National WWII Museum exterior Campaigns of Courage

The Summer Seminar in Military History

June 11 - June 30, 2023
A Partnered Program between the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy and the Society for Military History

Overview

The National WWII Museum and The Society for Military History will be co-hosting “The Summer Seminar in Military History” from June 11 – June 30 2023. The purpose of this three-week, in-residence experience is to grow and strengthen the study of military history by introducing fellows to the profession’s fundamental concepts and questions, its contemporary concerns and approaches, and its leading scholars.

About the Seminar

Application deadline: February 15, 2023

The National World War II Museum and The Society for Military History will be co-hosting “The Summer Seminar in Military History” from June 11 – June 30 2023. The purpose of this three-week, in-residence experience is to grow and strengthen the study of military history by introducing fellows to the profession’s fundamental concepts and questions, its contemporary concerns and approaches, and its leading scholars.

The program consists of a series of content and pedagogical seminars led by expert faculty and guest lecturers, as well as museum tours and battlefield staff rides. Lodging, meals, and a stipend are provided.

Apply Now

Summer Seminar in Military History Goals

  1. Fellows master the pedagogical techniques required to develop and teach survey courses and more focused course offerings in military history.
  2. Fellows gain the methodological and historiographical knowledge that will prepare them to make scholarly contributions to the field.
  3. Fellows are exposed to the historiography that has shaped the development and directions of military history.
  4. Fellows are introduced to the wealth of resources available in the field and offered advice on how to use them in their teaching and scholarship.     
  5. Fellows use Museum resources and staff to learn more about interpreting military history for the general public.
  6. Leading military historians share their knowledge with fellows and a broader audience through public presentations at the Institute.
  7. Fellows grow personally and professionally by developing networks among and across chronological and topical fields of study.


Applicants will be selected based upon their potential contributions to the field of military history and upon the contribution the program can make to their future teaching and research. Recent PhDs, advanced graduate students who have completed all requirements for their doctorate other than submission of the dissertation (ABD), and senior faculty members interested in working in military history but without a strong background in the field are eligible to apply.

For more information, please contact the Seminar Program Director, Dr. Bill Allison, at billallison@georgiasouthern.edu or the Principal Associate Director, Dr. Steph Hinnershitz at stephanie.hinnershitz@nationalww2museum.org.

Schedule

(Subject to Change)

Week 1 – Pre-Twentieth Century

Central Learning Objectives – Week 1

  1. Define “military history” from a holistic perspective and become familiar with the field’s fundamental terms, concepts, and questions
  2. Understand how and why societies go to war and how they intend to use military force as an instrument of policy and grand strategy
  3. Assess the differences in how societies mobilize for war—politically, militarily, socially, and economically—& the costs of that mobilization


Core Building Blocks

  1. What is “military history”? How do scholars use key terms and concepts in narrating their stories and in approaching the larger discipline?
  2. Be conversant with the major theorists of war (western and global) and their influence on nations’ professional conduct of war
  3. Appreciate the relationships between modern war and a society’s economic and social mobilization for war
  4. Understand the trends toward the professionalization of nations’ military forces in the modern era
  5. Evaluate the influence of industrialization on modern war


Supporting Building Blocks

  1. Become familiar with the evolution of military thought and theory over time
  2. Comprehend the relationships between military service, citizenship, and identity (both individual and collective)
  3. Understand how societies view differences between professional and citizen soldiers and how military organizations populate their ranks
  4. Appreciate the role and impact of developments in science and technology, particularly in weapons development
  5. Understand the ways in which nationalism, patriotism, and societal values influence war


Week 1

Day 1 – Arrival and Welcome Dinner 

Day 2 – Defining Military History and War

Day 3 – The “Age of Revolutionary and  Limited War”

Day 4 – Napoleonic Warfare

Day 5 – War in the Industrial Age–The American Civil War and Reconstruction 

Day 6 – War in the Industrial Age–Theory and Naval Arms Race

Day 7 – Staff Ride to Chalmette Battlefield

Week 2 – The Age of Global War

Central Learning Objectives – Week 2

  1. Understand war from a global perspective and how different nations and societies conceive of and conduct war in diverse ways
  2. Evaluate the conduct of warfare and the influence of leadership at all levels of war (military and political)
  3. Evaluate the role of the home front on the conduct of war and civilians’ relations with wartime armed forces


Core Building Blocks

  1. Evaluate how civil-military relations in different societies influence the conceptualization and conduct of war at multiple levels
  2. Appreciate the soldier experience in war
  3. Appreciate the ways in which staff rides and battlefield analyses can contribute to a deeper understanding of military history
  4. Assess the ways in which identity (including class, race, gender, ethnicity, and religion) have influenced the ways in which societies has mobilized manpower and popular opinion and conceptualized their enemies
  5. Appreciate the moral and ethical issues related to war’s conduct
  6. Understand and appreciate the importance of interpreting military history for a public audience at museums and in other spaces


Supporting Building Blocks

  1. Consider the similarities and differences among war, genocide, and mass political violence
  2. Become familiar with arguments on cultural “ways of war”
  3. Understand how doctrine is influenced by organizational and institutional peculiarities of a nation’s armed forces
  4. Consider the ways in which ideology has had an impact on modern war
  5. Appreciate the value of veterans’ memoirs in understanding war as a human phenomenon


Week 2

Day 8 – Study Day

Day 9 – The First World War and its Aftermath

Day 10 – World War II–Causes, Alliances, and Strategies

Day 11 – World War II–A Global War

Day 12 – World War II–Battle Analysis and the Experience of War

Day 13 – Public History at The National WWII Museum

Day 14 – Study Day

Week 3 – The Post-World War II Era

Central Learning Objectives – Week 3

  1. Evaluate how and why wars end—militarily, politically, and diplomatically—and how societies and their armed forces define “victory” and “defeat” during war and in its aftermath
  2. Understand the changing nature of military engagements in the post-WWII, Cold War, and post-Cold War eras
  3. Appraise the similarities and differences among military history and memorialization, myth, and memory
  4. Understand how societies and their military institutions deal with veterans’ issues, both during and after wars


Core Building Blocks

  1. Consider how societies and their armed forces explain the outcomes of wars and how those explanations shape nations and militaries after wars end
  2. Examine the veteran experience and soldiers’ reintegration into society during and after war
  3. Understand the experiences of civilians caught in the path of war
  4. Appreciate the difficulties of nation-building in times of war
  5. Comprehend the value (and potential limitations) of oral histories in comparison to “official” histories of war


Supporting Building Blocks

  1. Appreciate the ways in which members of society dissent against war and the political and military impact of that dissent
  2. Evaluate the effects of war on social dislocation, migration, and refugee communities
  3. Appreciate class issues in relation to social mobilization, recruiting, and military service in times of war
  4. Evaluate the role that antiwar and peace movements play in policymakers’ wartime decision-making processes
  5. Consider the environmental issues of war


Week 3

Day 15 – Dinner and a Movie

Day 16 – The Cold War–A Grand Strategic Overview

Day 17 – The Age of Limited War–Vietnam

Day 18 – Vietnam and Beyond

Day 19 – The Changing Nature of the Military in “Modern War”

Day 20 – The Social and Cultural Components of War

Day 21 – Out-processing

Program Directors & Visiting Scholars

Summer Seminar Program Director

Dr. Bill Allison

Dr. Bill Allison is a scholar of American military history, specifically the Vietnam War. He is Professor of History at Georgia Southern University, joining the faculty there as Chair of the Department of History in 2008. During the 2002–2003 academic year, he was Visiting Professor in the Department of Strategy and International Security at the USAF Air War College and later served as Distinguished Professor of Military History at the USAF School for Advanced Air and Space Studies from 2010 to 2011. He also served two years as the General Harold K. Johnson Visiting Chair in Military History at the US Army War College (2012–2014).

He is author of The Gulf War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), My Lai: An American Atrocity in the Vietnam War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), Military Justice in Vietnam: The Rule of Law in an American War (University Press of Kansas, 2007), and American Diplomats in Russia: Case Studies in Orphan Diplomacy, 1917-1919 (Praeger, 1997), among others. He is a former Trustee and Vice President of the Society for Military History and has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Military History as well as editor for Routledge’s Critical Moments in American History series. He also co-hosts with Professor Brian Feltman of Georgia Southern University the podcast Military Historians are People, Too! Born and raised in Texas, he lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Summer Seminar Co-Director

Dr. Steph Hinnershitz

Dr. Steph Hinnershitz joined the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy as a Historian in June 2021. She received her PhD in American History in 2013 from the University of Maryland and specializes in the history of the Home Front during World War II. Her most recent book, Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor during World War II, was recently published with the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Program Associate Director

Dr. Beth Bailey

Dr. Beth Bailey is Foundation Distinguished Professor, director of the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies, and a member of the history department at the University of Kansas. She is the author/co-author or editor/co-editor of 12 books, including An Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era; America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force; Managing Sex in the U.S. Military; and Beyond Pearl Harbor: A Pacific History. Professor Bailey was elected to the Society of American Historians in 2017, and in 2022 received the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the Society for Military History.

Program Associate Director

Dr. Robert Citino

Dr. Robert Citino is the Samuel Zemurray Stone Senior Historian in the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy. Dr. Citino is an award-winning military historian and scholar who has published 10 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; and numerous articles covering World War II and 20th-century military history. He speaks widely and contributes regularly to general readership magazines such as World War II. Dr. Citino enjoys close ties with the US military establishment, and taught one year at the US Military Academy at West Point and two years at the US Army War College.

Program Associate Director

Dr. Lorien Foote

Dr. Lorien Foote is the Patricia & Bookman Peters Professor in History at Texas A&M University. She is the author of four books, editor of three volumes, creator of a digital history project, and writer of numerous articles and essays on the military, cultural, and intellectual history of the American Civil War. In 2022, she was awarded the Organization of American Historians’ Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award for the most original book in the field.

Visiting Scholar

Dr. Vanya Eftimova Bellinger

Dr. Vanya Eftimova Bellinger is the author of Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War (Oxford University Press USA, 2015). She earned a PhD in history at King’s College, London. Bellinger is the winner of the 2016 Society for Military History Moncado Prize for her article “The Other Clausewitz: Findings from the Newly Discovered Correspondence between Marie and Carl von Clausewitz.” Bellinger is the first scholar to work with the newly discovered correspondence between the Clausewitz couple. Before transitioning to academia, Bellinger worked as a journalist and international correspondent for various European outlets.

Visiting Scholar

Dr. David Kieran

Dr. David Kieran is the Col. Richard R. Hallock Distinguished Chair in Military History and Associate Professor of History at Columbus State University. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of five books, including Signature Wounds: The Untold Story of the Military’s Mental Health Crisis (NYU 2019); Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory (Massachusetts, 2014); At War: The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (co-edited with Edwin A. Martini, Rutgers, 2018); and Remote Warfare: New Cultures of Violence (co-edited with Rebecca A. Adelman, Minnesota 2020). He is currently writing a history of organizational change in the post-Vietnam US Army, How the Army Saved Itself: Maxwell R. Thurman and the Army’s Post-Vietnam Metamorphosis (Under contract, University of North Carolina Press).

Visiting Scholar

Dr. Michelle Moyd

Dr. Michelle Moyd is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa, published by Ohio University Press in 2014. Her published work has also appeared in International Labour and Working Class History and Radical History Review. She is currently working on Africa, Africans, and the First World War, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Visiting Scholar

Dr. Michael J. Neufeld

Dr. Michael J. Neufeld is a Senior Curator in the Space History Department of the National Air and Space Museum, where he is responsible for the early rocket collection and for Mercury and Gemini spacecraft. He has written or edited nine books, notably The Rocket and the Reich (1995) and Von Braun (2007). In 2017 Secretary David Skorton gave him the Smithsonian Distinguished Scholar Award, the Institution’s highest research award. Asteroid 329018 Neufeld is named for him.

Visiting Scholar

Dr. David Silbey

Dr. David Silbey is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Cornell University and Director of the Cornell in Washington program. He teaches courses on defense policy and military history and specializes in the industrialized total wars of the 20th century and asymmetric responses (guerrilla warfare, insurgency, and terrorism) to those wars that evolved after 1945. He has written multiple books, including The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War, 1914-1916 (Taylor & Francis, 2005); A War of Empire and Frontier: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902 (Hill & Wang, 2007); and The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China, 1900 (Hill & Wang, 2012). His latest book, The Other Face of Battle: America’s Forgotten Wars and the Experience of Combat, looks at how America struggles in wars other than conventional. Silbey is also the series editor for Cornell University Press’s “Battlegrounds: Cornell Studies in Military History.”

Visiting Scholar

Dr. David R. Stone

Dr. David R. Stone, the William E. Odom Professor of Russian Studies, joined the Strategy and Policy Department of the Naval War College in 2015. He received a BA from Wabash College and a PhD in history from Yale. He previously taught at Kansas State University and Hamilton College. His book Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union (2000) won the Shulman Prize of ASEEES and the Best First Book Prize of the Historical Society. He has also published A Military History of Russia (2006) and The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (2015). He edited The Soviet Union at War, 1941-1945 (2010) and the two-volume The Russian Civil War (2022). He is the author of several dozen articles on Russian military history and foreign policy.

Visiting Scholar

Dr. Harold Tanner

Dr. Harold Tanner, is Professor of History at the University of North Texas specializing in modern China. After graduating from New England College in 1983 and traveling extensively in China in 1984, Tanner earned an MA in East Asian Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London in 1985, a second BA in Modern Chinese from the Beijing Languages Institute in 1987, and his PhD in Modern Chinese History from Columbia University in 1994. His textbook China: A History (Hackett, 2009) has been adopted at more than 50 colleges and universities, including Johnson Community College, Kenyon College, and Brown University. Tanner’s most recent book, Where Chiang Kai-shek Lost China: The Liao-Shen Campaign, 1948 (Indiana University Press, 2015), focuses on the interaction of Chinese Communist and Nationalist forces on the ground in Manchuria and US diplomacy in Washington and Nanjing in one of the key military engagements of the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949). Tanner has done presentations on Chinese political and military history and strategic culture for audiences at the Hoover Institution, the Society for Military History, the US Army’s People’s Liberation Army Conference, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the US Seventh Fleet Naval Reserve, and the Air War College.

Application Form

The Summer Seminar in Military History 2023 Application Form

Name:
Title
Address:
1. Please describe your interest in and experiences with military history. If you have taught or published about military history, please indicate where and on what subjects. How will you contribute to the development of the field of academic military history in the future? Please limit your response to 500 words.
2. Please explain how attending the Summer Seminar in Military History will help advance your study and/or teaching of history. What do you expect to get from this program and how does it fit into your long-term plans? Please limit your response to 500 words.
3. How did you hear about the Summer Seminar in Military History? (Summer Seminar in Military History website, other website, e-mail, brochure, scholarly journal, word of mouth, etc.)

For more information, please contact the Seminar Program Director, Dr. Bill Allison, at billallison@georgiasouthern.edu or the Principal Associate Director, Dr. Steph Hinnershitz at stephanie.hinnershitz@nationalww2museum.org.

Included with this form, you should submit the following materials:

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The deadline for submission of all materials is February 15, 2023.

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Accommodations

The Higgins Hotel & Conference Center

The official Hotel of The National WWII Museum, this stunning art-deco style property offers first-class accommodations, meeting spaces, and dining options providing a sophisticated lodging experience for guests. Named after local Higgins Industries shipbuilder Andrew Higgins, the Hotel pays tribute to a historic time when all Americans came together to secure victory and help change the world.

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