The Modern Scholar Podcast

Dr. Rob Thompson is a historian with the Films Team at the Army University Press. He received his PhD in History from the University of Southern Mississippi, and he specializes in the study of the Vietnam War, with a focus on the confluence of conventional warfare and pacification at the province level. His research places American strategy in the context of a single province—Phú Yên, and this is the subject of his book which we will be discussing today – Clear, Hold, and Destroy: Pacification in Phú Yên and the American War in Vietnam, which was published in 2021 by the University of Oklahoma Press. Dr. Thompson is also interested in the history of American diplomacy and the history of Modern Europe, and his writing has appeared in The Strategy Bridge, The New York Times, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Also, our standard disclaimer: Dr. Thompson's comments represent his views only and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of The Modern Scholar Podcast, Army University Press, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense.

My guest today is Dr. Tanya Roth. She earned her history PhD from Washington University in St. Louis and teaches high school and middle school history at MICDS in St. Louis, Missouri. She is the author of Her Cold War: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945-1980 which is the subject of our conversation today. Her research has been recognized by the American Association of University Women, and in 2019 an early version of Her Cold War received the Society for Military History’s Coffman First Manuscript Prize. Tanya’s writing has been published in The Washington Post, History News Network, and Public Seminar. She lives in the St. Louis area with her family. You can find Tanya on Twitter as @DrTanyaRoth and online at tanyaroth.com.

Erica Lunde is the Garden Programmer for the Faulkner County Library in Conway, Arkansas. In 2018 she graduated from the University of Nebraska—Lincoln with a Fisheries and Wildlife degree. In 2020 she moved to Arkansas and was hired as part-time circulation staff for the Faulkner County Library. Since then, she has become the full time Garden Programmer. In this position, she brainstorms, creates, and hosts gardening events and programs as well as maintains the Community Garden in the library’s backyard!

Dr. Aaron Bateman is an Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University and an affiliate of the Space Policy Institute. He received his Master’s in International Relations from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and his PhD in the History of Science and Technology at Johns Hopkins University. His research takes place at the intersection of science, technology, and national security during the Cold War. His research interests include technological cooperation and competition, military spaceflight, secrecy and knowledge regulation, arms control, technology and warfare, and the role of intelligence in statecraft. His work draws from archival collections in the United States, Western Europe, and the former Soviet Union. His first book project places Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in the context of a more militarized American approach to space that had emerged in the 1970s, and shows how divergent views of space militarization influenced U.S. foreign relations and public diplomacy through the end of the Cold War. In other projects he explores the development of overseas American surveillance infrastructure and its impact on U.S. relations with host nations. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Diplomacy & Statecraft, Intelligence and National Security, the Oxford Handbook of Space Security, the Journal of Strategic Studies, the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Science & Diplomacy, Diplomacy and Statecraft, and the Journal of Slavic Military Studies. Since he believes that historians have a unique role to play in informing current policy debates, he also writes about contemporary defense and space topics in policy-focused publications including the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Physics Today, and War on the Rocks. While completing his doctoral studies, Dr. Bateman held a Guggenheim predoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Prior to graduate school, he served as a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer with assignments at the National Security Agency and the Pentagon. As a staff member at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, he supported intelligence and national security space efforts. He has also participated in international dialogues aimed at promoting stability in space.

Rob Williams recently completed his PhD in History at The Ohio State University, researching the emergence, and development of a distinct “airborne” subculture during World War II and its influence on the U.S. Army during the Cold War. In a former life, he served as an infantryman and paratrooper with three deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, he is married with two children, and resides in Columbus, Ohio. His work has been featured in Stars and Stripes, VFW Magazine, ARMY Magazine, and the Columbus Dispatch among others.

This week, Dr. Paul "PJ" Springer is here to help me introduce my book to all of you, so the tables have turned and I'm a guest on my own show! Weird, I know. Cue the third-person bio. As a military historian, Philip Shackelford brings a unique focus on organizational culture and development to the history of communications intelligence, national security, and the U.S. Air Force during the Cold War. His book, Rise of the Mavericks: The U.S. Air Force Security Service and the Cold War, explores the rise of the U.S. Air Force Security Service, its Cold War history, and the relationships the command developed with other military and government agencies—the first work of academic scholarship to focus exclusively on this command. Philip has shared this research during multiple annual conferences of the Society for Military History and in other venues, such as the North American Society for Intelligence History annual conference and the faculty forum of the Air Command and Staff College. Philip is also currently serving as Editor-in-Chief of the newsletter for the North American Society for Intelligence History. Philip currently serves as the Library Director at South Arkansas Community College. He is a past president of the Arkansas Library Association, and serves the Arkansas library community in a variety of other capacities, including a recent term as Secretary of ARKLink (a statewide consortium of academic libraries) and as an Associate Editor for the Arkansas Libraries journal. In 2019 Philip was recognized as an Emerging Leader by the American Library Association, and in 2020 completed a Certificate in OER Librarianship through the Open Education Network. Philip’s masters in History and masters in Library and Information Science are both from Kent State University. Enjoy!

Dr. Elena Wicker recently completed her Ph.D. in International Relations at Georgetown University. Her dissertation, The Words That Matter: Terminology and Performance in the U.S. Army, explores the history of U.S. military lexicography and the strategic creation and use of jargon in strategy, doctrine, and concepts. Her interdisciplinary and multi-method research combines archival research, interviews, and quantitative methods including machine learning and natural language processing. Dr. Wicker was a 2021-2022 predoctoral fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin and was selected as a 2022 Presidential Management Fellowship finalist. She has been an Adjunct Researcher with the RAND Corporation since 2019, and has contributed to projects relating to intelligence, security cooperation, homeland security, and defense policy. Prior to her graduate studies, she served as an Intelligence Security Cooperation Officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency. She has completed internships in arms control treaty verification at the Department of State and worked for refugee aid projects in Jordan and the West Bank while studying advanced Arabic as a Boren Scholar. She holds an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University and a B.A. (magna cum laude) in Near Eastern Studies from Cornell University. *Originally recorded August 1, 2022.

We have a FANTASTIC bonus episode for you all today! Last Saturday several history podcasters came together to present a round table discussion about podcasting during the 2023 Society for Military History annual conference, held in San Diego. We recorded that session as a live episode, and are very excited to provide it for you here today! The session was titled "Making Airwaves: The Profession of History and the World of Podcasting," and brought together the hosts and creators of Bow and Blade, Civics and Coffee, Military Historians Are People, Too!, of course The Modern Scholar Podcast, and A Better Peace, the official podcast of The War Room. Please enjoy, and I hope everyone is inspired by the discussion. *This episode was recorded live during a conference session, so please excuse any irregularities in audio quality.

Dr. Heather Venable is an Associate Professor of Military and Security Studies in the Department of Airpower at the U.S. Air Force Air Command and Staff College. As a visiting professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, she taught naval and Marine Corps history. She graduated with a BA in History from Texas A&M University and a MA in American History from the University of Hawai’i. She received her PhD in military history from Duke University. She is the author of How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Marine Corps Mystique, 1874-1918 (Naval Institute Press, 2019). She is also a non-resident fellow at Marine Corps University’s Krulak Center, and she has contributed many articles about airpower and the current Air Force to online publications including War on the Rocks and the Modern War Institute, and she serves as a Managing Editor for the online journal Strategy Bridge. Dr. Venable also serves as Chair of the Program Committee for the Society for Military History. Her current research centers on intersections between theory and pre-war thinking and the application of airpower in combat. *Originally recorded July 20, 2022.

Dr. Marjorie Galelli is the Associate Director of the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies at the University of Kansas, where she recently received her PhD. She is also a Henry Chauncey ’57 Postdoctoral fellow in the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale. Her research focuses on the relationship between the US military, the government, the media, and the American people, throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries. Her manuscript, Two Sides of the Same COIN: A History of the United States and Counterinsurgency During Operation Iraqi Freedom examines the United States’ progressive adoption of counterinsurgency (COIN) between 2003 and 2011. *Originally recorded June 7, 2022.