S3E2 Brian Linn - Texas A&M University

Today's guest is the prolific, experienced, fan of the Rolling Stones and recently announced 2023 Society for Military History Samuel Eliot Morrison awardee Brian McAllister Linn! Brian is Professor of History and Ralph R. Thomas Class of 1921 Professor in Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. Brian has been at Texas A&M since 1989, but he had visiting positions at Old Dominion and Nebraska before landing in College Station. He attended the University of Hawaii for his BA and earned his MA and PhD at The Ohio State University. 

Brian has held far too many fellowships to mention them all, but here are some of his recent accomplishments: He was a Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences Fellow in 2019, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow in 2018-2019, and a Fulbright Distinguished Professor at the University of Birmingham in the UK in 2016. Brian also held a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellowship, and a Bosch Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. 

To say that Brian is a prolific scholar is an understatement. In 2016 he published Elvis’s Army: Cold War GIs and the Atomic Battlefield (Harvard), which won the US Army Historical Foundation's Best Book Award and US Military History Group's Captain Richard Lukaszewicz Memorial Book Award. The Society for Military History has recognized Brian's work with its prestigious Distinguished Book Prize twice: for The Philippine War, 1899-1902 and Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Pacific, 1902-1940 (which also won the US Army Historical Foundation's Best Book Award). His most recent book, Real Soldiering: The U.S. Army in the Aftermath of War, 1815-1940, will be published by the University Press of Kansas in 2023. Brian has also published more than 40 essays, chapters, and articles, including the just-published “Forty Years On: Master Narratives and US Military History (War & Society, 2022), which includes a shout-out to Military Historians are People, Too!

Brian’s service to the profession has been immense. He currently sits on the editorial boards of Battlegrounds: Cornell Studies in Military History, War and Society, and the Journal of Strategic Studies. Brian is a past president and trustee of the Society for Military History, which recognized his service with its Edwin M. Simmons Memorial Service Award in 2012.

We'll talk Hawaii, the state of military history today, Gaylord Perry, Stones versus Beatles, and Fulbright-ing. Join us for a much-anticipated chat with Brian Linn! And a big shout-out to Carney's Pub in Bryan, Texas!

Rec.: 12/02/2022