September 14, 2007

Military History - Cultural History - Transnational History

Wayne Lee (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Mind and Matter - Cultural Analysis in American Military History:
A Look at the State of the Field

Military historians are reaping the benefits of the compositional and experiential studies long promulgated by the "war and society" school, and are now examining the more complex interactions of culture and military activity.  The paper reviews the last fifteen years of such work, and suggests that military historians can profit by linking traditional operational studies to cultural analysis, while encouraging non-military historians to consider war as a useful arena for cultural study. Such approaches demand that we look more deeply at institutional and societal culture, their interactions, and how those interactions produced individual decisions on the battlefield.

Wayne E. Lee is Associate Professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He researches in the military history of the early modern period, primarily in the Atlantic world.  His publications include: Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina: The Culture of Violence in Riot and War (Gainesville, 2001); "Fortify, Fight, or Flee: Tuscarora and Cherokee Defensive Warfare and Military Culture Adaptation," The Journal of Military History 68:3 (2004): 713-770; "Peace Chiefs and Blood Revenge: Patterns of Restraint in Native American Warfare in the Contact and Colonial Eras," The Journal of Military History 71:3 (2007): 701-741.

Dirk Bönker (Duke University)

Military History and the Transnational Turn

The paper examines the promise of the transnational turn for the field of modern military history, foregrounding U.S. and German historiographies. Of great importance to transnationally informed military histories is the exploration of a new, increasingly global transnational military-political realm, which developed as part of the transformation of states, empires, and warfare in the middle decades of the 19th century.

Dirk Bönker is Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. His research interests focus on the history of warfare, militarism, and empire in Germany and the United States between 1860 and 1945. He is currently preparing a book-length study of global militarization and the making of navalism in Germany and the U.S. before World War I. In 2004-2005 he was the James Bryant Conant Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University.