S1E18 Beth Bailey - University of Kansas

Our guest today is the award-winning teacher and scholar Beth Bailey. Beth is a Foundation Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and the Director of the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies at the University of Kansas, which includes the amazing resource for military history instructors - Teaching Military History. She is the author of America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force, Sex in the Heartland, The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii, and From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America. In addition, she has edited or co-edited numerous volumes, including Managing Sex in the U.S. Military, which she did with Kara Vuic; Alesha Doan; Shannon Portillo.

Beth was educated at Northwestern and the University of Chicago. Before making the move to the University of Kansas, Beth taught at Barnard College, The University of New Mexico, and Temple University. She has spoken all over the world and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Indonesia. Beth’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has received the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award on two occasions, and she was elected to the Society of American Historians in 2017. In 2021, Beth was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Finally, just yesterday she was named the recipient of the 2022 Balfour Jeffrey Award in Humanities and Social Sciences, which is one of the University of Kansas’ prestigious Higuchi-KU Endowment Research Achievement Awards. Beth is the co-editor with Andrew Preston of the Military, War, and Society in Modern U.S. History series at Cambridge University Press and she is extremely active in a number of professional associations, including the Society for Military History. 

Beth is one of the most respected and generous people in the field of military history, and we are pleased that she made the time to sit down with us today. She's come far from parents who sat in the flea-infested Fox Theater in Atlanta on their first date and for one who is agnostic about Kansas basketball (living dangerously like that in Lawrence!)! Follow Beth on Twitter @BethLynnBailey.

BONUS - Beth and her husband historian David Farber have one of the most spectacular prairie homes you'll ever see. Check out their Kansas Longhouse outside Lawrence.

Rec. 01/25/2022