Keynote - Dayton in the Great War: Scholarship, Community, and What We Mean by “Popular History”

Streaming Media

Start Date

2-9-2015 2:35 PM

End Date

2-9-2015 3:30 PM

Bio

Paul D. Lockhart has been teaching history at Wright State since 1989. He came to WSU directly from grad school at Purdue University where he studied military history with the late Gunther E. Rothenberg, the preeminent Napoleonic scholar, and early modern European history with Charles W. Ingrao. Since then, Lockhart has written six single-author books. The first four dealt with his early academic specialty – Scandinavian history and especially the history of Denmark during its brief career as a great power – but he wanted to write history for a broader lay readership, not just for an exclusively academic audience. Returning to his first love, the history of American warfare, resulted in two books on the American Revolution, both published by the Big Six New York house HarperCollins. The first was The Drillmaster of Valley Forge (2008), a biography of the Baron von Steuben, of which Pulitzer Prize-winning popular historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote, “What a terrific biography this is — splendidly written with narrative sweep…. The dramatic story of how the American army that beat the British was forged has never been better told than in this remarkable book.” Lockhart’s second Revolutionary War history, The Whites of Their Eyes: Bunker Hill, the First American Army, and the Emergence of George Washington (2011), garnered praise from Richard Brookhiser of the National Review: “Paul Lockhart is our best military writer on the Revolutionary War.”

At Wright State, Lockhart teaches mostly courses on European and American military history, and is the founder and coordinator of the History Department’s graduate concentration in the History of War and Society. He has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society; has taught at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, Denmark; and in 2000 was the National Endowment for the Humanities Visiting Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York, College at Potsdam. In 2014 he received both the CoLA Outstanding Research Award and Brage Golding Distinguished Professor of Research title. As the 2013-14 Senior Fellow in CELIA (Collaborative Education, Leadership, and Innovation in the Arts), an Ohio Center of Excellence, Lockhart and the CELIA team created, developed, and implemented Wright State’s centennial commemoration of the First World War, “A Long, Long Way: Echoes of the Great War.”


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Feb 9th, 2:35 PM Feb 9th, 3:30 PM

Keynote - Dayton in the Great War: Scholarship, Community, and What We Mean by “Popular History”