War and Society
The history of human conflict matters. Armed struggle is a problem older than recorded history and the study of the past has been shaped by an interest in the challenges of war and peace. Members of this cluster have research and teaching interests in the history of military operations, institutions, and theory, as well as diplomacy and the impact of war on society and culture. The cluster includes award-winning faculty and graduate students whose work spans North America, Europe, and Asia. This cluster aims to break down the long-standing divisions between “old” and “new” military history by fostering an intellectually engaged community of scholars broadly interested in military affairs as an engine of change in human society. Faculty members teach a number of popular undergraduate courses and enthusiastically encourage undergraduate and graduate research. Current and former graduate students have won nationally-competitive research grants, published books with distinguished presses, and hold academic positions in both civilian and military institutions of higher education. We welcome applications from prospective graduate students interested in the study of war, diplomacy, and their impact on societies and cultures in the early modern and modern world.
Undergraduate Courses
HIST 230 US Military History, 1609 to Present
HIST 232 History of American Sea Power
HIST 234 European Military History
HIST 320 History of the Atlantic World
HIST 321 The Age of Revolution in the Atlantic World
HIST 333 The Age of Absolutism
HIST 337 War and European Society in the Twentieth Century
HIST 349 The Vietnam War/The American War
HIST 350 Asia during World War II
HIST 370 Civil War and Reconstruction
HIST 372 Reform, War and Normalcy: The United States 1901-1929
HIST 373 The Great Depression and World War II
HIST 403 History of Nazi Germany
HIST 406 The Era of the French Revolution and Napoleon, 1715-1815
HIST 411 Imperial Russia, 1801-1917
HIST 442 World War II
HIST 443 American Military History to 1901
HIST 444 American Military History Since 1901 (approved as ‘W’ course)
HIST 445 History of Modern Military Thought (approved as ‘W’ course)
HIST 446 Aerospace History
Graduate Courses:
HIST 622 War, Prosperity, and Depression
HIST 630 Sectionalism, Civil War and Reconstruction
HIST 634 Maritime History and Sea Power
HIST 645 Modern Military History
HIST 646 Readings in Military History
Faculty
R.J.Q. Adams is University Distinguished Professor of History and Patricia and Bookman Peters Professor of History and writes and teaches the history of Britain and Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. Long interested in the question of how liberal democracies go about fighting modern ‘total wars’, among his books are Arms and the Wizard, Lloyd George and the Ministry of Munitions, 1915-1916, The Conscription Controversy in Britain, 1900-1918, The Great War: Essays on the Military, Political and Social History of World War I., British Appeasement and the origins of World War II, and Europe: Crisis and Conflict, 1890-1945.
Terry H. Anderson is a Professor and Cornerstone Faculty Fellow. He has authored five books, and co-authored one, A Flying Tiger’s Diary (with pilot Charles Bond) that examined the daily life of the American Volunteer Group in China in 1941-42. He has written articles on the Vietnam War, also examined in his two books on the 1960s, and most recently published Bush’s Wars (2011), which chronicles the Bush administration's response to 9/11--the war on terror, the conflict in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq. Professor Anderson has taught in has taught in Malaysia and Japan. He was a Fulbright professor in China, and the Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History at University College, Dublin.
James C. Bradford received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and has taught at the U.S. Naval Academy and Air War College and in Malaysia. He has lectured at Britannia Royal Naval College, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, the U.S. Military Academy, and the Royal Malaysian Armed Forces Staff College. An Early American and Maritime/Naval historian, his publications include The Papers of John Paul Jones (1986), The International Encyclopedia of Military History (2007), and A Companion to American Military History (2010). A professor, he currently serves as Director of Graduate Studies.
Charles Brooks received his Ph.D. from State University of New York at Buffalo and has taught early U.S. history at Texas A&M since 1989. He is interested in war, popular uprisings and rebellion, and citizen soldiering during the period from the American Revolution to the Civil War. His research spotlights how the concept and practice of citizen soldiering forged civic identity and shaped ideas about allegiance, consent, and federalism in military affairs. His publications include Frontier Settlement and Market Revolution (1996), and a number of articles and essays concerning common soldiering during the American Civil War. He is currently at work on a book about military service in the Confederate armies and the making and unmaking of Confederate nationalism.
Joseph G. Dawson is Professor of History at Texas A&M University and presents courses on U.S. military history and the American Civil War & Reconstruction to both undergraduates and graduate students. His books, articles, and essays deal with aspects of the U.S. Regular Army, American volunteer soldiers, the Marine Corps, and the Navy, as well as civil-military relations during the nineteenth century. His current research addresses the relationships between Confederate President Jefferson Davis and some of his senior generals with more than twenty men who held the office of state governor in the Confederacy, 1861-1865.
Olga Dror (Ph.D. Cornell University, 2003) currently works on cultural transformations that took place in Vietnamese societies between 1965 and 1975. Her main focus is Vietnamese identities on the opposing sides in the conflict. She explores how different texts created during this time shaped and reflected those identities. In particular, she focuses on youth's identities since raising a new generation during a protracted conflict can and indeed played a very important role in the modus vivendi and operandi of the society at that time. This side of her research uncovers a previously completely unexplored layer of the conflict. Her interest in cultural and social aspects of war-time societies goes beyond the war in Vietnam, as is evident in her teaching: in addition to teaching a course on the war in Vietnam, she also introduces students to the multi-faceted Japanese wartime empire, stressing political, social, and cultural developments in Japan and its colonies that allowed the establishment of the empire and to those that led to its demise.
Chester Dunning is a specialist in Russian and early modern European history trained at UC Santa Cruz and Boston College. Dunning's Russia's First Civil War toppled the long-held interpretation of the Time of Troubles (1598-1613) as a social revolution. Dunning wrote the first post-Marxist study of military forces involved in Russia's first civil war (cavalrymen, harquebusiers, and Cossacks) and demonstrated that rebel superiority was due in part to the use of "low-status" gunpowder weapons. Dunning has published articles about the early modern fiscal-military state, French and Irish mercenary soldiers, and King James I's plan to seize north Russia. Dunning brings military and social history into all his classes.
Brian McAllister Linn is the Ralph R. Thomas Professor in Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. He is the author of four books--The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War (1989); Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Pacific, 1902-1940 (1997); The Philippine War, 1899-1902 (2000); The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War (2007)—and over thirty articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings. He has been an Olin Fellow at Yale University, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, and Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellow, and the Harold K. Johnson Visiting Professor at the Army War College. From 2009-2011 he served as president of the Society for Military History. His current project is “Elvis’s Army: Creating the Atomic Soldier, 1946-1965.”
Jason Parker is an Associate Professor of History. He studies both the formal and informal "diplomacy" embedded in the interactions of empires, nations, and peoples. His first book, Brother's Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937-1962 looked at the actions of the US government and of African Americans in the push for independence in the British West Indies. His current project examines the US public-diplomacy campaigns to win the "hearts and minds" of the global South during the Cold War-- and how those campaigns inadvertently contributed to the formation of the Third World as a geopolitical concept and entity. He has also authored articles in Diplomatic History, the Journal of African American History, and International History Review.
Roger Reese is Professor of History at Texas A&M University, where he has taught courses on European, Russian, and Soviet history since 1990. His research specialty is the history of the Soviet Red Army. He has authored numerous articles, one of which was awarded a Moncado Prize from the Society for Military History. He has written four books on the Red Army, most recently Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011). He has edited one work on the Imperial Russian Army. He is currently developing a course on the military history of the USSR.
Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss teaches courses in Atlantic World History, Modern France, and the Caribbean. Her first book, Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique, (2009), focuses on the relationship between Martinique and continental France and the construction of racial, class, gender and national identities during the Napoleonic period and the final decades of chattel slavery in the French Empire. Her second project, “France at the Edges: Life in France’s Atlantic Port Cities, 1760-1830,” explores connections among French Atlantic port cities in the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa and Europe and efforts to maintain French institutions and notions of national identity during the international upheavals of the so-called Age of Empire.
Adam R. Seipp is an Associate Professor of History. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in military history, European history, and the history of war and society. His book “Strangers in the Wild Place: Refugees, Americans, and a German Town, 1945-52” will be published in 2012. He is the author of The Ordeal of Peace: Demobilization and the Urban Experience in Britain and Germany, 1917-21 and a number of articles and book chapters on the First World War, American basing policy during the Cold War, and the refugee crisis of the late 1940s.