S3E11 Lesley Gordon - University of Alabama

04/11/23 • 58 min

Our guest today is Civil War scholar Lesley Gordon. Lesley is the Charles G. Summersell Chair of Southern History at the University of Alabama. Prior to moving to Tuscaloosa, she was a professor of history at the University of Akron, and she started her academic career at Murray State University. Lesley received her BA from the College of William and Mary, and her M.A. and PhD from the University of Georgia.

Lesley’s first book General George E. Pickett in Life and Legend (UNC Press) was a History Book Club Selection. She published “This Terrible War”: The Civil War and its Aftermath with Daniel E. Sutherland and Michael Fellman in 2003 and the book is now in its third edition. In 2014, Lesley published A Broken Regiment: The 16th Connecticut’s Civil War (LSU Press). She has also co-edited four volumes, including Intimate Strategies of the Civil War: Military Commanders and Their Wives, with Carol K. Bleser (Oxford), and Race and Gender at War: Writing American Military History, with Friend-of-the-Pod Andrew Huebner, which is forthcoming with the University of Alabama Press. She has also written more than a dozen essays and articles.

Lesley is extremely active in her field and she is currently the president of the Society of Civil War Historians. She chairs the editorial board at the University of Alabama Press and served on the editorial board of The Journal of the Civil War Era. She is a current member of the advisory board for Civil War Times. Since 2009, Lesley has been an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer.

Join us for a fun and fascinating chat with Lesley Gordon. We'll talk girls drawing Civil War soldiers in middle school, being a tour guide at Mark Twain's home, sports bandwagons, Noah Wyle, writing biography, a little Alison Krause, and Daisy Joines & The Six, so tune in!

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Rec.: 03/14/2023

Check out the MHPTPodcast Swag Store on Zazzle!

Rec.: 03/14/2023

Previous Episode

S3E10 Martin Thomas - University of Exeter

Today's guest is Martin Thomas. Martin is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for Histories of Violence and Conflict at the University of Exeter in the UK. He was also the first director of Exeter's Centre for the Study of War, State, and Society. Before joining the faculty at Exeter, Martin taught at the University of the West of England in Bristol for eleven years. He has held visiting professorships and fellowships at Sciences Po. Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies. Martin received his BA and PhD from Oxford University.

Martin is the author of ten books and dozens of articles and book chapters. His many publications include The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire with co-author Andrew Thompson, Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France, 1882-1956 (Oxford) with co-author Richard Toye in 2017, and The Civilianization of War: The Changing Civil–Military Divide, 1914–2014, with Andrew Barros (Cambridge). Martin's solo publications include Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and their Roads from Empire (Oxford), Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers, and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918-40 (Cambridge), and The French Empire at War, 1940-45 (Manchester).

Martin was awarded the Philip Leverhulme prize for outstanding research in 2002 and currently holds a three-year Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship. He has also been a fellow of the Independent Social Research Foundation. Martin has been a member of the editorial boards of the International History Review, Intelligence and National Security, Diplomacy & Statecraft, War & Society, French Historical Studies , and Cambridge’s Studies in the Social & Cultural History of Modern Warfare.

Join us for a really interesting chat with Martin Thomas. We'll talk teaching global history, the nature of colonial violence, old French ladies with baskets of hand grenades, League One football, and Little Feat!

Be sure to check out the MHPTPodcast Swag Store on Zazzle!

Rec.: 03/13/2023

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S3E12 David Kieran - Columbus State University

Our guest today is the guitar-playing, hiking, marathon-running, American Studies guy-turned-historian David Kieran! Dave is an Associate Professor and the Colonel Richard R. Hallock Distinguished Chair in Military History at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia. Before coming to Columbus State, he was associate professor and chair of the history department at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, PA, where he also served as coordinator for the American Studies program. Dave was also a visiting assistant professor in the American Studies Department at Franklin & Marshall College and in the History Department at Skidmore College. He earned a BA in English from Connecticut College and a PhD in American Studies from George Washington University.

A scholar of the post-Vietnam American military, Dave is the author of Signature Wounds: The Untold Story of the Military’s Mental Health Crisis (NYU Press) and Forever Vietnam: How A Divisive War Changed American Public Memory (University of Massachusetts Press). He has also edited or co-edited several volumes, including The War of My Generation: Youth Culture and the War on Terror (Rutgers University Press) and At War: The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Rutgers University Press), with Edwin A. Martini. David’s articles have been published in War & Society, the Journal of American Studies, and the Journal of War and Culture Studies, and he has contributed to numerous edited volumes. Finally, he has written for the Washington Post, Psychology Today, and Slate. His new project is tentatively titled How the Army Saved Itself: Maxwell R. Thurman and the Army’s Post-Vietnam Metamorphosis.

Dave has two awesome dogs, has run over a dozen marathons, and has more guitars than Bill, which is a sore point with Bill. Join us for a great chat about interdisciplinary approaches to doing history, interviewing retired generals, running marathons, mental health issues in the American military, Bruce Springsteen, Alabama white sauce, acoustic viz electric guitars - and more!

And forgive Bill's kitchen renovation noise! Military Historians have kitchens, too!

Shoutout to Smoke Bourbon and BBQ in Columbus!

Rec.: 04/06/2023