We are soliciting essays for an edited collection on the history of the National Guards in the United States, 1850-1950, tentatively titled "Citizens, Men and Soldiers: Essays on the Emergence of the Modern National Guard."
America’s citizen soldiers have been widely discussed in terms of the failure or success of United States military policy, viewed with contempt in relation to their military effectiveness, or examined as instruments of social control. These approaches have provided a convenient way for historians to put the “national” into the National Guard. While the new military history of the 1970s and 1980s led to a brief resurgence in interest in the Guard, studies that examine the Guard in a social and cultural context remain rare.
We seek to reposition the history of the state national guards, and the volunteers who filled their ranks, as vital actors in the fluid terrain of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States. We are soliciting papers on the history of state militias/national guard organizations and/or guardsmen in the United States between 1850 and 1950.
We encourage submissions from scholars across fields who have discovered in the national guards a vital topic, ripe for new exploration and attention. Topics include, but are not limited too:
Organization and Institution Building
Domestic Duty - including Strikes, Race Riots, and Natural Disasters
Race, Ethnicity and Citizenship
Manhood and Masculinity
Women and the Guard
Wartime Service and Commemoration
State similarities and differences
Guardsmen and gun culture
The Guard experience in International perspective
We encourage submissions of both new and existing work.
Please submit short cv, a 500-word abstract and selected bibliography for new work, or a copy of the already completed work, to firstname.lastname@example.org by January 31, 2007. Following the selection process, manuscripts of 8,000-10,000 words (text and notes) will be due by July 1, 2007.
Please address any questions to:
Department of History
University of Minnesota Duluth
1121 University Drive
Duluth, MN 55812
Mark A. Potter
Melbourne Research Office
University of Melbourne
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