#TheWorldWars

Whoa! The History Channel is actually airing a history program this week. "The World Wars" is a three episode story that connects World War I and World War II through the lives of several key players, including Churchill, FDR, Hitler, MacArthur, Mussolini, Patton, and Stalin. There are, of course many key players like Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, Harry Truman, and any other German, Briton, or Soviet not mentioned above, who were overlooked, but I guess that the show would have lost its focus if it included too many characters.  Overall the first episode of the series, which aired last night on Memorial Day, is entertaining. There were some amateurish mistakes (maybe because the History Channel is out of practice making history shows?), such as using World War II tanks in World War I and indiscriminate use of firearms (all sides used the the British Lee-Enfield .303). There is some cheesy overacting and strange cinematography. Patton rode the outside of his tank into combat without even a helmet on. In another strange scene Benito Mussolini snipes at three German soldiers. Wearing what appears to be a dress uniform (and, again, no helmet) loads the rounds individually like a big game hunter, as he fires at his quarry. One wonders why the Germans didn't drop into the tall grass and return fire. In another scene, I wondered if FDR was really alone with Woodrow Wilson when the president received a copy of the Zimmermann Telegram. And there was some misleading overemphasis to move the story along. For example, one might get the impression that George Patton was the only one who recognized the importance of the tank in warfare. In fact, he was a fairly minor player in developing the tactics to suit the new technology. British thinkers like Fuller and Hart had a greater impact on armored warfare, and, of course, we cannot ignore the German commanders who implemented the Blitzkrieg. In the United States Adna Chaffee had more influence on developing the armored branch.

Chester A. Arthur's bed

File this in the category of "you never know where you will run into presidential history, even for Chester A. Arthur." This is his bed, which is displayed at the Ghost Town Museum in Colorado Springs. According to Carl Anthony the bed was passed down to Arthur's son and grandson, who both lived in Colorado Springs (by-the-way you can read about more presidential bed history at the list link).

AHA Conference Review: Saturday January 4, 2014, the rest of the day

After our panel concluded on Saturday, I went to the book exhibition, visited the poster session (which I did not easily find), and finished the day by attending James McPherson's Society of Military History lecture, "The Rewards of Risk Taking: Two Civil War Admirals." Like many historians I could easily recognize McPherson. In addition to having read several of his books, I have seen him numerous times on television. His lecture focused on the subject of his most recent book, a naval history of the Civil War, which I admit I have not read. Not sure if I ever will, but that is a statement on my limited reading time, not on the value of McPherson's work. Craig Symonds's Civil War at Sea, which I have read, covered the subject masterfully. Symonds's was present in the audience and McPherson acknowledged him and his expertise. McPherson's lecture compared Union Admirals Samuel DuPont and David Farragut to  Generals George McClellan and Ulysses Grant. In this analogy DuPont and McClellan are the dilatory commanders who sought to mitigate risks, while Farragut and Grant were more gutsy commanders willing to take a gamble and double down in the next move. The main point being that in engagements that involved thousands of men on both sides, the outcome often depended on the personality and command traits of the leaders. I enjoyed the lecture, but I have some qualms with an approach that puts all the agency in the hands of the Union commanders. In my humble opinion chance and luck are underrated factors in historical events, especially in military history.

I then waited an hour for a shuttle back to the Hilton that never came. I missed the last one of the evening by a couple of minutes, but did not see the sign until later. It was a cold, dark walk across the bridge, but only a 20 minute walk.

AHA Conference Review: Saturday January 4, 2014, 11:30-1:30 pt 2

Now for the rest of the panel, with gratitude to Jonathan Anzalone for organizing our panel and guiding it through the approval process.

In "In Search of a Skier's Paradise: New York State and the Development of Skiing in the Adirondack Park, 1932-67" Jonathan cataloged the misadventures of state sponsored recreation. In this case, New York sought to promote skiing, which gained in some popularity after the 1932 Winter Olympics were held at Lake Placid, NY with a state owned and operated resort. At the same time, the state sought to goose the economy of the Adirondack region, which enjoyed a unique status as a state park. Very poor execution undermined these lofty ideals. After a decade of hard work, in which supporters obtained a successful state referendum to revise the state constitution to allow the construction of a resort on protected land. It was only after the state constructed a highway to the resort, built the resort, and promoted it throughout the region, that it was revealed that they had put all their hopes in the wrong place. It was a disaster. The mountain was too steep for inexperienced skiers to safely manage. It was also too dry and windy, which resulted in a dangerous, ice-covered course. In the early 1960s the slope was among the first to utilize artificial snow blowers. The community experienced no economic benefits, and the experience left such a bitter taste in the minds of voters that a referendum to create another state operated sky resort failed in 1961. The site is currently a weather station.

In "Disneylands with Trout: Environmental Change and Conflict on Tailwater Fisheries" Jen Corrinne Brown described how the promotion of recreation led to environmental consequences for a range of native fish species. As dams stopped the flow of a river, they created a still area referred to as tailwater. Adaptable and valued trout thrived in this new environment with its warmer water. States sought to promote recreational fishing by stocking these areas with trout. This is where the Disney Land reference comes in. Abundant trout created a cheap thrill of easily getting some keepers. Jen argued that this created an artificial experience of nature somewhat akin to Disney Land. The cost for this policy was paid for by the local species that thrived in the cooler water of the freely flowing rivers and streams. Deemed "trash fish" and poorly valued by anglers, no effort was made to protect or propagate the native species. A more subtle ecological impact effected other parts of the ecosystem as well. Alterations in flow and fish species led to changes in plant and insect life. There was a human cost to increasing numbers of fishermen. In the case of the Bighorn River in Montana, the Crow Indians lost control of the river through their reservation as well as their ability to regulate the anglers on their reservation.  Once again, Native Americans were screwed.

In "Run the Caldera: The Contested Politics of Wilderness Recreation in Northern New Mexico" Sarah Stanford-McIntyre chronicled the conflict over the first land trust established by the United States government. Created in 2000, the Caldera trust piloted a unique government-private cooperative effort at environmental protection. This approached, however, was plagued with problems. In its effort to become economically sustainable by 2015, the trust raised fees; marketed several recreational activities, including a marathon, van tours; hunting, and fishing; and maintained a working ranch. Leaving the land in a wild, untrammeled state or allowing free or unrestricted hiking did not fit into the plan to create a sustainable trust. The situation was ripe for a political contest between the conservative, profit-minded trust and its more liberal ecologically-minded critics. As the trust struggled to make money with increasing fees and more activities to attract paying customers, the conflict escalated.  At this point the trust will not hit its 2015 target. On the other hand, efforts to turn the land over to the Forest Service for management have also made no progress. Thus, the conflict over the use of the land has resulted in paralysis.

My tenuous genealogical connection to the 1916 Easter Rising

John A. Kilgallon was born in the Village of Far Rockaway in 1891. His father Luke Kilgallon and

mother Nora Walsh Kilgallon immigrated from County Mayo. They married in the United States, and I cannot say whether or not they knew each other in the old country. John was their only son. My connection (remember I said it was tenuous) to the Kilgallon family is that my grandmother's half-sister, Agnes Cosgrove, was Nora Walsh's niece. Agnes immigrated to the United States in 1912 at the age of 16 and lived with her aunt's family.

Luke was a blacksmith who wisely learned how to fix cars and built a prosperous auto repair and gas station in the Far Rockaways. He patented a device to put tires onto the rims. In 1914 he sent his son to St. Enda's school in Dublin. There John was decisively influenced by the school's founder, Patrick H. Pearse, one of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rebellion. Known as "The Yank" John drilled as part of a unit known as "Pearse's Own" consisting of current and former St. Enda's students. He was in the Post Office during the thick of the combat, and surrendered with Pearse after six days of heavy fighting. After his capture, the British sent John to Frongoch Prison Camp in Wales. The authorities offered to release him if he swore an oath of allegiance to the British crown. John rejected this offer. As he stated in a letter to his father that was later published in the Brooklyn Eagle in February 1917,  he could not make such an oath without violating the principles that he had and his comrades had fought to uphold. America's Ambassador the Court of St. James, Walter Page, pressed the British government to release "The Yank." The British government yielded to the pressure, most likely thinking of the larger political picture, and Kilgallon was released on Christmas Day 1916. John served his country in World War I as a machinist in the United States Navy. From his service record, it appears that spent the entire war in stateside naval bases. John died in 1972 at the age of 80.

My mother who had known John described him as a very quiet, almost meek man. She could not believe he would have participated in such a violent event. One wonders how the this youthful experience shaped the rest of his life.

AHA Conference Review: Saturday January 4, 2014, 11:30-1:30 pt 1

Now it was my turn to present at the AHA Conference. My paper "Disagreement, Debate, and Discussion over the Meaning of Nature Protection: Wildlife Conservationists and the Battle over the Migratory Bird Conservation Act of 1929" was first up in our panel A Place to Play: Outdoor Recreation and Environmental Conflict in the Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century United States. Thank you to Jonathan Anzalone for organizing our panel and including me.

My paper focused on a little known, but I feel important, piece of legislation to create wildlife refuges that dragged on for most of the 1920s. My argument is that this bitter debate between different groups of wildlife protectionists shattered a coalition that had achieved striking success in the decade before the introduction of the refuge bill. In short, the goals that the preservationist wing (led by William Hornaday) and the sportsmen or utilitarian wing (led by John Burnham) differed in fundamental ways, which created mistrust between the two groups. I won't say anymore; you can read the full version below.

My presentation did not go as well as I would have liked. For some reason, I stumbled over several words and lost my place once or twice. I felt I was reading too fast, even though several practice runs at a slower pace had me coming in well within the time limit.

The theme of our conference today is “disagreement, debate, and discussion.” My paper focuses on the disagreement, debate, and discussion within the conservation movement over three bills between 1923 and 1929 to establish federal migratory bird refuges. In the short term, this acrimonious, internecine battle stalled an important piece of legislation. This delay exacerbated the conditions that the legislation sought to relieve. In the long term, it wrecked a coalition that had only a decade before achieved historic victories to protect American birds.

First, it needs to be stated that all wildlife conservationists supported the main effort of the legislation to create migratory bird refuges. Refuges were deemed essential to meeting the obligations of the landmark 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act with Canada, and for creating breeding and propagation safe havens for a variety of bird species. Led by Chief Edwin Nelson, the federal Bureau of Biological Survey expressed its growing alarm over the devastating effects that increased drainage of marshland for farming was having on critical migratory bird breeding habitat. If they agreed on the importance and purposes of creating refuges, what then did wildlife protectionists argue about for almost an entire decade? First, they disagreed about how to pay for refuge acquisition. This was no small consideration. A sustainable and reliable source of revenue was necessary to construct a flourishing refuge system. Who paid for land purchases opened up the second question, which was, should hunters receive special access to the refuges, since migratory game birds were an important economic asset?

As John Reiger points out in his seminal American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, the early enlightened hunters – men like George Bird Grinnell and Theodore Roosevelt -- supported forest and water conservation largely because they understood the importance of habitat to the protection of their game. By 1921 many sportsmen concluded that they deserved to enjoy the fruit of their conservation labors after several decades of hard work. Their leading spokesperson was John Bird Burnham, president of the American Game Protection Association (AGPA), [and this is a very important part of the story] a conservation organization financed by a conglomeration of gun and ammunition manufacturing companies such as DuPont, Remington, and Winchester. Burnham also served as the chairman of the influential Migratory Bird Advisory Board, which was created in 1913 to advise the secretary of agriculture on federal hunting policy and regulations. Burnham believed that American wildlife was in what he in 1923, called, “a vigorous and hopeful renaissance,” largely due to the efforts of sportsmen to put sound conservation measures in the local, state, and federal statute books. Echoing his idol Theodore Roosevelt, Burnham wanted hunting to be an accessible sport to all Americans, not just the wealthy who could afford costly excursions to remote areas. He wished to expand, as he said, "the [American] system that aims to preserve for all the people the benefits that otherwise will accrue only to those blessed with considerably more that an average share of wealth."

Burnham envisioned a refuge system paid for by hunters through a $1 federal license to shoot migratory waterfowl. He reasoned that if sportsmen financed the refuges, they should benefit from them in the form of public shooting grounds on or adjacent to the refuges. Public shooting grounds would provide good hunting opportunities to Americans of all income levels.

In 1921 Senator Harry New of Indiana and Congressman Daniel Anthony of Kansas introduced a bill written by John Burnham that included the $1 hunting license and public shooting grounds. To increase the popularity of their bill in rural areas they packaged it as relief to the farmers and landowners who felt besieged by hunters requesting access to their land. Burnham marshaled almost unanimous support for this legislation from within the conservation movement, including the National Association of Audubon Societies. One prominent conservationist, however, was absent from the roster of supporters. In what was a strange display of apathy on his part, William Temple Hornaday, the irascible Director of the Bronx Zoo, didn’t think it necessary to get involved because he reasoned that the bill could not possibly pass the Congress. This proved to be an accurate prediction. Although it cleared the Senate, it failed in the House. Those who voted nay did so largely because they opposed the federal government purchasing lands within the states and requiring a license to shoot migratory waterfowl.

If Hornaday had not been thinking deeply about the New-Anthony Bill, he did formulate his own proposals for hunting regulation. He envisioned himself as the representative of the millions of Americans who did not hunt. This predominately urbanite constituency mirrored the 44 million people who visited the zoo over his thirty-year tenure. Unlike Burnham, Hornaday believed American wildlife was in a state of precipitous and dangerous decline. He was alarmed by the growing numbers of hunters who took the field, like so many George Babbitts, with their new gadgets, more effective guns, and most especially their automobiles that granted them unprecedented access. He knew he could not stop them from taking the field, but be believed strongly that some restrictions could counter the negative effects that growing numbers of hunters were having on wildlife populations. At the December 1923 meeting of the Migratory Bird Advisory Board, Hornaday introduced a measure to reduce the daily bag limits on duck and geese. Although he was voted down by the decisive vote of 16-2, the issue of bag limits became thoroughly entangled with discussion of the migratory bird refuge legislation.

In early December 1924 Hornaday and Edwin Nelson met at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City to discuss bag limits. Nelson felt caught between rival conservation factions. On the one hand he did not want to anger the hunters. The federal government had too few wardens and Nelson was forced to rely mostly on their voluntary compliance to fairly new and not necessarily popular federal hunting regulations. On the other hand, Nelson gave some consideration to Hornaday’s position that waterfowl populations were declining in number, if only because it seemed the logical effect of shrinking breeding grounds. Before committing himself, however, Nelson wanted to conduct a population survey. In 1925 he issued a report that supported Burnham’s position wildlife increase and claimed that game populations were in fact increasing between 10 and 200 percent depending on location. As a result of this report Hornaday came to view Nelson as a dishonest broker standing in the camp of the gun makers and their minion, John Burnham. As Chairman of the Permanent Wildlife Protection Fund — a well endowed organization of which he was essentially the only member — Hornaday issued a press release that found its way into a front page article in the New York Times. Hornaday publicly proclaimed that Burnham and Nelson were nothing less than "paid agents of the big corporations who make and sell guns and ammunition." The tone of Hornaday’s inflammatory comments weighed heavy on the wildlife protection community. While not defending Burnham, some newspapers felt that Hornaday’s rhetoric was entirely too scathing and too personal. Two years later Burnham successfully sued Hornaday for libel over the press release.

Within several weeks of Hornaday’s attack on Burnham, a convention of state game commissioners met in Denver, Colorado. The atmosphere was tense bordering on hostile. "A gleaming spear was poised at every tepee entrance," T. Gilbert Pearson, the secretary of the Audubon Society, wrote later. Through several difficult meetings the factions forged a deal, referred to as the Madsen Compromise, after Utah game commissioner David Madsen that removed the hunting license provision from the refuge bill. This compromise would give the sportsmen the public shooting grounds they demanded and Hornaday an alternative revenue stream he demanded. Ironically, neither Hornaday nor Burnham trusted the other enough to support the deal. Hornaday felt that without a bag limit reduction to offset the public shooting grounds, the compromise was nothing more than an empty gesture designed only to disarm him and his supporters. "John Burnham's influence for evil is perfectly amazing," he wrote in disgust to Will Dilg of the Izaak Walton League. To an extent, Hornaday was correct to be suspicious. Burnham openly admitted to friends that he felt no obligation to be bound by the "compromise" for he felt that, as he wrote, one correspondent, that Hornaday and his allies had "laid a trap" for him in Denver.  As the two most dominating, powerful, and respected personalities in the wildlife protection movement grew more divided they drowned out the vast majority in the middle who were willing to work with each other in good faith.

            In 1926 a migratory bird refuge bill was re-introduced into the Congress with the hunting license and public shooting grounds provisions. Supporters were cautiously optimistic that it would pass this time. Capturing this mood, T. Gilbert Pearson of the Audubon Society wrote to Frank Chapman in February 1926, “Altogether I feel the situation is pretty good for its passage this year, if no one of a dozen or more flourishing monkey-wrenches do not happen to land in the works.” Inopportunely Hornaday lobbed such a monkey wrench in the form of a bill sponsored by Senator Royal Copeland of New York and Representative Schuyler Merritt of Connecticut to reduce bag limits. Hornaday viewed the reduction as absolutely essential to equalize the impact of the proposed public shooting grounds, but it seemed to his adversaries as nothing more than an irresponsible provocation. The bag limit bill was highly controversial among conservationists because it challenged the Progressive Era assumptions that policy was best made by interested parties and trained experts. Putting nuts and bolts wildlife management decisions in the hands of untutored Congressmen seemed downright dangerous.

On April 29, 1926, during a debate on the Migratory Bird Refuge bill in the House, New York Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia denounced the public shooting grounds proposal as a sham, “under the guise of conservation.” Then he proceeded to read into the Congressional Record excerpts of confidential correspondence between John Burnham and the bigwigs of the gun and ammunition manufacturing firms. Burnham wrote in one such missive in 1924, "The sentimentalists led by Doctor Hornaday are demanding cuts in the bag limits and seasons, which if carried to the logical conclusion means the reduction of shooting opportunities to the vanishing point. Of course, if this happens, the sale of firearms and ammunition will be seriously affected." Such comments impeached Burnham's credibility, and seemingly validated all that Hornaday had been saying about the conflict of interest between Burnham's role as Chairman of the Migratory Bird Advisory Board and his position as president of the conservation organization funded by the nation's largest gun and ammunition corporations. Speaking of the effect of the publication of Burnham's correspondence on the pending legislation, Massachusetts state Ornithologist and stalwart Hornaday ally Edward Howe Forbush commented, "If he wrote those letters, he has killed the game refuge bill."

Four weeks later Hornaday announced his retirement as Director of the Bronx Zoo, a position he had held since 1896. It was rumored at the time that he had in fact been forced to resign. Frederic Walcott of the Bronx Zoo's Board of Managers wrote that Hornaday had paid what he called “the extreme penalty” for both the bag limit proposal and the LaGuardia attack. Over the course of three decades Burnham and George Bird Grinnell wrote often to Hornaday's superiors at the zoo, arguing that the Director's inflammatory public comments embarrassed their pubic-spirited, family oriented organization. Burnham must have felt enormous satisfaction when he learned that his adversary had finally received his just desserts.

Regardless of what was rumored at the time, it is open to debate if the seventy-one year old director was pushed out or retired on his own accord. Nevertheless, Hornaday’s departure from the zoo did not diminish his voice or dampen his vigorous opposition to public shooting grounds. The House voted down the migratory bird refuge bill shortly after LaGuardia's performance. After failing for the second time to shepherd a favorable migratory bird refuge bill through the Congress, the gun and ammunition corporations withdrew their funding from Burnham's AGPA. Now it was Hornaday's turn to feel immense satisfaction at his rival's fall from grace.

In January 1928 Senator Peter Norbeck, a progressive Republican from South Dakota, introduced a migratory bird refuge bill. Hornaday saw Norbeck as an honest player and wrote to the Senator to inform him that his proposed legislation based on the principles of the New-Anthony bill, “is not at all the good-conservation bill that you think it is.” Furthermore, Hornaday appealed to the senator’s progressivism by declaring in a bit of overstatement that the public shooting grounds provision would “put the federal government into the business of founding and maintaining duck-shooting resorts.” Convinced that the most important feature of the bill was refuge creation, Norbeck responded that in his bill only 10-30 percent of the refuges would have public shooting grounds. This mollified Hornaday who accepted it as something of a compromise. But Hornaday’s adversaries were alarmed by his seeming influence on Norbeck. Carlos Avery, an ally of Burnham’s, warned the senator to be careful of taking advice from Hornaday, “because if you do there will be not much left of the bill.” As it turned out, Avery was right to be concerned. Daily Norbeck received disheartening letters from all the key players in the wildlife protection movement expressing vehement support for one provision or another and casting aspersions on other conservationists. Surprised and exasperated over such infighting over what he considered secondary issues, Norbeck barked to Edmund Seymour of the Camp-Fire Club and a staunch Hornaday ally, “I am for the Sanctuary bill with our without shooting grounds.”

If Norbeck found the conservationists frustrating to deal with, his colleagues in the Senate presented additional obstacles. It is beyond the scope of this paper to examine them in detail, but in the end Norbeck’s bill was amended to resemble all that Hornaday had wanted. The public shooting grounds provision and hunting license were struck from the bill. Instead, treasury would pay for land requisition like any other Congressional appropriation. The revised migratory bird refuge bill passed the Senate in late 1927 by a unanimous vote, a fact that Hornaday described in his memoirs, Thirty Years War for Wildlife, as, “an AMAZING MIRACLE.” The bill’s sponsor did not share Hornaday’s sense of triumph. To the contrary, the former governor and experienced legislator vented, “I am frankly sick over the whole situation.” “I have wasted so much effort on this matter and I look upon it as the biggest failure I have ever been connected with,” he wrote to another. Norbeck vowed that he would not lift a finger to get a comparable version through the House.

Hornaday feared that Burnham and his allies would outflank him in the House by restoring the hunting license and public shooting grounds provisions in the lower chamber and then using the conference committee to refashion the Senate bill. Speaking on behalf of the National Committee of 100 – a lobbying front he formed with Edmund Seymour after retiring from the Bronx Zoo in 1926 – Hornaday launched what could only be described as a media blitz in support of the Senate version. This vociferous campaign throughout 1928 made the Committee into something of an obnoxious pariah. Even Hornaday's ardent admirer, author Thornton Burgess, commented that he was "bitterly assailed" for being associated with such an organization and that "men whom I had long looked up to, and whose regard and good opinion I cherished, turned against me."

Hornaday’s fears proved unfounded. The entire conservation movement was too tired and drained by the long battle to fight anymore over these issues. There remained absolute consensus on the need for refuges, and the devastating effects of drainage and drought had only worsened. On February 9, it passed the House unanimously by a vote of 219-0. President Coolidge signed it shortly thereafter.  Within a decade, the migratory bird refuge system consisted of 85 refuges containing nearly 700,000 acres.

Hornaday had won an impressive victory against difficult odds, but his success came at a price. The conflict between he and Burnham, which they both must share blame, wrecked and exhausted a powerful coalition of scientists, sportsmen, nature enthusiasts, bird watchers, and urbanites, who had achieved so much working together, during the progressive era. A decade later President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted a grand bargain of sorts to recast the movement. The result was a duck stamp to pay for land acquisition and a reduction in the bag limit, among other reforms, favored by Hornaday. Structurally, the administration sponsored the National Wildlife Federation, which was designed to serve as an umbrella organization to unite sportsmen and non-sportsmen. Despite these efforts, the coalition could not be resurrected to resemble its former self and the divide between these groups, first sharpened during the debate over the Migratory Bird Refuge Act, echoed throughout the remainder of the twentieth century.

AHA Conference Review: Saturday January 4, 2014, 9:00-11:00

Woke up this morning at 3:30 am after having a dream that I had missed my panel. Not a good way to start the day. I felt better after a 3 mile run on the treadmill in the Hilton's gym, even though they had the heat cranked up so I high that I broke a sweat during my stretch.

The first panel of the day was Empires at War, 1912-23: Rethinking the Great War a Century On.  In a nutshell, this panel argued that historians should view the war as one of empires. This plays out in two sub-arguments. First, our understanding of the war would be better served if we expanded its temporal parameter to include the pre- and post- war conflicts, including the Italian invasion of Libya and the Balkan Wars before 1914 and the revolutions and Russian-Polish War after 1918. Second, our understanding of the impact of the war would be improved if we examined the effects it had in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East through the connection of these parts of the world to European empires.

In "The United States Empire, 1914-24" Christopher Capozzola argued that despite Woodrow Wilson's rallying call that the United States was fighting to save democracy, our nation was an imperial power. He cited military interventions in Haiti (1915), Santo Domingo (1916), Panama (1918), Cuba (1924), and Nicaragua (1924) to support his argument, and added that he United States trained local police and military forces in several Latin American nations to hold up leaders favorable to American policy. According to Capozzola, historians should not see the United States as the outsider in the war of empires, but as one more imperial power acting in its own interests.

In "Greater France and the Great War" Richard Fogarty examined the place that empire played in  France's war effort. For starters, he made the case for expanding the date ranges of the war. Specifically in the case of France to include the Moroccan Crisis and conscription of Algerians before the war, and the Syrian insurgency and Rhineland occupation after it. The war was very much at the heart of shared common experiences for an empire that stretched across several continents. From South East Asia across Africa, subjects of the empire participated in a common war against Germany. This, however, did not create a stronger sense of unity. In fact, Fogarty argues, it had the opposite effect as the war accelerated the break up of the empire.

In "The Great War as Global Conflict" Erez Manela made -- as his title implied -- a case to think of the Great War as more than a European war. The French were not alone in expanding the scope of the war to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. As examples, he noted that 140,000 Chinese non-combat laborers served in Europe (something that I don't recall ever hearing about before), and that Great Britain fought insurgencies in India, Iraq, and Ireland. He continued on Fogarty's theme that war accelerated imperial decay by stating that the war led to the transition of global organization from empires to nation-states. Manela also made the claim for an expanded time frame, suggesting that 1911 be considered the better starting date (largely because of the Balkan Wars).

This panel drew many questions and comments from the audience. One line questioned the notion of an American empire. Was training a police force in a Latin American country the equivalent of Belgian brutality in the Congo? Nor did Americans in the Progressive Era see themselves as an empire. Unlike the British, who boasted of their empire as an agent of civilization, Americans of the time period were not so celebratory, and even understood themselves in contrast to the Europeans as not being imperial powers. The other line or comments focused on the significance of Africa and Asia to the war itself. In other words, the war was still won and lost on the Western Front. The colonial African soldiers fought in the trenches too. While the global perspective is important, it should not overshadow the central front of the war.