Symposia

Jonathan D. Bratten

“General Pershing once called us Boy Scouts”: National Guard Service, Memory and Memorialization of World War I

The memory of World War I for the United States National Guard is complicated. Despite widespread community pride in their service, and monuments built in their honor at home and in France, many National Guard personnel felt that the Army – and Pershing, specifically – never gave them their due. Before the Great War, the National Guard was not considered an integrated part of the United States Army. Many doubted the National Guard’s performance, despite being restructured in 1903 and again in 1916 to become more like the regular Army in equipment, uniforms and training. Some even referred to them as “boy scouts.” Once in France, the 11 National Guard divisions who saw combat demonstrated their prowess on the battlefield to American, Allied and German leadership, which not only sustained these divisions in the post-war army force structure, but also led to today’s reliance on the National Guard as the Army’s integrated reserve force.

Jonathan D. Bratten is the author of “To the Last Man: A National Guard Regiment in the Great War, 1917–1919” (Army University Press, 2020) which received the 2020 Army Historical Foundation’s Distinguished Writing Award. He is a historian of the American colonial era and World War I, as well as an officer in the Army National Guard. He holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in history and has served two company command tours, as well as a tour as an instructor in the Department of History at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point from 2021 to 2022. He is a veteran of Afghanistan and served in the Capitol response mission in 2021. In 2016, Bratten served as a historical on-screen adviser for the Smithsonian Channel documentary, “Americans Underground: Secret Cities of World War One.” He has written for Army History, The Washington Post and The New York Times. Bratten contributed chapters to the anthologies “Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict” (2018) and “Armies in Retreat: Chaos, Cohesion, and Consequences” (2023). He is currently on assignment at the U.S. Army Center of Military History.

Ben Brands

On Hallowed Ground: The American Battle Monuments Commission

Established in 1923 by Congress, the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) was founded to oversee the construction of commemorative monuments for the American Expeditionary Forces. Within a decade, the Commission’s responsibilities expanded from building memorial chapels in the eight permanent military cemeteries in Europe to the total management and maintenance of these sacred spaces – tasks originally conducted by the War Department. Nearly a quarter of the 124,000 American war dead interred in ABMC cemeteries served during the Great War. This talk will explore the origins and evolution of the ABMC’s commemorative work over the last century.

Ben Brands is a historian with the American Battle Monuments Commission. A Ph.D. candidate at George Mason University, where he held the L. Claire Kincannon Internship at the George Mason University Libraries' Special Collections Research Center, Brands specializes in the history of the United States Army in the 19th century. Brands has taught courses on military history at Oregon State University and the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he was an Assistant Professor from 2015 to 2017. A former infantry officer in the United States Army, Brands also worked at the U.S. Army's Center of Military History helping to write the official history of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Richard S. Fogarty

Greater France and the Great War: A Century of Global Remembrance

The global reverberations of the First World War were as clear in 1923 as they had been between 1914 and 1918: France and Belgium’s occupation of Germany’s industrial Ruhr region to enforce war reparations, along with the Treaty of Lausanne that officially ended the war between the Ottoman Empire and the Entente powers, were directly connected with the French colonial empire known as “Greater France.” France promised allies worried about racial hierarchies that it would not deploy troops from Africa and Asia in the Ruhr, as it had done earlier on the Western Front and in occupied Germany. Clearly, the Great War made matters of race and empire more relevant and fraught in the years after 1918, and long after 1923, as millions of people in France and its empire continued struggling to understand the meaning of the war and their service to France in a world still ruled by empires: deciphering the implications and remembrance of WWI was as much a global affair as waging it.

Richard S. Fogarty earned his Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the author of “Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918” (2008) and the co-editor of “Empires in World War I: Shifting Frontiers and Imperial Dynamics in a Global Conflict” (2014) and of the Africa section of “1914-1918-online, International Encyclopedia of the First World War.” He is currently working on a book about the French colonial empire during the First World War, “Greater France and the Great War,” and a longer-term project about Muslim North African prisoners of war in Germany tentatively titled “Under Strange Moons: Islam, Captivity and Contested Identities during the First World War.”

Doug Frost

Doug Frost is a Master Sommelier and the United States’ eighth Master of Wine – a designation he achieved in 1991. Frost was the second person in history to complete both exams, and more than a quarter century later he is still one of only three people in the world to have achieved both these remarkable distinctions. A contributor to the Oxford Companion of Wine, Opus Vino, The World Atlas of Wine by Hugh Johnson and The Wine Report, an annual report edited by Tom Stevenson, Frost has also authored three books and numerous articles for San Francisco Chronicle, the Underground Wine Journal, Drinks International, Practical Winery & Vineyard, Wines & Vines, Wines & Spirits, Cheers Magazine, Sante Magazine, Hemispheres Magazine, Missouri Life, Fine Cooking, Epicurious.com, Le Pan, and the Kansas City Star. He is the founder and director of the Jefferson Cup Invitational Wine Competition; Head Judge and founder of the Mid-American Wine Competition; and runs the Washington Cup, a competition for American craft spirits.