
Announcements and Events
Lancaster University is once again running the Merriman Prize Competition, in which current undergraduates registered at any university worldwide are invited to submit an essay on a topic in the fields of international and/or military history from the ancient world to the present day.
The university is also running a separate Lancaster Prize in Digital Humanities competition, awarded for an outstanding undergraduate essay on any topic in a humanities discipline—such as history, archaeology, literature, theology, religious studies, anthropology and philosophy—that uses or critiques digital technology.
Application deadline for both prizes is June 16, 2023. Full details available at https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/history/studentships-and-essay-prizes/.
MEETING OF INTEREST
13TH ANNUAL AMERICAN DEFENDERS OF BATAAN AND CORREGIDOR MEMORIAL SOCIETY CONVENTION
May 4-6, 2023
Sheraton Albuquerque Uptown
2600 Louisiana BLVD NE
Albuquerque, NM
Special hotel rate available by April 6, 2023
Call 24 hrs. a day at 1800-325-3535 and ask for the American Defenders of Bataan & Corregidor Memorial Society (ADBC-MS) Rate or LINK (suggest you call to see if you can retain the conference rate after the deadline)
Find registration form HERE.
You can email in a pdf of the registration form and call in your registration fee by emailing Ms. Judy Pruitt, pruittja13@aol.com
Thursday, May 4, 2023
- 2023 POW/Japanese Friendship Trip to Japan discussed by the seven “children” of eight POWs.
- John Duresky talks about the book: Relentless Hope: A True Story of War and Survival by David L Britt, with John Duresky and Vickie Graham (ISBN 978-1-09838-539-2, august 31, 2021). The story of US Army 1st Lt. Chester K Britt who served at Ft Wint in Subic Bay and then in the Battle of Bataan. He was from La Crosse, Wisconsin.
- William Dalness and Josh Kefauver discuss their relatives in “Two Wars Two Generations.” Harold Elmore "Swede" Dalness, 51st Inf Regt (PA) who fought in the Battle of Bataan and was a POW of Imperial Japan and his namesake, Harold Edward Dalnes, a sailor aboard the USS Cyclops that disappeared in the Caribbean Sea during WW I.
Friday, May 5, 2023
- Chris Schurtz, Grandson of Major Paul W. Schurtz (515th Coast Artillery, died aboard the Oryoku Maru) discusses memorials across New Mexico remembering the Battle of Bataan and the Bataan Death March.
- Paul Ruiz tells the stories from his father MSGT Joe Ruiz (U.S. Army Philippine Scout, POW, Guerrilla Fighter) about the war in the Philippines.
- Gregory Kupsky, Ph.D., Senior Historian on the WWII Team in the Indo-Pacific Directorate at Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency gives an update on the disinterments of Unknowns from Manila American Cemetery and the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (Punchbowl, Hawaii)
Saturday, May 6, 2023
- Thomas H. Begay, U.S. Marine, Navajo Code Talker at Iwo Jima talks about The Navajo Code Talkers: Their Code Was Never Broken Presenter:
- The Next Generation: The Grandchildren of Bataan and Corregidor Veterans. Panel led by the grandchildren of Agapita Silva (200th Coast Artillery)
- Banquet-Speaker: author Steve Moore discusses his book As Good As Dead: The Daring Escape of American POWs From a Japanese Death Camp about the Palawan Massacre.
CALL FOR WRITERS
The Edwin Mellen Press
We are looking to increase our current pool of authors at The Edwin Mellen Press in the discipline of Military related studies. We are a non-subsidy academic publisher of scholarly books in the humanities and social sciences. Our sole criterion for publication is that a manuscript makes a contribution to scholarship. We publish monographs, critical editions, collections, translations, revisionist studies, constructive essays, bibliographies, dictionaries, reference guides and dissertations.
Mellen Press has published over 10,000 works in numerous disciplines, including military subjects of a scholarly nature. We publish 300 scholarly works a year. We offer recognition awards (for superior scholarship), royalties, authors maintain copyright, peer reviews and we have a world wide distribution network of libraries and direct sales. For submissions we are looking for scholarly works on a wide variety of Military issues and topics.
Please tell us about your work by emailing us at editor@mellenpress.com. Including your phone number will also be helpful. We will get back to you in 7 business days or less. For more information, please contact:
Edwin. Mellen Press
Philip Viverito/ Editor/Direct
editor@mellenpress.com
www.mellpress.com
BOOK PRIZE AWARDED
The U.S. Military History Group is pleased to announce John F. Shortal’s Code Name Arcadia: The First Wartime Conference of Churchill and Roosevelt as the winner of the 2021 Master Corporal Jan Stanislaw Jakobczak Memorial Book Award.
This book prize is named for Polish-born Jan Stanislaw Jakobczak (1914-2004), an Allied soldier of World War II. Arrested by the Soviets in 1939, Jakobczak spent three years in the Siberian Gulag before his release into General Władysław Anders’ Polish II Corps. After training in Persia and Palestine, Jakobczak and his compatriots fought alongside Allied forces in the Italian Campaign. He received a head wound during the recapture of the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino. After the war, Jakobczak emigrated first to London and later to Chicago, where he became a U.S. citizen. This book award memorializes his odyssey and that of other Allied soldier-refugees who made their homes in the United States.
Code Name Arcadia was published by Texas A&M University Press.
John F. Shortal is also the author of Forged by Fire: Robert L. Eichelberger and the Pacific War. He retired from the U.S. Army as a brigadier general and subsequently served as Director for Joint History for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
A selection committee of award-winning historians -- Robert Burrell, Jörg Muth, and David Ulbrich --selected Code Name Arcadia for the 2021 Jakobczak Award, which recognizes the outstanding book published in 2021 that covers any topic in U.S. Military History from 1898 to 1945.
The selection committee offered the following words of praise for the award-winning book:
"In Code Name Arcadia, John Shortal examines the Washington Conference running from December 22, 1941, to January 14, 1942, between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. The conference marked the first wartime meeting of the two Allied leaders and their senior military staffs. Shortal ably dissects the personalities and debates as the Allies started hammering out strategic priorities in the European and Pacific theaters of operations. The decision to fight "Germany First" ranks as the most significant outgrowth at the conference. Shortal should be commended for his thorough research and for adding to our understanding of British and American perspectives during the early months of the Second World War."
Please note: The two other selection committees for the 2021 Captain Richard Lukaszewicz Memorial Book and the 2021 Colonel Richard Ulbrich Memorial Book Award Award did not determine that any of the nominated volumes merited selection as winners.
PAPER PRIZE COMPETITION
The IJMH Early-Career Paper Prize 2023 by the International Journal of Military History and Historiography (IJMH)
The International Journal of Military History and Historiography invites submissions for its IJMH Early-Career Paper Prize.
The International Journal of Military History and Historiography publishes scholarship on military historical topics from antiquity to the contemporary period that appeal to an international readership. The journal is interested in the history of the military, of military doctrine, of strategy, and of warfare in all its forms, and in all aspects and themes of warfare throughout history. This includes the interactions between political, economic, social, and cultural history with military history.
The Prize will be awarded to an academic article of outstanding quality in the field of international military history written by a graduate student or an early-career scholar, which will have been published in the IJMH in 2023, either in print or as an advance article online. The author of the winning article will be officially announced in the journal and on the journal’s website, and receive a €1,000 cash prize. See past years’ winners below.
In line with IJMH’s general guidelines, submissions should be an original contribution to the field of military history that is of interest to an international readership, e.g., a topic involving more than one nation and, preferably, based on multi-archival research. There is no chronological limitation, but the subject should be historical and the methodology should fulfil academic standards.
Submission Requirements
Articles should be based extensively on primary research, must not have been previously published in another form or outlet, and should not be currently under consideration by another journal or book series. The submitted work has to comply with the journal’s style sheet, be between 8,000 and 10,000 words (including footnotes), and be thoroughly referenced. For further information on style and referencing, please visit www.brill.com/ijmh.
The prize is open to graduate students who are currently registered at a higher education institution, or to those who have obtained their doctoral degree after January 1, 2018.
Submissions for the 2023 prize are accepted on a rolling basis, but should be sent by 30 September 2023 by the latest. Please see the journal webpage for information on how to submit (www.brill.com/ijmh). In case of questions, contact the Editor-in-Chief, Dr Marco Wyss (m.wyss@lancaster.ac.uk).
Past winners of the IJMH Early-Career Paper Prize:
2022
Chungsun Lee, for the article “Between Visible and Invisible Deaths of the Korean War: Re-envisioning Operation Glory (1954) at the United Nations Memorial Cemetery in Korea”, published online as an Advance Article.
2021
Mitchell G. Klingenberg, for the article “‘In the Character of their Material, Animate and Inanimate, the Troops of the United States Excelled’: American Theatre-Level Logistics and Supply in the China Relief Expedition of 1900”, published online as an Advance Article.
2020
Ian Ona Johnson, for the article “Strategy on the Wintry Sea: The Russo-British Submarine Flotilla in the Baltic, 1914–1918”, published in Volume 40, No. 2.
2019
Hosub Shim, for the article “The Battle of An Khe Pass (1972): The Implications of the South Korean Army’s Pyrrhic Victory in the Vietnamization Phase of the Vietnam War”, published in print in Volume 40, No. 1; published online as an Advance Article.
2018
Zoë Rose Buonaiuto, for the article “A Grave Reconciliation: The Establishment of German War Cemeteries in Normandy, 1944-1964”, published in Volume 38, No. 2.
2017
Gaj Trifković, for the article “The Forgotten Surrender. The End of the Second World War in Yugoslavia”, published in Volume 37, No. 2.
RICHARD W. LEOPOLD PRIZE
The Richard W. Leopold Prize is given biennially by the Organization of American Historians to historical scholarship that focuses on America and the world, military affairs, historical activities of the federal government, documentary histories, or biography created by a U.S. government historian or federal contract historian. These subjects cover the concerns and the historical fields of activity of the late Professor Leopold, who was president of the OAH 1976–1977. Eligible projects for the Leopold Prize can be books or edited volumes, but they can also include other forms of historical scholarship and documentation including public history projects, exhibitions, podcasts, documentary film, and digital history projects. We invite entries that explore the multiple forms of engagement in the spheres of America in the world and U.S. military history or address the diversity of federal government activities and of biographical subjects. Entries could explore, but are not limited to, high politics, the state and political economies along with social and cultural history, imperial history, Indigenous history, and transnational histories of racial formation, gender and sexuality, or labor.
The prize was designed to improve contacts and interrelationships within the historical profession where an increasing number of history-trained scholars hold distinguished positions in governmental agencies and museums.
The prize recognizes the significant historical work being done by historians outside the academy.
Each entry must be published, uploaded, or installed during the two-year period January 1, 2022, through December 31, 2023.
The prize will be presented at the 2024 OAH Conference on American History in New Orleans, Louisiana, April 11–April 14.
Submission Procedures
The winner must have been employed as a full-time historian or federal contract historian in a U.S. government agency or museum for a minimum of five years prior to the submission. If the author has accepted an academic position, retired, or otherwise left federal service, the submission must have been created within two years of their separation date. Verification of current or past employment with the U.S. government (in the form of a letter or e-mail from the office that employs or has employed the author) must be included with each entry for the Leopold Prize.
One copy of each entry, clearly labeled “2024 Richard W. Leopold Prize Entry,” must be mailed directly to the committee members listed below. Each committee member must receive all submissions postmarked by October 1, 2023.
For books and edited volumes, bound page proofs may be used if they are to be published after October 1, 2023, and before January 1, 2024. If a bound page proof is submitted, a bound copy of the book must be sent to each committee member postmarked no later than January 7, 2024. (Please see “Submission Policy” at right.)
If a book carries a copyright date that is different from the publication date, but the actual publication date falls during the correct time frame making it eligible, please include a letter of explanation from the publisher with each copy of the book sent to the committee members.
For nonbook entries, appropriate documentation of the project along with evidence that it was publicly available from October 1, 2023, and before January 1, 2024, should be sent to each member of the committee. That documentation will necessarily vary by genre of entry but could, for example, include a catalog for an exhibition, a URL for a digital history project, active links to discrete episodes of a podcast, or for documentary film instructions for streaming.
The final decision will be made by the Richard W. Leopold Prize Committee by February 2024. The winner will be provided with details regarding the OAH Conference on American History and awards presentation. By applying for this prize, you are agreeing to the OAH’s use of your data however it is needed in the normal course of business if selected as winner or honorable mention. Read our privacy policy here.
Richard W. Leopold Prize Committee
John Worsencroft (Committee Chair)
16 Lake Forest Hills
Shreveport, LA 71109
[Affiliation: Louisiana Tech University]
Please e-mail the title(s) you are submitting for consideration so the committee can verify that all books have been received: johnw@latech.edu
Chad H. Parker
University of Louisiana, Lafayette
Department of History
554 Griffin Hall
141 Rex Street
Lafayette, LA 70503
Nicole Sackley
3209 Kensington Avenue
Richmond, VA 23221
[Affiliation: University of Richmond]
DEADLINE: SUBMISSIONS MUST BE POSTMARKED BY OCTOBER 1, 2023
Please send as soon as possible to allow for any mail delays that might occur.
Verification of current or past employment with the U.S. government (in the form of a letter or e-mail sent to the publisher from the office that employs or has employed the author) must be included with each entry for the Leopold Prize.
SEEKING TRANSCRIBERS
Project CHECO: The Air Force Experience in Vietnam" (https://airforcehistory.net) seeks to textually digitize a semi-curated collection of documents held at the Air Force archive. It also supports research into the correlation between demographics and crowdsourcing effectiveness.
The Air Force created Project CHECO (Contemporary Historical Examination of Current Operations) in 1962 to analyze issues of immediate concern to various echelons of the service. Over the course of fifteen years, authors completed more than 250 reports on topics that included special operations, conventional air operations, rules of engagement, training, air base defense, and many others. Arguably, the Project CHECO reports represent the single-most comprehensive collection of Air Force-produced documents detailing its activities in the Vietnam War. The vast majority of these have been declassified and approved for public release, and only the publicly-available studies are being used for this project.
For the volunteer, this is a trifecta of opportunities: A chance to learn about U.S. Air Force history in Southeast Asia from the perspective of the service itself; contribute to digital history through the textual digitization of a portion of the USAF archive (similar to efforts by NARA, LOC, and the Smithsonian); and, last but not least, help me gather data for my dissertation!
The process is simple:
1. Fill out a demographic form (individual identities will not be associated with performance)
2. Review some directions for the site.
3. Correct or transcribe a document from the Air Force archive.
4. Take a survey.
THAT'S IT! If you have any questions, please contact me at dabyrd4@gmail.com. Thanks, Dave
SUBMISSIONS SOUGHT
Joint Force Quarterly seeks history submissions for its “Recall” Section
Joint Force Quarterly, published by the National Defense University Press, is looking for articles of 2,500 - 5,000 words or less for its Recall section. Recall focuses on historical issues often of contemporary relevance to the joint force. JFQ is the Chairman's joint military and security studies journal designed to inform and educate national security professionals on joint and integrated operations; whole of government contributions to national security policy and strategy; homeland security; and developments in training and joint military education to better equip America's military and security apparatus to meet tomorrow's challenges while protecting freedom today. Instructions for submission of articles is at: http://ndupress.ndu.edu/SubmitaManuscript.aspx. Any questions can be sent to JFQ1@ndu.edu.
