History 5250.

001

Research Seminar: Modern Warfare

Fall 2020

Wednesdays from 2:00-4:50 p.m. in Wooten Hall 112

Dr. Geoffrey Wawro

University of North Texas, History Dept.

Office = WH 252

Office hours – Thursdays 5:30-6:30 pm, or by appointment

Geoffrey.Wawro@unt.edu

DISABILITY STATEMENT: The University of North Texas makes reasonable academic

accommodation for students with disabilities. Students seeking reasonable
accommodation must first register with the Office of Disability Accommodation (ODA) to
verify their eligibility. If a disability is verified, the ODA will provide you with a
reasonable accommodation letter to be delivered to faculty to begin a private discussion
regarding your specific needs in a course. You may request reasonable accommodations
at any time, however, ODA notices of reasonable accommodation should be provided as
early as possible in the semester to avoid any delay in implementation. Note that students
must obtain a new letter of reasonable accommodation for every semester and must meet
with each faculty member prior to implementation in each class. Students are strongly
encouraged to deliver letters of reasonable accommodation during faculty office hours or
by appointment. Faculty members have the authority to ask students to discuss such
letters during their designated office hours to protect the privacy of the student. For
additional information see the Office of Disability Accommodation website
at http://www.unt.edu/oda. You may also contact them by phone at 940.565.4323.

Course Description:

This is a research seminar to hone your skills as a historian. To succeed as a publishing

scholar, you need to be an entrepreneur, who can survey the field, locate the gaps or
opportunities for debate in the historiography, and then find the sources that will help
you fill those gaps, exploit the opportunities, and create new, usable research that can
be cited, shared and admired by the historical establishment.

In this seminar we will have several meetings spread over sixteen weeks; the “open”
weeks will be for you to carry out your research and writing. Attendance at our
meetings is critical. Also critical is your observance of deadlines for important course
work like paper outline, annotated bibliography and rough draft. Email everything to
me (geoffrey.wawro@unt.edu), but also be sure to deliver a hard copy of the emailed
work to my office as well. If I’m not there, slide it under the door or place it in my
department mailbox down the hall.

With luck, you will write a publishable paper on a neglected or controversial aspect of
military history. You may choose to focus on a thesis/dissertation topic and write a
serviceable chapter. Whatever your preference, your paper should be original and
thorough and stake out a clear, well-argued position (thesis) on an important and
lingering historical question. You will not be writing a narrative – what happened when
– so much as an interpretative essay that explores a complex or misunderstood area of
warfare and sheds new light on it. Your paper will be more analytical than descriptive.
It will use as many primary sources as you can lay hands on, such as official documents,
memoirs, and newspaper accounts.

Our research area is Modern Warfare. It is a deliberately broad rubric to accommodate

as many students as possible. Choose your topic carefully. Read around it; know the
relevant secondary source literature; determine whether there are holes to be filled, or
nonsense to be corrected.

The historiography is your first important responsibility. You must scour bibliographies
to know all of the relevant important works. Use obvious sites like google and amazon
to augment your search, and definitely check in with a research librarian at Willis to
scour other sources. Some books will be obvious, others less so. Don’t wait to be told,
find these things yourself. That’s a big part of what historians do – they track down
sources, like reporters on a story. The internet makes this so much easier than it ever
was in the old days of the card catalog and outdated bibliographies that were a fixture
in library research rooms.

You can focus on war & society, strategy, combat, operations, diplomacy, finance,
gender, economics, whatever you like. However, you need to ascertain whether there
are sufficient primary sources (archives, published documents, journalism, memoirs) as
well as secondary sources (monographs, articles, and general histories) to support your
project, and make it worthwhile and interesting. Locating sources gets to the
entrepreneurial nature of the profession: I can assist, but you must do the digging that
will yield accessible sources in a relatively tight time window.

Make this class a priority. If you put the work off and try to cobble something together
late in the semester you will not have time to use ILL and get all of the sources that you
need.

Proofread your work with extreme care. I take a very dim view of typos and sloppy
writing. If it’s not worth your time to proofread, why is it worth my time to read? Do
NOT rely on spellcheck to proof. You must do it.
Requirements:

Class attendance, a high quality, analytical 25-30 page (exclusive of front and back
matter) research paper, and a successful oral presentation and defense.

Week 1, 8/26/20 Organizational meeting. How well do you know the field and
literature? What do you want to work on? General ideas? Specific ideas?

Week 2, 9/2/20 Prospectus due in class. 1-2 pages. Be prepared to discuss and
defend your topic. Bring a copy for everyone.

Week 3, 9/9/20

Week 4, 9/16/20 Paper outline by email. geoffrey.wawro@unt.edu

Week 5, 9/23/20

Week 6, 9/30/20 Annotated bibliography by email. geoffrey.wawro@unt.edu

Week 7, 10/7/20

Week 8, 10/14/20

Week 9, 10/21/20

Week 10, 10/28/20

Week 11, 11/4/20 Rough drafts due. Hard copy to my office by 4 pm. Soft copy to my
email. geoffrey.wawro@unt.edu

Week 12, 11/11/20 Discuss rough drafts in class: problems, pitfalls, successes.

Week 13, 11/18/20

Week 14, 11/25/20 Final papers due by 4 pm. Send email copy and drop hard copy in
my History Department mailbox, or under my office door. No class.

Week 15, 12/2/20 Paper defenses in class.