Master of Arts in History

Life Gives You Opportunities to Make Course Corrections

Before every class I’ve taught, I’ve given a short introduction about my life and career. I do this for two reasons. First, the retrospective is mildly entertaining, containing a few embarrassing (or, at least, self-effacing) photos and some funny comments. It helps break the ice. Second, it reveals my background, potential biases, experiences and qualifications to teach that particular course. I think it’s important for students to know where their professor is coming from and that s/he’s had the proper training to lead them on their intellectual journey. I start the story with a description of myself, in college as an undergraduate, majoring in engineering, and about to join the Navy after graduation. I contrast that with my current position as an Air Force office with a PhD in History. My lesson: if you aren’t on the course that you want to be on, life gives you lots of opportunities to make course corrections. I’m very grateful for those opportunities. I have to admit, it can be a bit daunting. Not many people would “throw away” an engineering degree from MIT and decide that they want to be a historian (fortunately, I’ve been able to combine my passion for history with a full career in the military) but I’m very happy with my decision. I found that there are much bigger questions in life than, “What is the absolute minimum thickness of a hull that will not break apart in rough seas?” For example, “Why wouldn’t a shipping company invest in double-hulled tankers in order to prevent an ecological disaster if that hull ever winds up on a reef?” I think, deep down, that’s the true appeal of history. It lets us get at the really important questions in life.

My first interest in history began with the Civil War. It’s a natural topic for anyone growing up in the South (As William Faulkner said, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past,” which is especially true in the South!) My MA work at Louisiana State University focused on southern Unionists, a story, I learned, largely excised from the history of the war by the “Lost Cause” mythmakers in the years after the war. Part of the myth is that the South was solidly united behind the Confederacy, which simply isn’t true. For the mythmakers, acknowledging that many Southerners were unconvinced of the wisdom of the Confederacy’s cause somehow minimized the contributions of those who were.  So I told that story, specifically focusing on those who were so opposed to the Confederacy that they took up arms for the Union. In the process, I made a fascinating discovery: History has to have an ARGUMENT! Narrative history is not academic history. You can’t just tell stories; you have to make a point! And, as my dissertation advisor at the University of Kansas taught me years later, don’t waste all that time and effort making a minor point or watering it down with qualifiers and stipulations. Be BOLD! Make a significant contribution.  Hopefully, that’s what I did in my PhD program, arguing that the Air Force, for much of its history, has gotten it wrong -- that it can’t win wars by itself and needs to work more on being an effective part of the joint team where, along with the ground and naval forces, it can have a significant, even decisive impact.

While at LSU, I read a book in my graduate seminar that opened my eyes to a whole new field of history, one that occupies a growing share of my attention. The book was Timothy Silver’s A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800. Silver’s book is about a lot of things, but one of the things it focuses on is deer hunting, which, at that point in my life, I knew something about. I had grown up hunting and fishing in the swamps and bayous of Louisiana but had never considered that my interests in history and the outdoors could be linked. Although LSU’s history department did not offer any courses on environmental history (the university does have a robust geography department) I enrolled in a waterfowl ecology course as my final elective and determined that, if I ever had the chance to purse a terminal degree, I would go to a school that had a strong environmental history program. When that opportunity arrived in 2008, I chose the University of Kansas, based on demonstrated strengths in both military and environmental history. I concentrated on these two fields and joined them under the rubric of 20th-century American history. At KU, I had the opportunity to produce seminar papers on the environmental history of the Air Force Academy, arguing that American ideas about nature and the West significantly influenced the site selection process, and on the impact of the Air Force’s training and production infrastructure on the Great Plains, which has left unmitigated environmental damage in too many places.

My current research focuses on how the natural environment around Colorado Springs, specifically the lack of resources such as water, led city leaders to attract first military and later religious “industries” to provide the city’s economic base, and the result these decisions have had on the city’s political climate. I remain interested in both military and environmental history, especially over the last century in the United States. My courses and the books I assign reflect my interest in this period, these topics and the broad grasslands between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains, where I’ve been fortunate enough to spend most of the last 20 years. I’m still making minor course corrections, but I’m really enjoying the scenery on the current leg of my journey, which would not have been possible if an unhappy engineering student hadn’t walked into the History department at LSU one spring afternoon and announced that he wanted to pursue a graduate degree in history!

- Chris Rein is a faculty member in the history program at Norwich.