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Left to Right: Showalter, Lengel, and Lockhart

Dennis Showalter is a renowned expert on military history, with a particular focus on Germany and the United States. Since 1969 he has been a professor at Colorado College, where he has “the best students God ever gave a professor.” In 2011 he was awarded the college’s Lloyd E. Worner Teacher of the Year Award. He is joint editor of the journal War in History and past president of the Society for Military History. He has advised or been a board member of several Washington-based policy institutes and has written or edited two dozen books and almost 200 articles. His most recent works include The Wars of German Unification (2004), Patton and Rommel: Men of War in the Twentieth Century (2005), Hitler’s Panzers (2009), and Armor and Blood: the Battle of Kursk (2013). He is currently working on a book detailing the age of mass war, a subject he also covers in this issue’s “The Making of Mass Warfare, 1789–1918.” Showalter believes that the study of war is a public discipline, for the general community, and he agrees with the aphorism—“We may not be interested in war, but war is always interested in us.” It is, he says, “the low common denominator of human behavior.”

As a graduate student in modern European history at the University of Virginia, Edward G. Lengel focused on Great Britain and World War I. Though he continues to have an abiding passion for the military history of that period, a part-time job during his graduate studies changed his trajectory and pulled him deeper into history—American history. Tat job, working with the university’s Papers of George Washington documentary editing project, became a career, and since 2010 he has been director of the Papers project, a mammoth undertaking dedicated to publishing everything written by or to Washington. His first major book, General George Washington: A Military Life, was published in 2005. He continues to write frequently on Washington as a leader and a man, but he hasn’t given up on World War I. His To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918, appeared in 2008. In “Ancient Rivalry, Modern Clash,” he takes an indepth look at the tactics and geopolitics surrounding the Greco-Turkish War, which he sees as a continuation of a global conflict that lasted from 1914 to 1945 and beyond.

Paul Lockhart teaches European and military history at Wright State University. His interest in the connections between European military traditions and American warfare led to his 2008 book, The Drillmaster of Valley Forge: The Baron de Steuben and the Making of the American Army. His most recent work also deals with the American Revolution—The Whites of Their Eyes: Bunker Hill, the First American Army, and the Emergence of George Washington. Lockhart says that when he’s not teaching history or writing about it—as he does in “Bonaparte at Bay” —he’s thinking about writing about it.

The proud son of two World War II veterans, Noah Andre Trudeau has a long interest in military history with a special emphasis on the American Civil War. Among his seven books on the subject are The Last Citadel, on the siege of Petersburg; Like Men of War, a combat history of black troops in the Civil War; Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage, and Southern Storm, the story of Sherman’s march through Georgia. He is currently writing a history of Abraham Lincoln’s two weeks at the war front in March–April 1865. Trudeau’s articles take him farther afield, into the Revolutionary War, the Mexican-American War, World Wars I and II, and the Spanish and English Civil Wars. He enjoys the concision that articles demand and feels he’s done his job when he either introduces readers to a little-known action or provides a fresh perspective on more familiar ones, as he does when he considers the players and implications of a critical battle in the Mexican-American War in “An American Fandango in Monterrey.”