President’s Column
Richard Stewart
President, USCMH
This is my second column as your President and I can report to you that our organization is making great progress in a number of areas. The response to date on my two challenges (everyone bringing in at least one additional new member and all members contributing some money, of whatever amount, to our long-term endowment) has been very promising. We have added at least seven new members so far, a number of them young scholars. Several members manned an information booth at the recent Society of Military History annual meeting and accepted a number of new members at that venue while spreading the word about the U.S. Commission to many other, perhaps future, members. We all need to help out and spread the word to others about our organization in order to get new members and increase our visibility. Each of us joined the organization because we felt that we needed to increase our exposure to the international military history community and I know that others share our interest and just need a little push to join. You can be that push. I look forward to hearing more from each of you about the new members you have recruited.
Several members have also stepped up to the plate and made additional financial contributions to the U.S. Commission endowment fund and we will be highlighting their names in our newsletter. My personal thanks to each of them! If the organization is to prosper in the long term, and if we are to have the money to provide book prizes and travel grants to young scholars, we must have a healthy financial base. The endowment, set up last November by our Board of Trustees, does just that. So dig into your pockets a bit and contribute just a little extra to make sure that the organization thrives and can continue to provide the grants and prizes so necessary to keep us visible and viable.
As for the annual international Congress, I hope that as many of you as can make it are planning to go to the ICMH Congress in Bulgaria this year. This will be a great chance to see old friends and make new ones in the international military history community as well as see a new country—a country previously closed off to us old “Cold Warriors” and now a vibrant member of the community of nations. The Congresses are often the high point of our year and I know you are looking forward to this one in Sofia. I’ll see you there!
In closing, I can see that we are all working hard to build our Commission into a larger, more vibrant, engaged, and financially secure organization. I urge you all to stay involved and keep up the good work. After all, each of us is finding something we like in the U.S. Commission or we wouldn’t have joined. Let’s “spread the wealth” and share that commitment with new members as we build for the future. See you in Sofia!
USCMH Panel Participants in 2012 ICMH Colloquy
Randy Papadopoulos, Ph.D.
Vice President, USCMH
This August will see the U.S. Commission sponsoring five paper presenters at the Sofia Colloquy of the ICMH, which has the theme of “Technology and Warfare.” Our contributors, as chosen by a committee of Dr. Bianka Adams and myself, will include:
-Dr. Joseph P. Harahan, Independent Scholar, “Eliminating the 43rd Strategic Rocket Army in the 1990s: Using International Cooperation, Technology, and Management”
-Prof. John D. Hosler, Morgan State University: “Military Technology in the Writings of John of Salisbury”
-Prof. Brian M. Linn, Texas A&M University, “‘Wars are fought by men supported by weapons—wars are not fought by weapons supported by men:’ The US Army, Technology, and Atomic Warfare in the 1950s”
-Dr. Robyn Rodriguez, Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command: “The Importation and Adaptation of Technology and Tactics: The German Military Mission in China, 1927-1938”
-Dr. Richard Stewart, U.S. Army Center of Military History: “‘It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time. Cold War Technological Dead Ends ’”
Dr. Barton Hacker, Curator, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, participant, book roundtable.
All participants deserve congratulations for having their work selected for presentation at the colloquy and for submitting their papers on time. Members will forgive a note of pride that two of the USCMH’s participants in Sofia (Prof. Hosler and Dr. Rodriguez) have recently joined our commission. Both are recipients of the Commission’s Junior Scholar Travel Grants.
2012 USCMH Annual Trustees Meeting
Fred Borch
Recording Secretary, USCMH
The US Commission held its Spring Board Meeting on May 12th, in conjunction with the Society of Military History annual conference in Arlington, Virginia. Secretary General Pat Harahan reported that we had a table at the SMH meeting, and that this was generating a lot of interest in what we offer and seems to be a good way to recruit new members. Most of the meeting focused on the upcoming XXXVIII Conference in Sofia, and that attendance looks to be good, with about 25 U.S. members travelling to Bulgaria. Dimitri Minchev, the Bulgarian Commission of Military History president, expects about 200 attendees from 32 countries. Africa and Europe will be well represented. There also will be attendees from Brazil Japan and South Korea.
Trustee Bianka Adams and Vice President Randy Papadopoulos examined paper proposals and selected Brian Linn, Pat Harahan, John Hosler and Richard Stewart to make presentations. Brian will present a paper on the U.S. Army, Technology and Atomic Warfare in the 1950s. Pat will examine the elimination of the Soviet 43rd Strategic Rocket Army in the 1990s. John will discuss military technology in the writings of John of Salisbury. Finally, Richard Stewart will present a paper on Cold War technological dead ends.
The Board discussed the on-going need to revive and redesign the USCMH website, which is out of date. The Board voted to hold the annual general meeting on Saturday, October 27, 2012.
Collins Book Prize
The U.S. Commission on Military History recently inaugurated the Brigadier General James L. Collins Jr. Book Prize in Military History, named in honor of one of the USCMH’s founding members and a pillar of the international military history community. The commission offers a $1,000 prize to the author of any nationality of the best book written in English on U.S. military history published during 2009, 2010, or 2011 and submitted by 30 June 2012. Topics in all periods and all aspects of U.S. military history (including naval and air warfare) will be considered, including theory, operations, biography, technology and science, strategy and tactics, social, and diplomatic. Special consideration will be given to those works promising to have the most significant impact on the study of America’s military past, and in keeping with the mission of the USCMH, award preference will be given to books that highlight the international aspects of U.S. military history. The President of USCMH will announce the recipient of the 2012 prize at the organization’s annual general meeting usually held in November.
The late Brigadier General James L. Collins Jr. commanded the attention of military historians for decades. He served as the Chief of Military History from 1970 to 1982 and in that capacity championed the use of military history in the professional development of the U.S. Army. Collins and a few other pioneers, in their establishment of the USCMH, helped enlighten our international colleagues about the first-rate scholarship common to the American military history community. He was instrumental in the growth of the USCMH and its development as an influential national member of the International Commission on Military History. On the personal level, many fellow historians came to know “Jimmie” Collins as a man of solid integrity, gracious manners, quick intellect, and a lover of fine wines (from his own Virginia vineyard of course). So, it is especially appropriate that the best book in U.S. military history for 2012 will be honored by association with the distinguished Brigadier General James L. Collins Jr.
Toward a New ICMH Bibliography
Ricardo A. Herrera
Trustee, USCMH
The Bibliographical Committee of the International Commission on Military History held a marathon meeting in Rio de Janeiro during the annual congress. There are quite a few changes to report, ranging from the committee’s new leadership, the new publisher, and some changes to the International Bibliography of Military History (IBMH). The committee elected Dr. Mauro Mantovani, Department Head of Strategic Studies at the Swiss Military Academy at ETH Zurich, president of the committee. Dr. Mantovani, who has extensive experience editing professional journals and a number of publications to his credit, will serve as editor-in-chief of the revamped IBMH.
Following many years of generous support underwriting the IBMH the Swiss Ministry of Defense, the ICMH contracted with Brill, a well-regarded Anglo-Dutch publishing house, to publish biannually the organization’s bibliography. The IBMH, much as before, will continue to serve as an annotated bibliography highlighting publications in national and international military history. The IBMH will focus on brief, critical reviews of recent scholarly works worthy of international attention or significant to each member commission’s national military historiography. The IBMH will also occasionally publish historiographical essays addressing the state of military history in a member country or focusing on a specific topic. Previously the IBMH published multilingual entries, but will now publish solely in English. For the USCMH, this will certainly ease the issue of translations. More information on the IBMH can be found at: http://www.brill.nl/publications/journals/international-bibliography-military-history.
One of the issues of concern to USCMH members is the low number of US entries relative to the great number of works written by US authors. No country publishes as many scholarly books on military history as the United States, but, unfortunately, this is not apparent in the IBMH. In conversations with Dr. Mantovani and Brill, I stressed that reviewers customarily receive a book in exchange for their review of it and that this may be a factor in the small number of US contributions—IBMH reviewers do not receive a book. Discussions over this are ongoing. We are also discussing the possibility of moving the IBMH in the direction of an essay-oriented journal publishing historiographical articles rather than entries. As discussions continue, I will update you. In the meantime, should you be interested in contributing to the IBMH, please feel free to drop me a line at . Instructions for authors can be found at: http://www.brill.nl/files/brill.nl/specific/ibmh.pdf.
Future Conferences and Announcements
“War Documentaries”
The journal InMedia (http://inmedia.revues.org/) devotes an issue to the study of “war documentaries” in the English-speaking world.
Documentaries provide a first-hand window into the war: whether they are based on media archival footage or witnesses’ visual and oral accounts, documentaries articulate and construct the collective vision and memory of the war. Milton J. Bates argues that war narratives build on a dual perspective that pits the perceptions of the man on the battlefield against the knowledge of the military command: “The man on the hilltop, whether he is an elected political leader or one of those civilian or military technocrats whom Noam Chomsky called the ‘new Mandarins’, knows better than the man in the valley because he knows so much more and knows it dispassionately.” From the soldiers’ accounts to the version formulated by government officials, documentaries highlight the gaps between war experiences. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussel refers to the First World War to argue that the horror of combat defies the attempts of language to represent it. Atrocities such as the Holocaust cannot be contained in language, which accounts for the merging of fiction and nonfiction in a series of documentaries that capture Bill Nichols’ “blurred boundaries”. The documentary’s search for truth is thwarted by the tricks of memory linked to the confusion of events signified by the “fog of war” that make war narratives necessarily incomplete stories.
In this issue of InMedia, we prompt contributors to question the discourses of the war in documentaries that either endorse patriotic myths or interrogate their ideological underpinning in the wake of anti-war movements. War documentaries have challenged our perceptions of events as technological progress has democratized film cameras and made it a tool placed in the hands of soldiers and witnesses. Eric Barnouw contends that the development of lighter, cheaper equipment served non-governmental groups as a medium of dissent. From the Vietnam Home Movies series to The War Tapes (Deborah Scranton, 2006), documentaries give voice to the soldiers whose visual memories of the war are coloured by the imagination of the past, thus merging fiction and nonfiction in films that use stories to fashion History.
The following topics represent possible fresh fields of investigation:
The role of documentaries in the perception of war
The role of technology in the evolution of the war documentary
The writing of a Counter-History or the politically committed documentary form
The fictional dimension of war documentaries
War documentaries as a collection of memories
Proposals should not exceed 500 words, should include a short bibliography and should be sent both to Delphine Letort () and to Georges Fournier () by 15 September 2011.
The Constitution of Peace: Current Debates and Future Perspectives.
Zentrumstage 11-13 October 2012
Center for Conflict Studies, Marburg, Germany
Conference concept: Contemporary criticism regarding the prevailing conceptualization of peace holds that it is firmly embedded in liberal thought. Moreover, since practices of building peace have come under severe criticism from both an empirical and a conceptual perspective, it is time to consider new approaches. The conference seeks to push the debate forward by proposing and discussing alternative ways of understanding peace. This may take conceptual and/or empirical forms. The objective of the conference is therefore twofold. First, it seeks to review current criticism of the prevailing conceptualization of peace and to envisage alternative forms.. Second, from an empirical perspective, it aims at investigating current peace-building practices to highlight their strengths and weaknesses regarding the conceptualization and implementation of peace (building) programs, and the relationship between global peace-builders and local people affected by violence (and peace) among other perspectives.