During the four decades that the late Russell F. Weigley taught in Temple University’s History Department, he established it as one of the world’s most preeminent centers for the serious study of military history.  Weigley created new standards in institutional, policy, and operational studies that continue to influence the field, as do the large number of doctoral students that he trained.  That Weigley tradition has continued unabated since his passing in 2004, and a new generation of professionally trained military historians from Temple is making its presence felt in academe and the American military’s various schools and historical programs

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Faculty Research

              Gregory J. W. Urwin, Weigley’s successor, has published prize-winning work on the American Civil War and World War II.  Trained by social and political historians, Urwin has focused increasingly on analyzing military affairs from the bottom up.  His publications on race in the American War of Independence and Civil War, along with the treatment of American POWs in the Pacific Theater during World War II, seek to better define the line that separates legitimate acts of war from war crimes.  Urwin’s recent lecture at the U.S. Army War College, “When Freedom Wore a Red Coat:  A Social History of Cornwallis’ 1781 Virginia Campaign,” is the précis for his tenth book.  That lecture will soon be published in two different venues by the U.S. Army Center of Military History to help American strategists better appreciate that insurgencies are not quelled merely by success in combat, but must also be engaged on economic, social and cultural levels.

              Jay B. Lockenour, a historian of modern Germany, also takes a broad approach to military history, with a special emphasis on the cultural impact of warfare and military institutions in Europe.  His first book analyzed the involvement of German World War II veterans in the establishment of West Germany between 1945 and 1955.  His current research project deals with Erich Ludendorff, the famous German general during World War I, and the radical politics that preoccupied his postwar years.

              Beth Bailey, a leading scholar in American social, cultural, gender, and sexual history in the 20th century, has helped bring military history back into the mainstream with her research on America’s shift to an all-volunteer army in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.  The groundbreaking nature of Bailey’s research has been demonstrated by her June 2007 article in the article, Journal of American History, “The Army in the Marketplace: Recruiting an All-Volunteer Force,” and her lecture at the U.S. Army War College, “Today’s Army - Is it Your Bag?: The Market, the Citizen, and the Making of the All-Volunteer Army.”

              William I. Hitchcock, a widely published student of European international, diplomatic, and political history since 1939, is about to release a new book on Europe in 1945 that takes an uncompromising look at the impact of war and liberation on the civilian population.

Graduate Student Research

              Temple graduate students interested in military history remain an eclectic lot and their research addresses a wide variety of topics.  Four recently defended dissertations focus on the American military from 1918 to 2004, and they shed new light on aspects of military professionalism, institutional development, and military doctrine.  Other students are writing on 17th-century notions of just war theory and their effect on Puritan New England; the social history of the United States Regiment of Dragoons (the U.S. Army’s first permanent cavalry regiment); the U.S. Navy’s use of hydrography in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to promote the republic’s imperial interests; American coastal defense policy; British global strategy during World War I; German Army propaganda companies during World War II;  a revisionist view of the U.S. Army’s replacement system in World War II; and issues of history and memory as they impact on the Normandy Invasion of June 1944.