproof And the chaplain averting his eye....

When the days of rejoicing are over, When the flags are stowed safely away, They will dream of another wild 'War to End Wars' And another wild Armistice day.

But the boys who were killed in the trenches, Who fought with no rage and no rant, We left them stretched out on their pallets of mud Low down with the worm and the ant.

Afghantsy: The Soviet Experience in Afghanistan

When the Red Army invaded Afghanistan to ensure that a pro-Soviet socialist regime remained in power in 1979, observers in the West assumed that it would follow the pattern provided by interventions in Eastern Europe during the 1960’s.  After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev decreed that no socialist state allied with the Soviet Union would be allowed to either change its form of government, or change its alliances.  This led to Soviet-backed interventions in Ethiopia, Aden, Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia to support Marxist regimes.  This doctrine combined with Afghanistan’s shared border with the Soviet Union set the stage for armed intervention in favor of the government led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan.  What the Soviet Union and the world did not anticipate was a decade-long struggle between the Red Army and insurgents, resulting in heightened tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The geo-political consequences of the war in Afghanistan are well documented, as are changes in Soviet combat tactics, the muhahedin resistance, and the United States’ role in supply arms and supplies to resistance groups fighting against the Soviet Union.  Less understood, particularly in the West, is the experience of Soviet soldiers and civilian personnel who served in Afghanistan due to conscription or as volunteers.  Soldiers and civilians alike experienced privation and horror for their nation.  Unlike the heroes of the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany, they returned home garner the scorn and disdain of fellow Soviets, and a lack of medical care and veterans’ assistance.  Not only did the Afghantsy not win their war on behalf of the Motherland, but the fact they were even fighting was hidden from the public until 1983, four years after the war began.  As Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness, took hold and the Soviet public learned more about the war, the rationale for fighting became a subject of debate.  Ultimately, the Afghantsy found themselves outcasts among their own people.

From Pacifism to War in the Name of Christian Love: The Ideology of the First Crusade

The combination of military force and Christianity affected both Christianity and the shape of the world at large after the Emperor Constantine ordered his troops to mark their shields with the Chi Rho symbol of Christianity at the battle of Milvian Bridge.  With this example conflicting with the apparent renunciation of violence found in the New Testament, Augustine of Hippo published his doctrine of Just War as guidelines for Christians called to render military service or defend their homes.  The belief that Christians could rightly take up arms had a lasting impact on the development of European civilization and its interactions with the wider world.  Relying on Augustine’s doctrine, Christians fought to defend themselves from outsiders, launched the Crusades to the Holy Land, and engaged in wars among themselves. 

When later theologians further refined Augustine’s understanding of the circumstances under which Christians might use force, they armed themselves against each other in conflicts over political and religious dominion.  President George W. Bush invoked an ideology derived from Christian ideology of Just War in launching the invasion of Iraq, and worsened American relations with the people of the Middle East by calling for a “Crusade” against Islamist terrorism.  Since the combination of Christianity and arms continues to play a significant, even dominant role in the world, it is necessary to revisit the development of Western European Christian theology regarding the use of force through the Pope Urban II’s call in 1095 for the First Crusade.

The effort to lay ground rules for the just prosecution is an ancient one.  In The Republic Plato illustrates the early Greek view of proper warfare.  He argues that soldiers should kill only combatants, leaving women, children, and the elderly unscathed.  He also contends that armies should refrain from destroying homes, as this would create undo hardship for those remaining after the war is over.  He limits these protections only to Greeks.  Non-Greeks might face a harsher form of warfare when they fought Greeks.[1]  Building from Plato’s work, Aristotle extended the doctrine of proper warfare to include acceptable reasons for engaging in war.  He believed defense, revenge, helping allies, seeking new resources for the polis, or to maintain power over subject peoples were all valid justifications for war.[2]

Periodizing the Military Revolution Debate

The debate over the Military Revolution in early modern Europe, which developed out of Michael Roberts’ seminal article, is in many ways a debate over the proverbial chicken and the egg. Which came first: the growth of states, or changes in warfare.  On the side of state formation is the argument that states had already begun to attempt to centralize functions and improve taxation as early as the First Crusade of the Twelfth century, while those who argue that military change drove governments to centralize and grow usually argue that the need to support large armies using gunpowder weapons was responsible. To argue for a specific periodization is to choose a side in the greater debate.

Michael Roberts initially argued that the European art of war was radically transformed between 1560-1660, largely due to the effects of military changes introduced by Maurice of Orange and Gustavus Adolphus.  Both leaders introduced linear musket tactics that dramatically reduced the percentage of pikes used by their armies, relying on the shock of massed musket fire.  To increase the number of weapons firing at the same time, Roberts argued, musketeers were arranged in lines five or six ranks deep, with the front row firing and filing back to reload while waiting their turn to fire again.  These tactics were allegedly based on Maurice of Orange’s interpretation of Roman infantry tactics as presented by Vegetius.  Gustavus Adolphus’ contribution to this tactical innovation was to have his infantry lines advance when firing rather than remaining in static positions.  For this to work, the musketeers had to repeatedly drill in order to quickly load and fire their weapons at the same interval, and on command, which required a larger number of junior officers and non-commissioned officers to give orders and boost morale.  The need for larger armies, for drill, and for standardized weapons, according to Roberts, forced early modern states to develop the bureaucracies needed to pay troops, provide supplies, and to provide training areas.  In Roberts’ opinion, the military revolution of the Thirty Years’ War led to the development of the modern state.

The concept of the Military Revolution drew critique and support from many sources.  Clifford Rogers argues that by placing the time period for the military revolution after 1500 obscures what he considered the truly dramatic changes in European warfare that occurred during the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453).  Fourteenth century armies, which were dominated by heavy cavalry who fought to capture their opponents (gaining both glory and ransom), were completely different from those than conquered the globe beginning in the Fifteenth century.  Commoners armed with missile weapons, who fought to kill their enemies, dominated the later armies. Rogers traces these changes to the Hundred Years’ War in France, which he contends witnessed two military revolutions: an infantry revolution and an artillery revolution.

Who Started the Cold War - A Historiographical Approach

In We Now Know, Gaddis, who had previously argued that the Cold War was the result of complex factors acting on both sides of the Cold War struggle, argued that after reading translated documents available from former-Soviet archives for a short time in 1992-1193 that as long as Stalin led the Soviet Union that the Cold War could not be avoided, thus, the long conflict was Stalin’s fault.  According to Gaddis, Stalin’s post-war strategy required the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons, dominate Eastern Europe, and foment revolutions throughout the Third World.  Gaddis further argued that Stalin pursued this course for ideological reasons, and that American policymakers had little choice to resist.  In this analysis, George Kennan’s policy of containment and the Truman doctrine represent the earliest and most obvious examples of American resistance to Stalin’s plans, and were taken at the request of other nations who requested American protection leading the United States to develop a democratic sort of empire.

Over the course of the Cold War, Gaddis contends, the United States tragically overestimated the need to defend its credibility in Guatemala and Vietnam, spent too much on nuclear weapons, and allowed the focus of Cold War competition to shift to the numbers of nuclear weapons each side possessed after the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Although the Soviet system had started to collapse early in the Cold War, Gaddis believed that the shift made the Soviet Union more dangerous than it really was, a technicality that many analysts missed after 1963 because the bipolar system kept them from examining multidimensional aspects of power like economic factors.

            Gaddis is seemingly joined in his apparent revival of orthodox or traditional Cold War historiography by Vladislov Zubok, Constantine Pleshakov, Vojtech Mastny, and Mark Mazower, who argue that Stalin was ultimately responsible for the Cold War for reasons including his desire for security, ideology, and misunderstanding potential Western responses to his actions and goals.  Zubok and Pleshakov provide an inside account of the Soviet role in the Cold War through the Cuban Missile Crisis that focuses on the human element of the Cold War.  They argue that Stalin’s poor statesmanship and false expectations, especially regarding his attempts to pull Germany into the Communist camp, caused the Cold War.  They believe that Stalin stumbled into the conflict rather than planning it, though he expected renewed war with capitalist countries within 25 years of the end of World War II, and was surprised when his activities kept the West United against him rather than ending up in conflict with one another as Leninist ideology said they should.

France's post-War Struggle to Maintain International Prestige

In the post-war world, France has struggled to maintain and regain its position of international prominence, which was diminished following both of the Twentieth century’s world wars.  The experience of defeat, occupation, and liberation left France to participate in the post-war reorganization of Europe only at the invitation of the United States and Great Britain.  Its major post-war concerns were to ensure that it maintained a major role in Europe, her autonomy, and through 1962 preserving it Empire. 

Relationships with German and the United States dominated French diplomatic and Foreign Policy concerns for the duration of the Cold War.  According to Helga Haftendorn, France worked in triumvirate, or a “strategic triangle”, from 1965-1995 with the goals of maintaining a close working relationship with Germany and balancing the power of the United States to preserve France’s freedom of action on the world stage.  During the 1950s, France focused developing ties with Germany as part of its efforts at reconciliation.  The goal in fostering close relations was to integrate Germany into the West European economic and security system and guarantee American protection from both Germany and the Soviet Union.  France still attempted to develop a global role, but had to do that within the context of its relationships with Germany and the United States.  The initial steps toward this can be seen in the development of the European Coal and Steel Community as developed by the Schumann Plan of 1950 and the efforts of Jean Monnet.  The end result of the beginnings of the ECSC was to lay the groundwork for later European integration in the EEC.

According to John Gillingham, the ECSC worked to provide peaceful access to the resources of the Ruhr, which he believes was one of the major issues leading to World War I and World War II.  What was needed was a way to reconcile both French and German need for resources while restoring the international system of payments, allowing trade.  Monnet’s solution was a supranational agency that integrated the German economy into the West and made it the guardian of West European progressivism, and satisfying French economic and Security concerns.

The Ruhr was especially important to France and the low countries because while German industry had modernized by the war, industries in occupied Europe had not been.  The ECSC got Germany to subsidize mines in Belgium, allowed imports of coal, and encouraged German cartels to allocate markets to other ECSC members when it could not meet demand for industrial products.  The ECSC and Schumann Plans were just the first stage of European integration, and when Great Britain turned out unable (or unwilling) to lead the way in Europe, the United States partnered with France to lead Europe.  De Gaulle had begun to press for a special relationship with the United States like that enjoyed by Great Britain as early as 1947, with later consequences for its relationship when it failed to do so, even within the context of NATO.

Major Technological Developments Facing Navies, 1800-2000

The past two centuries produced three key technologies that radically altered the nature of naval warfare: steam power, the submarine, and the airplane.  Naval technologies with important, but lesser effects on the nature of naval warfare include missile technology, nuclear weapons, and iron/steel armor.  Of these, the submarine and nuclear weapons seem to have played the largest role in radically changing how the world’s navies viewed naval strategy.  We can see these technologies at play most clearly in the naval arms races of the Nineteenth century and the major wars of the Twentieth century. 

The development of steam power was the earliest of these technologies because it showed that the Royal Navy might be unable to defend England from invasion across the English Channel, and would also be unable to conduct close blockades of ports on the continent, as it had done during the Napoleonic Wars.  Eric grove argues that because steam ships could navigate without reference to the wind, they could take routes and land at points that the Royal Navy would not be able to predict.  The Crimean War showed the possibilities of steam-powered vessels (and the deficiencies of British ships) as French ships equipped with high horsepower steam engines easily navigated the passage of the Dardanelles against the wind.

C.I. Hamilton argues that the steam power and focus on torpedoes by the jeune ecole played a key role in the Anglo-French Naval arms race from the time of the Eastern Crisis of 1839/40 through the 1860s.  France also developed steam-powered torpedo boats to prevent the Royal Navy from using a close blockade against French ports in the case of war. This was part of a French attempt to change the nature of naval war away from the emphasis on large fleet actions in the face of a larger British fleet.  Steam technology led France to develop doctrines of ramming, commerce raids, amphibious landings, and coastal defense as opposed to large clashes at sea.

The Collapse of the Liberal Consensus in American Politics

Democratic dominance over American politics from 1932-1968 was born in the economic chaos of the Great Depression, the Allied military victory during World War II, and was strengthened by consensus over Cold War anticommunism and Foreign Policy issues.  This consensus included general agreement over domestic policy before the second stage of the Civil Rights movement alienated many working class Americans after 1965.  With the beginning of the Great Depression, many Americans accepted the idea that government had a greater role to play in regulating the economy and providing social services such as welfare, retirement programs, medical care for the poor, and, ultimately, expanded civil and political rights for African Americans.  This program was the culmination of changes in American political thought stretching back through the Progressive era to the rise of the Populist movement in the 1890s, and bolstered by prominent figures like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.  Support for this agenda was geographically and ideologically dispersed, gathering labor organizers, wealthy liberals, farmers, and southern conservatives under a large umbrella.  This broad coalition frayed and ultimately collapsed when Black Power ideology developed among a radical set of Civil Rights activists, and Americans grew unable to sustain a constant fear of nuclear holocaust during the late 1960s. The Black Power movement frightened to middle and working class whites, and the antics of radicals in the antiwar movement combined with urban riots demonstrated the breakdown of law and order in American society.  American conservatives enjoyed an ideological resurgence relying on a mish-mash of anti-Communism, fiscal responsibility, and law and order rhetoric that carried racial overtones.  The new conservative ideology of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan attracted parts of the Democratic coalition – working class voters repulsed by the excesses of the counterculture, Black Power, antiwar movement, and worried about competition with minorities for jobs and housing.  To do this, the Republican Party appealed to the issues that concerned suburban voters – forced busing, taxation, law and order, and family values.

The Democrats gained electoral dominance with the 1932 elections largely because Herbert Hoover refused to use the power of the Federal government to help Americans through the Great Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the new president, introduced programs designed to boost the economy through Federal spending based on pragmatic attempts not bound by a specific ideology.  The successes of the New Deal faltered in 1937 when FDR attempted to return to a balanced budget, triggering a recession, but the combination of New Deal programs and the full employment brought on by World War II in 1941, definitively showed Americans that government could beneficially play a larger role in the economy.  During the Second New Deal, Federal programs moved beyond mere jobs programs to include benefits like Social Security. 

Barton Bernstein argues that a large part of the reason that the New Deal helped Democrats forge such a diverse coalition was that it built on the basically conservative agenda of the Progressive era.  New Deal reforms were ultimately conservative in nature because they worked to protect American capitalism rather than replacing it with a truly managed economy.  While the New Deal extended both welfare benefits and federal power, most benefit helped the middle class rather than the impoverished.  The most conservative measure of the New Deal was the Social Security Act of 1935, which forced people to pay into retirement pensions.  The effect was that while the Federal government administered Social Security, individuals were ultimately responsible for their own future, and the government would not be burdened with their upkeep.

The Influence of Population Shifts on American Life

From the 1870s to the 1990s the United States experienced a series of dramatic demographic changes as the result of immigration and emigration. The major changes included rural to urban migration from 1870-1900, the two Great Migrations of African Americans fleeing the South, and the seemingly simultaneous growth of suburbs in the Sunbelt after World War II.

During the last tree decades of the 19th century, the populations of cities exploded. Cities grew at double the rate of total population growth. Immigration from abroad contributed to the rise of cities as 14 million immigrants arrived on the east coast of the United States, mostly from southern and eastern Europe. At the same time, many Americans migrated from rural areas to cities seeking work as modernization of agriculture required less labor. Andrew Carnegie took advantage of this migration, hiring farm kids to work in his first steel mill.

The growth of cities led to dramatic changes in the nature of urban areas and in Americans' expectations of the role of government in their lives. Crowding in cities, outbreaks of disease in the 1880s, combined with reformers belief in using science to change society for the better led to changes in the role of government. After an 1882 typhoid outbreak killed 20,000 people in Chicago, city engineers expanded sewer and water systems. When the depression of 1893 struck, Detroit mayor Hazen Pingree hired the unemployed to build public facilities and railed against corruption in government as a threat to everyone. City problems also drove the development of the settlement house movement of reformers like Jane Addams, who used statistics to bring reforms to housing, to end child labor, and to protect workers. The huge growth of cities had a dramatic influence on American politics, helping to inspire the development of the Progressive movement.

The technological and demographic changes of the Gilded Age transformed the nature of American cities. In the 18th and 19th centuries Americans followed the trend of cities worldwide by placing houses as close to each other as possible because it made for shorter distances to travel and allowed all of the dwellings to be inside city walls. Historian Kenneth Jackson argues that the rise of domesticity during the 19th century led Americans to want a different style of housing, with more privacy and separation from work.

The Southern Move to the GOP, 1948-1972

Before 1948, Southern Democrats largely believed that the party was the defender of their way of life, which was based on an ideology of states' rights and traditional values. They had generally warned northern liberal reformers, Republicans, and civil rights activists to stay out under the broad label of "outside agitators." The adoption go the civil rights plank at the 1948 Democratic National Convention and President Harry S. Truman's integration of the military with Executive Order 9981 created a split between northern and southern Democrats.

This pair of civil rights actions began the prices of not only moving many southern Democrats to the Republican party, but also in destroying the national New Deal liberal consensus. The first concrete illustration of the split in the Democratic party came with the establishment of the States' Rights Democratic party to scare the larger Democratic party into dropping its civil rights plans. When that failed, the Dixiecrats ran Strom Thurmond against Truman and Dewey in the Presidential race, winning in South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Historian Kari Frederickson argues that Thurmond, and possibly other New Deal Democrats from the South, favored some reforms that would benefit blacks, but found Truman's intention to use Federal power to enact civil rights reforms insulting. Thurmond ran from U.S. Senate as a Democrat in 1954, but switched to the GOP in 1964 to support Barry Goldwater. The creation of the Dixiecrats and politicians switching parties seemed to give permission to southern voters to consider alternatives to the Democratic party. As southerners left, the Democrats became even more liberal.

Origins of the Civil Rights Movement

As with all great social movements, the Civil Rights movement that peaked in the 1960s built on much earlier traditions of African American organization, protest, and legal action.  Although it did not begin to make dramatic impacts on American society until the 1930s and 1940s, the origins of the Civil Rights movement can be traced back to the 1880s.  The modern Civil Rights movement should be traced from African American legal actions during World War II.

What eventually developed into the modern Civil Rights movement began even before the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v Ferguson, which established the principle of separate but equal.  Clarissa Myrick-Harris argues that the Civil Rights movement began with the 1881 Washerwomen’s Strike in Atlanta, in which black laundresses organized a strike to get better wages and more autonomy in their working conditions.  The washerwomen drew financial and moral support from Atlanta’s churches and fraternal organizations, setting a pattern that would hold true for the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.  1881 was an important for African American efforts to protect their rights in Atlanta, as the city’s black residents organized for collective self-defense to protect themselves from police brutality and false arrest.  In one such occurrence, African American men and women gathered to protect James Burke when he was arrested for allegedly pushing a white woman from a sidewalk.  Not only did his mother brandish a gun at white authorities, but also the crowd followed the police to the jail to ensure that Burke was safe.

From 1890-1910 black Atlantans reacted by the rash of lynching in and around the city by holding mass rallies and launching petition drives to get police protection.  They failed to produce significant results, but provided the model of nonviolent direct action that was successfully used during the 1950s and 1960s to finally take concrete steps toward equality.  This episode of black protest also drove Atlanta University professor W. E. B. Du Bois to become a civil rights activist.

Why Wasn't There a Worker's Revolution in the United States after 1880?

Marx and Engels never quite figured out why the United States didn't have a serious worker revolt, but they suspected that the United States' lack of a feudal experience and early adoption of political democracy for large sections of society prevented the development of class consciousness. Think about it: although colonial America maintained property requirements for voting, they were low enough that all free, white males could aspire to political participation even before independence. By the 1820s, Jacksonian democratic ideals essentially enfranchised free white men across the country. That meant that despite the rhetoric of the pre-Revolutionary years that England sought to turn colonists into political slaves, most white Americans had no experience of being downtrodden without some hope of social and economic mobility.

Others also argued against the development of class-based politics in the United States. As early as 1867, E. L. Godkin argued that workers were not the same in America as they were in Europe where laborers were members of an order in society that was arrayed in conflict with higher economic classes. Eric Foner argued that In the United States, workers simply wanted better wages or working conditions. The social line between capital and labor was faintly drawn, so that successful laborers could hope to become employers themselves.

David Montgomery argues that while American workers had intense conflicts with employers, they didn't wrap those conflicts in class consciousness. Even when a revolutionary ideology did appear, it focused on control of the work place rather than political change. Despite this, in the first fifteen years of the 20th century, Americans elected more socialists than the English did. So despite the distance between worker objectives and politicos, socialists were successful in elections. One significant issue was that American capitalism simply worked better for workers, who had better wages, housing, and diet than their European counterparts. Americans also enjoyed more social and geographic mobility, which meant they could go West and fame if they grew weary of factory work and city life. This extension of Turner's frontier thesis rendered socialism mostly irrelevant in American politics.

The Blog

Now that I've passed my dissertation defense and sent my final draft to the Graduate School via ProQuest, I'm finally feeling up to blogging again. Many of the posts will deal with the challenge of finding a full-time gig as a newly-minted PhD, with my experiences teaching online and classroom courses as an adjunct, and other geeky academic stuff. I've also unearthed all of the notes I took as a student at UA, both in classes I took and those I TA'd, so I expect a lot of that stuff will make it onto the blog. The first sets will likely be notes from one of my comprehensive exams. I also expect to look closer at current events and military history more generally as I get my feet back under me.

Chaplains and Killing Non-combatants

I'm increasingly interested in the roles of chaplains in Vietnam. Not only do they seem to play an important role in reporting atrocities during the war, but responses to them by soldier are quite visceral. Some turned to chaplains like Fr. Watters, who died ministering to wounded soldiers on the battlefield at Dak To, for comfort, while others decried the bellicosity of chaplains for volunteering to man the door guns of helicopters. In my dissertation, the most prominent chaplains were Captains Cresswell and Davis. Cresswell encouraged Hugh Thompson to report civilian deaths at My Lai, and reported them to his own superior, Americal Division Chaplain Colonel Francis R. Lewis. While Cresswell and Lewis were criticized for not reporting My Lai outside the Americal Division, Fr. Davis seems to have convinced three soldiers to testify against a senior NCO in the murders of three Vietnamese farmers.

Chaplains in Vietnam represented a wide range of attitudes on the war and the killing of noncombatants. Joanna Bourke's An Intimate History of Killing cites an 1960s study of their attitudes to show that soldiers could not reliably look to them for guidance when it came to the treatment of Vietnamese civilians. Seventy-three chaplains took part in the study, and sixty-nine of them argued against killing noncombatants. That seems like a solid stance against civilian deaths, but four were willing to accept justifications offered by commanding officers for killing noncombatants, and another was willing to accept it it were a military necessity. When it came to reporting atrocities, seven said they would only complain to the commanding officer of the soldiers involved. Another forty-six indicated that they would only report atrocities within the confines of the Chaplain's Branch. What that means is that 72% would likely only report potential war crimes within the immediate chain of command.

Beyond the issue of killing noncombatants, 42% of the chaplains indicated that they would accept a commanding officer's decision not to accept surrenders without complaint. 90% of those in the study expressed only minor ethical qualms about violations of the laws of war. Only 15% of the chaplains asserted that they would advise soldiers to disobey illegal or immoral orders.

This leaves some obvious issues. If chaplains were not willing to vigorously report atrocities, how could the average soldier be expected to do so? If chaplains were unwilling to advise troops about how to deal with immoral or illegal orders, how were soldiers supposed to have the courage to do so? Even, Fr. Davis, who conducted courses on combat morality for the 2/503rd saw this as a confusing area for the men under his pastoral care. What chance did soldiers have to fulfill their legal and moral obligations regarding war crimes in this environment?

On Conscientious Objection and the ACA

I don't often post items directly related to current politics on my blog - those I save for Facebook friends, and occasional items on Twitter. Although I've not blogged much as I got deeper into writing my dissertation, my intent is for this place to remain related primarily to historical and academic interests. Today I'm breaking that rule because Annalee Flower Horne has a great post about the Hobby Lobby/Affordable Care Act case currently before the Supreme Court of the United States as it relates to actual Conscientious Objection. Rather than focusing on whether a corporation has enough personhood to have religious views, Annalee focuses on the concept of Objection. Take some time to go read it, it is definitely worth the effort.

This very peripherally relates to my dissertation, which includes a focus on morality and combat during the Vietnam War. One of the key figures in the media chapter - which I'm revising again over the next two days - is James Henry, a medic who happened to witness multiple atrocities. Unlike most other soldiers in Vietnam who witnessed atrocities, Henry repeatedly tried to report the war crimes he saw. Having been warned to keep quiet about it for his own personal safety while still in country, he tried first to report murders and rapes by members of his unit to a Staff Judge Advocate and an agent of the Criminal Investigation Division on his return to the United States. The lawyer told him to wait until his enlistment was up because the Army had so much power to make himself miserable. The CID man got aggressive with Henry asking him what he was trying to pull?

Wisely taking the advice of the SJA, Henry waited until he was out of the service and wrote to his Congressman to report the atrocities he saw in Vietnam while under the command of Captain Donald Reh. After being ignored, he did an interview with Scanlan's Magazine, gave a press conference at the Los Angeles Press Club, and joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He holds the distinction of being the only veteran to testify at the Winter Soldier Investigations in January 1971 to have his claims substantiated by the Army. That happened not because the other members of VVAW were liars (a few were), but because he chose to seek justice on both the individual and institutional levels. Unlike the others, Henry gave CID names, dates, and locations for the atrocities he witnessed.

Why am I bringing him into this discussion? In addition to being the only soldier at WSI to have his claims of war crimes verified by the Army, he also happened to be the only soldier to earn a status as a conscientious objector without providing a religious justification. He eventually agreed to enlist as a combat medic to avoid prosecution by the local U.S. Attorney. While in Vietnam he earned a Bronze Star for working hard to save his comrades while under fire. Despite being described as a "mild hippie" by his platoon commander, the other members of his platoon recall that from the beginning he moved like a veteran in field, especially under fire.

Like the examples Annalee provides, James Henry was Conscientious Objector who still did everything required of him to fulfill the obligations of citizenship. Think about it - he showed that you can maintain your moral and ethical beliefs, but that you have to sacrifice to do so. Otherwise, they aren't worth very much.

On Writing Conclusions

The three most challenging  parts of writing my dissertation have definitely been the My Lai chapter (revised five times now), the Introduction, and starting on the Conclusion. I've discussed the problems with the My Lai chapter at length already, but before today I only mentioned the challenges of writing an introduction and conclusion on Twitter and Facebook. The intro was unexpectedly difficult because I assumed that in most respects it was really just another round of revisions of my prospectus. That turned out to be wrong due to the new direction my evidence forced my to take with my analysis, so while I was able to repurpose significant portions of the prospectus, I ended up doing a lot of new writing, and revisiting the historiography on My Lai and atrocities in Vietnam.

Conclusions are different animals. Like everyone else, I've written a short conclusions to papers, conference presentations, and journal articles, but since is my first book-length project, I've been unsure about how to approach this important element in the dissertation. After the long slog through graduate school, I know how important the introduction and conclusion are in helping readers understand what the whole point of the book is, but how to pull that off is another issue entirely. That meant a bit of quick research into how to write a conclusion - I know this applies to many graduate students, but by temperament I usually try to figure things out for myself before asking for help, and  enjoy doing research to solve problems.

My first stops were Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Jules Benjamin's A Student's Guide to History, and Mary Lynn Rampolla's A Pocket Guide to Writing in History. I have a long personal history with these three books - my first encounter with Turabian was as a junior in high school, while I got the others in graduate school to help out my own students. Predictably, Benjamin and Rampolla were no help. Indeed, Rampolla was counter-productive since she indicates that no new ideas, arguments or information should appear in a conclusion. While that's fine for an essay, based on the hundreds of academic works I've read at this point, it isn't accurate for books. Since I had already planned to use some very interesting sources that didn't work with the body of my dissertation, but speak to the overall theme that how soldiers understood the issue of atrocities in Vietnam was a complex and varied greatly based on their own background, goals, and experiences, Rampolla's advice almost started a bit of a panic attack.

Turabian was more helpful, likely because her audience is different. Benjamin and Rampolla are oriented toward helping undergraduates figure out how to write and do research for history courses, not write theses or dissertations. Luckily, Turabian provides a process for writing a conclusion that was familiar once I saw it laid out, though the initial suggestion sounded a bit snarky:

If you have no better plan, build your conclusion around the elements of your introduction, in reverse order.

Having said that she provides some useful advice in two basic points:

1. Restate your claim more fully, and with more specificity than in the introduction.
2. Point out new significance, practical applications, or new research.

I'm not sure my research has practical applications since the All Volunteer Force is increasingly less representative of the rest of American society than the conscript and draft-motivated armies of the 20th century. Similarly, while the Army noted that there was no consistent official way for soldiers to report atrocities without going through their immediate change of command as late as 1973 (and I'm not sure that it ever implemented that), the on-going debate about taking the process of investigating and court-martialing soldiers for sexual assault away from the chain of command. In some respects these are related issues. How could soldiers be expected to report atrocities through the chain of command when the officers above them often engaged in or ignored atrocities? Similarly, how can the DoD expect victims of sexual assault to report the crimes to the person who committed or enabled those assaults?

There is a lot of room for further research in the area of how American soldiers understood and reacted to atrocities in Vietnam. As Nick Turse put it in Kill Anything that Moves, this entire subject has taken on the status of forbidden or forgotten knowledge since the fall of Saigon in 1975. Beyond that, I'm only dealing with U.S. Army troops who witnessed or reported atrocities. There's remaining work to be done with other branches of services, especially the Marine Corps.  There's also the issue of soldiers who didn't witness atrocities - how did they understand the issue? Since Army chaplains played important roles in two of my chapters, there's also more work to be done to understand their position within the Army, how soldiers viewed them, and how that played into reporting of atrocities.

This still leaves out the issue of additional material. Luckily, a member of my committee provided good direction on that. He argued that as long as the new items fit in a way that accentuated the main argument of the dissertation, then there was no reason not to add it into the conclusion. However, if the materials were more in the nature of interesting anecdotes that don't really add anything, save the stuff for another project. That's something I can manage, and I think the items (mostly from oral histories) will lend themselves well to the overall conclusion.

The next order of business: write the dang conclusion, and start what I hope is the final round of pre-defense revisions.

Alabama Law Review Symposium on New York Times vs. Sullivan

The Alabama Law Review will host a symposium to mark the 50^th anniversary of New York Times vs. Sullivan on February 28 and would like to invite students and faculty to attend.

New York Times vs. Sullivan is one of the most important cases in the history of First Amendment jurisprudence. Famously described by a noted First Amendment scholar at the time as “an occasion for dancing in the streets,” the decision in New York Times vs. Sullivan constitutionalized the law of libel, recognizing a dramatic breadth of freedom to criticize public officials for their conduct; in so doing, it had a significant impact on both freedom of speech and freedom of the press, one that has been debated ever since.

As a historical matter, moreover, the case was intimately connected to the history of the civil rights movement, particularly within the state of Alabama.

Symposium speakers include some of the nation’s foremost experts on both the history and law concerning New York Times vs. Sullivan.

They include Professor David A. Anderson, University of Texas School of Law; Judge U.W. Clemon, Northern District of Alabama; Professor RonNell Andersen Jones, BYU Law School; Judge Robert Sack, Second Circuit Court of Appeals; Professor Chris Schmidt, ITT Chicago-Kent College of Law; Professor Mark Tushnet, Harvard Law School; and Professor Sonya West, The University of Georgia School of Law.

We will need to have a headcount by February 21 for planning purposes. Please let me know if you have any interest in attending or inviting your students. Attached you will find a schedule of the day’s events, and you may also share this link for registration:http://www.law.ua.edu/register

100 Years to WWI: Sarajevo to Versailles

“100 Years to WWI: Sarajevo to Versailles”  is a brand new four week summer program recreating the path of the First World War by traveling through Vienna,  Berlin, Brussels, Lille, Reims, and ending in Paris.  Through visits to four battlefields and 25 plus museums and historical sites, participants in the program will get a glimpse of the lasting repercussions and begin to understand the magnitude of the events that transpired 100 years ago. Participants will also have the once in a lifetime opportunity to be there as Europe commemorates these historical events.

The four week program, begins on June 8^th in Vienna, Austria, and ends on July 3^rd in Paris, France. The program fee of $6,848 includes tuition, accommodation for 25 nights, 25 breakfasts, unlimited local transportation in each city, transportation between cities, entry to 25+ museums and historical sites as well as the four guided battlefield tours and welcome/farewell dinners. The program will offer six semester credits in History, Art History, Government and Global Affairs. We will also be seeking credits in Economics and German. Undergraduate and graduate students with at least a 2.25 GPA are eligible to apply. The application deadline is March 7^th.

Professor Marion Deshmukh,  the Robert T Hawkes Professor of History at George Mason, will be leading the program. Dr. Deshmukh teaches courses in History and  Art History with a focus on Europe, specifically Austria and Germany. Please click on her name to learn more about the specific courses she teaches and her numerous publications.

More info at: WWI Summer 2014. Online application: apply.

Revising My Lai

For the folks who follow my twitter feed, it's no secret that I'm finding writing my dissertation a far greater challenge than I imagined. This experience puts me in awe of the two most prolific historians I know - Howard Jones and James Olson. That they can crank out high-quality scholarship at a quick pace while shouldering a normal teaching load is simply amazing. Since this is my second career, it won't be near as long as theirs, so I can't pretend to reach their output. In fact, I'm hoping to achieve just ten or fifteen percent of their book totals - two or three books will be enough for me, and I don't dare hope to write anything nearly as popular as Amistad.

Writing is now a chore. Getting the initial ideas on paper was not the hard part. The problem is definitely revising this mess into something coherent in which the evidence I have fits a logical argument that adds something to our understanding of the Vietnam War, veterans, and the domestic struggle over how we fought the war. When I step back from the actual writing and revision, it is clear that the problem is largely that I had one conception of what my dissertation would be about, but have had to change directions two or three times. My initial focus was on the atrocities themselves and the menalite of the soldiers who committed them. That changed after reading Nick Turse's dissertation, which is now the book Kill Anything that Moves. There was little need for me to add another three hundred or so pages on top of his 1,000 page tome.

Still fascinated with Vietnam and with the topic of atrocities, I next turned to the soldiers who did not commit atrocities. This made a lot of sense given that Turse gives the impression that the soldiers who didn't commit atrocities were a tiny minority. He didn't actually write that, but the tone of his dissertation (I haven't yet had time to read his book) and his very broad definition of atrocity makes it feel that way. It turns out that the evidence just doesn't support the idea that most soldiers in Vietnam committed atrocities. Indeed, at My Lai less than twenty members of Charlie Company raped or killed noncombatants (that number leaves out the men who shot livestock, burned huts, or destroyed wells). That leaves a much broader group of people who passively or actively avoided participating in atrocities, the ones who saw things and never reported them, and even the folks who variously intervened, protested, or reported the war crimes they saw.

I'm sure that everyone reading this (few though you are) can see a huge problem for figuring out why these non-participants did not commit atrocities. How do you prove a negative? What evidence is there for what they were thinking? How do you find any evidence that exists? It took me six months of fruitless writing to figure out that it's almost impossible because most of it is not preserved in archives in a way that is easy to ferret out. That's especially true when you look at the evidence I've gathered: oral histories, courts-martial documents, CID investigations, letters, newspaper articles, congressional (and other) testimony. Most of the evidence I have relates more to why the people who got caught up in some events didn't join in, why they reported it, why they wrote to members of Congress, why they contacted the media, and why they joined the antiwar movement, and who those things relate to atrocities. How do you develop an analytical framework for that, and what does it have to do with My Lai?

So here's what I came up with: dates and methods of reporting are important, as is how those things relate to when My Lai became public. Despite the common perception, the U.S. media largely avoided reporting about American atrocities in My Lai until after it became public in November 1969. The exceptions are few, but vivid - Morley Safer reporting the burning of Cam Ne in 1965 and the Green Beret case that became public right before My Lai did. There's a four-year gap between those events. The big change was the high number of American casualties and the change in American reporting of the war after the Tet Offensive in February and March of 1968. It turns out how soldiers and veterans reported atrocities (if they did) relates to that pattern. Before November 1969 (and definitely before February 1968) soldiers who reported atrocities generally did so within the normal chain of command. After that, their reporting of atrocities seems to follow their levels of disenchantment. Guys who still believed in the war or the military hierarchy, reported war crimes through the chain of command. Those who didn't want the Army damaged by their reports, but didn't believe in their chain of command sought out Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor, or Chaiman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff William Westmorland. If they were a little more disenchanted they contacted their members of Congress. Soldiers and veterans who still believed in the American system, but not the Army or the government tended to report war crimes to the media. The really disenchanted soldiers, who had lost faith in the whole system and wanted to mobilize the public joined the antiwar movement - they joined VVAW or worked with CCI.

It all hinges around a kind of triad of issues - Tet, My Lai, and Vietnamization. That's what I'm trying to fix this My Lai chapter to deal with, and keep getting stuck on providing interesting, but unnecessary details about the massacre itself. I think I may just have to scrap what I have a rewrite it from scratch because the editing process just isn't producing results.

Quick and Dirty American Revolution Book List

I recently received a question on twitter about quality non-fiction on the American Revolution. Sadly, I only have about five or six works on the subject on my shelves. That pretty amazing, but I do have some good lists of material largely culled from sample PhD comps lists. The first half of U.S. History is not one of my fields (Modern U.S., Modern Europe, Military and Naval, and Asia), but it's important to have more than a passing familiarity when you teach as an adjunct. So here goes the list. Hopefully it will be helpful. If readers have other complementary suggestions, they are welcome (and will go on the list). There are a large number of great books that are not included here, but probably should be.

Colonial and General

• Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition
• Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom:  The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia 
• Allen Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves:  The Development of Southern Cultures in Chesapeake, 1680-1800
• Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black:  American Attitudes toward the Negro,1550-1812
• Gary Nash, Red, White, and Black:  The Peoples of Early America
• David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment:  Popular Religious Belief in Early New England
• Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament:  Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and Self in Early America
• Edmund Morgan, Visible Saints
• David Hackett Fisher, Albion’s Seed
• George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards
• Alfred Crosby, Columbian Exchange
• Perry Miller, Errand in the Wilderness
• Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter
• Susan Parrish, American Curiosity
• Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country
• William Cronon, Changes in the Land:  Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
• James Axtell, Beyond 1492
• Stephen Foster, The Long Argument
• Michael Winship, Seers of God
• Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith:  Christianizing the American People
• Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross
• Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia
• Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives
• David Hall, Worlds of Wonder
• Jill Lepore, The Name of War
• Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women
• Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone
• Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom:  The Ordeal of Colonial
• Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint   
• Jeffrey Young, Domesticating Slavery
• Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, Anxious Patriarchs
• Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America
• John Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North

Revolution

• Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution           
• Bernard Bailyn,  The Origins of American Politics
• Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America
• Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible
• Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson
• Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution
• Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War:  The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783
• Merrill Jensen, The Founding of the Nation 
• Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum:  The Intellectual Origins of the
• Constitution
• Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: The Foundations of British Abolitionism
• Jack Rakove, Original Meanings
• Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic
• Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic
• Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity
• Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash
• David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes
• John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement
• Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic.
• Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution
• Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity 
• David Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters
• Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic:  Political Economy in Jeffersonian America 
• George R. Taylor, The Transportation Revolution
• Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution

More Colonial North American Books are here: http://home.uchicago.edu/~jacevedo/colonialAmericareadinglist.html

Colonial and American Revolution Military History

• Hagan, Kenneth. This People's Navy. (1990)
• Anderson, Fred. A People's Army. (1984)
• Higginbotham, Don. The War for American Independence. (1971)
• Mackesy, Piers. The War for America, 1775-1783. (1964)
• Alan Taylor, American Colonies
• Robert Middlekauf, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution 1763-1789
• Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters:  The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800
• Richard White, The Middle Ground:  Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region 1650-1815
• Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense, A Military History of the United States
• Anderson, Fred. The Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2000.
• Bidwell, Shelford and Dominick Graham, Firepower: The British Army Weapons and Theories of War, 1904-1945. New York: Pen and Sword, 2005.
• Bodle, Wayne. The Valley Forge Winter: Civilians and Soldiers in War. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.
• Brumwell, Stephen. Redcoats: The British Soldier and the War in the Americas, 1755-1763. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Carp, E. Wayne. To Starve the Army at Pleasure: Continental Army Administration and American Political Culture, 1775-1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
• Chet, Guy. Conquering the American Wilderness: The Triumph of European Warfare in the Colonial Northeast. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2003.
• Cobb, Richard. The People's Armies: the Armées Révolutionnaires, Instrument of the Terror in the Departments, April 1793 to Floreal Year II. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
• Corvisier, André. Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494-1789. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.
• Cox, Caroline. A Proper Sense of Honor: Service and Sacrifice in George Washington's Army. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
• Cress, Lawrence. Citizens in Arms: The Army and the Militia in American Society to the War of 1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.
• Cunliffe, Marcus. Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America 1775-1865. Rev. ed. New York: Free Press, 1974.
• Grenier, John. The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607-1814. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Higginbotham, Don. War and Society in Revolutionary America: The Wider Dimensions of Conflict. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.
• Knouff, Gregory T. The Soldiers’ Revolution: Pennsylvanians in Arms and the Forging of Early American Identity. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.
• Lee, Wayne E. Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina: The Culture of Violence in Riot and War. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001.
• Martin, James Kirby and Mark Edward Lender. A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763-1789. Arlington Heights, IL: H. Davidson, 1982.
• Mayer, Holly. Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community during the American Revolution. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003.
• McDonnell, Michael A. The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
• Melvoin, Richard I. New England Outpost: War and Society in Colonial Deerfield. New York: Norton, 1989.
• Neimeyer, Charles. America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army. New York: New York University Press, 1997.
• Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750- 1800. New York: Cornell University Press, 1996.
• Piecuch, Jim. Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775-1782. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008.
• Resch, John and Walter Sargent, eds. War & Society in the American Revolution: Mobilization and Home Fronts. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007.
• Rosswurm, Steven. Arms, Country, and Class: The Philadelphia Militia and "Lower Sort" During the American Revolution, 1775-1783. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987.
• Silver, Peter. Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America. New York: Norton, 2008.
• Ward, Matthew C. Breaking the Backcountry: Seven Years’ War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754- 1765. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003.
• Zelner, Kyle F. A Rabble in Arms: Massachusetts Towns and Militiamen during King Philip's War. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

Summersell Center for the Study of the South Events

Monday, January 27, at 6 pm, Richard Bell, Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, will deliver a lecture on his work about free blacks kidnapped into slavery, entitled "On the Road to the Dismal Gulf: Free Blacks' Journey into Slavery." The lecture will be held in Lloyd Hall room 38. Particularly if you're teaching a relevant upper-level course, please bribe your students accordingly. A flyer for the event is attached.


Monday, February 17, Jennifer Jensen Wallach, Associate Professor at the University of North Texas and a foodways scholar, will be presenting, "'Clean, fresh beef':  Black Progressive Food Reformers and the Case Study of the Tuskegee Institute." We will host this event in the Summersell Room in the evening, and as with the event with Natalie Ring from this past spring, it will be a lecture accompanied by dinner and conversation, so I will be sending around a request for RSVPs in a few weeks to be sure I'll have enough food for everyone. 

Pre-doctoral fellowships in Security Studies at Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law

The Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin will offer up to two pre-doctoral fellowships in security studies for the 2014-2015 academic year. The Strauss Center will consider advanced PhD student applicants working on a broad range of topics related to issues of national and international security, law, and diplomacy. The nine-month fellowship will last from September 2014 to May 2015 and includes a stipend of $24,000 and one round-trip airline ticket. 

Pre-doctoral fellows are encouraged to present their research within and outside the Center, participate in the research activities of the Center, attend and take an active role in seminars and conferences, engage with younger scholars, and immerse themselves in the greater University community during their appointment.

The deadline for application entry is February 15, 2014.

For more information on the 2014-2015 pre-doctoral fellowship, please visit
https://strausscenter.org/strauss-news/security-studies-pre-doctoral-fellowship-2014-2015.html

For the fellowship application form, please visit
https://strausscenter.org/images/Predoc%20Application%20Form.pdf

Please email Andrew Ehrhardt (andrewehrhardt@austin.utexas.edu) with any specific questions concerning the fellowship.

Andrew Ehrhardt
Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law
University of Texas at Austin
2300 Red River Street, Stop E2700
Austin, TX 78712
P: 512.471.6267
F: 512.471.6961
andrewehrhardt@austin.utexas.edu
www.strausscenter.orgEmail: andrewehrhardt@austin.utexas.eduVisit the website at http://strausscenter.org/strauss-news/security-studies-pre-doctoral-fellowship-2014-2015.html

Samuel H. Kress Foundation Graduate Fellowships

SAMUEL H. KRESS FOUNDATION - TWO SHORT-TERM GRADUATE FELLOWSHIPS (2014) 

The Medici Grand Ducal Archive (Mediceo del Principato), comprising over four million letters dating between 1537-1743, provides the most complete record of any princely regime in early modern Italy as well as an extraordinarily rich historical reservoir of European history. This collection offers an incomparable panorama of human history, expressed through the words of the people most immediately involved, opening new windows onto the political, diplomatic, gastronomic, economic, artistic, scientific, military and medical culture of early modern Tuscany and Europe. 

The Medici Archive Project (MAP) wishes to provide graduate and doctoral students from diverse disciplines with the opportunity to have exposure to original source materials and training in their use. For this reason MAP is offering five short-term fellowships sponsored by the SAMUEL H. KRESS FOUNDATION for graduate students in art history or rlated field who are in the early stages of their dissertation work. The KRESS fellowships have been developed to enable students working on their dissertations to conduct primary research using the Mediceo del Principato and other collections housed in the Archivio di Stato in Florence. 

This scholarly residence will be of considerable benefit in helping students to gain the necessary skills, experience and confidence to continue independent academic research in the later stages of their graduate trajectory. While undertaking primary research for their dissertation in the Florentine state archives, the Fellows will benefit from the supervision of the MAP Staff, academics drawn from a variety of disciplines who are experts in archival research, paleography and the digital humanities. The Fellows will also have the opportunity to expand their academic networks through contact with the many international scholars who regularly visit and collaborate with MAP. Finally, Fellows will be enrolled in the annual MAP Archival Studies Seminar. 

The fellowships last for an uninterrupted period of two-and-a-half months, taking place at any point between 1 March 2014 and 15 December 2014. The KRESS Fellows will undertake their dissertation research on-site in the Archivio di Stato. 

Candidates must be enrolled in graduate programs at United States universities, and working on dissertation topics that treat any aspect of Italian Renaissance or Baroque art history; Tuscan art history topics will be given preference. 
The stipend is $5,000 plus an allowance for travel expenses for the spring/summer term (2 - 2 1/2 months); 8500 plus an allowance for travel expenses for the fall semester (3 - 3 1/2 months). 

To apply for this fellowship, the following material should be sent electronically to Elena Brizio (ebrizio@medici.org): 

1. A copy of the candidate’s dissertation proposal (or a final draft). 
2. A short essay (two pages maximum) on how a candidate’s topic will benefit from archival research. 
3. A complete and up-to-date curriculum vitae. 
4. The name and email address of one scholar, preferably the candidate’s supervisor, who can comment on the applicant’s qualifications and the merits of the research proposal (please do not include letters of recommendation with the application). 

The application deadline is: 15 February 2014. 

Please note: 

1. All materials submitted by the applicant should be in English. 
2. All materials should be in a single .pdf file. 
3. Please do not include supplementary material (publications, papers, etc.). 

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Dr. Elena Brizio 
(ebrizio@medici.org) 


Elena Brizio 
The Medici Archive Project 
Via di Pian dei Giullari, 66 
50125 Firenze - Italy 
+39 055 240221
Email: ebrizio@medici.org; info@medici.org
Visit the website at http://www.medici.org