Marjorie Galelli
Kansas State University
Marjorie Galelli, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of US Military History at Kansas State University and Co-Director of the Teaching Military History project. Her work focuses on modern US military history, with an emphasis on unconventional warfare, civil-military relations, and the role of the media in shaping foreign policy. She is working on her manuscript, Searching for Victory: How Counterinsurgency Framed Operation Iraqi Freedom. She has recently published a co-authored a book chapter entitled “Haunted by the Lessons of ‘the Good War’: Post-Cold War Contestation of World War II Narratives.”
Undergraduate Syllabi
Hollywood and the Military: Soldiers and Civilians in the All-Volunteer Era
In this course, we cover key themes about the US military in the late 20th century and use popular movies as a guiding thread. The movies are not simply an illustration of the themes that we address. Rather, we use them as primary sources to better understand the historical context in which they were created.
We mainly focus on the military as an institution and its interactions with the civilian world. War is in the background. Through the lens of movie representations, we address questions such as: How do civilians become soldiers? What does it mean to be part of the US military? How do civilians and military personnel interact? How do movies influence civilians’ perspective of the military? How does the military use Hollywood and what for? How do these popular representations evolve over time?
The new version of the syllabus is designed for a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule rather than Tuesday-Thursday. As such, it starts each week with a class solely focused on the historical context. The assignments have also been revised to be more guided and scaffolded.
The last iteration of the course was a hybrid 6-week summer course designed with a flipped classroom approach. The students confronted the materials on their own at home before we analyzed them together in class. Each week, they started by learning about the historical context in which movies were produced before pivoting to readings on themes related to the week’s movies. Every Tuesday we met in person for conversations on the movies and the themes they depict in relation to the context in which they were created.
Given that a lot of the work students have to do in this class is watch movies, this class works particularly well as a summer course (even though students spend up to 5h each week just watching the movies, they don’t mind it as much as spending the same time on readings). I would, however, recommend against teaching it fully asynchronously as it takes a lot of practice to be able to analyze movies not in terms of what they explicitly depict, but rather for what the director’s decision reveal about the time period in which they were made.
Assignment
Vietnam War Meme Assignment
This assignment is designed to encourage students to reflect upon conveying historical information to a layman audience in a creative way, by designing a meme and explaining it. Over the years students have demonstrated a lot of skill and creativity in their submissions. For more advanced-level classes, I recommend instructing the students to design a meme based on a specific reading, rather than the topic of the class overall.