American Military History

This course will provide an interpretive survey and discussion of American military history from colonial beginnings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the present. It considers the role and significance of war in American history and asks whether these past wars could tell us anything about the challenges of the twenty-first century. The format of a survey may not allow us to pursue every significant and interesting topic in great detail. Instead, main emphasis will be placed on several specific themes. These include the relationship of state and society, organization of military institutions in colonial North America and in the United States, and strategy and policy. That means that we will spend less time on battles and generals than on technology, logistics, administration, and sociology. 

The United States in the Vietnam War

This course is an upper-level elective that will explore U.S. policies and strategy in the Vietnam War era (1945-1975) and the domestic and international consequences of American engagement in Southeast Asia. We will consider the origins of the conflict, both from an American and a Vietnamese perspective and in the context of the Cold War, the course and conduct of the war, its transformative effect on American political culture, the peace process, and the aftermath of the war in politics and memory. The U.S. and the Vietnam War holds that it is impossible to understand the Vietnam War in isolation and that domestic and foreign policies as well as military operations and strategy need to be considered as closely related issues.

This is a survey course at the advanced level. I don’t expect much prior knowledge or specific interest in history, but I do expect consistent participation and a willingness to work and think. I will help you wherever I can if you find yourself struggling with the material (either in its analytical aspects or because of the sheer mass of data), but you need to approach me to tell me that you are having difficulties. You may also consider forming small study groups. Learning rarely occurs exclusively in the classroom (virtual or physical)!

War, Violence, and Modernity

This course is an upper-level elective – open to graduate students - that will explore the correlation of war, violence organized and controlled by the state or unbounded and uncontrolled, and modernity. Specifically, it will consider the relationship of state and society with regard to war and domestic order from the end of the Middle Ages (roughly the mid-fifteenth century) to the present. We will focus primarily on the West, i.e., Europe and North America, although comparisons to other regions and cultures will be introduced where appropriate. We will assess the assumption that “war made the state and the state made war” and consider to what extent our understanding of modernity (political, social, technological, and even cultural) has been shaped by war and by advances in the military realm. We will investigate whether Europe and the United States developed along similar lines toward a modern state. Finally, we will consider the rise of the state’s monopoly of significant violence from the sixteenth century, its solidification in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, and its erosion in recent times.