Bill Allison
Georgia Southern University
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. After earning a BA and MA in History at East Texas State University in 1989 and 1991, he completed his Ph.D. in history at Bowling Green State University in 1995. He then taught at the University of Saint Francis (Indiana) before joining the History Department at Weber State University from 1999-2008. During the 2002-2003 academic year, he was Visiting Professor in the Department 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 2010-2011. 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), and is co-author with Janet Valentine and the late Jeffery Grey of American Military History: A Survey from Colonial Times to the Present (Pearson, 2013), among other works. He has presented and lectured at numerous conferences and universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Zurich, the Australian Defence Force Academy, the US Army Heritage and Education Center, and the USAF Air Command & Staff College.
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 has also served on the Department of the Army Historical Advisory Committee and was awarded the Army’s Outstanding Civilian Service Medal in 2014. In addition to recent essays on war remembrance and commemoration, his current research includes book projects on the Tet Offensive and America in 1968. Since 2019, he is the series editor for Modern War Studies at the University Press of Kansas. He also co-hosts with Prof. Brian Feltman of Georgia Southern University of the podcast Military Historians are People, Too! Born and raised in Texas, he lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Undergraduate Syllabi
War & Society
We will look at the various aspects of the war experience across history from the Ancient World to the present day, covering as much of the world as we can. We will look at how civilians, women, soldiers, propaganda, film, public history, memory, and the like, experience war as well as how culture, nationhood, and other factors influence warfare and how war is experienced.
The American War in Vietnam
This course explores one of the most controversial and tragic periods in American history. The war in Vietnam, which for the Vietnamese lasted from World War II through the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975, killed over 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese. The war tore the United States apart in the 1960s and early 1970s with protests and riots. Its cost is still felt in both countries today. We will look at the war through a variety of lenses, including combatant and non-combatant, fiction and personal memoir, film, memory, and others. It is an enormously complicated conflict, one that is is still recent if not raw in American memory. It was a war that the United States lost, that some argue the United States could have won, and that others argue should never have been fought. It is a war clouded with myth and political narratives.
The American Military Experience
graduate Syllabus
Readings in European History (online)
This course focuses on War & Society in the Great War - World War I. We will look at the various aspects of the World War I experience in Europe - civilians, women, soldiers, propaganda, film, public history, memory, and the like. This is a readings course - meaning, we will read. This is not a research course, meaning we will not do research.