Russell F. Weigley

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Russell Frank Weigley (born June 2, 1930 in Reading , Pennsylvania , † March 3, 2004 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania) was an American military historian . He was a professor of history at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Life

Weigley graduated from Albright College with a bachelor's degree in 1952 and received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania with Roy F. Nichols . His dissertation was on the US Army Quartermaster MC Meigs. He then taught at the University of Pennsylvania and from 1958 to 1962 at Drexel University before becoming an associate professor and later professor at Temple University. In 1985 he became a Distinguished University Professor there and in 1998 he retired. He has also been visiting professor at Dartmouth College and Army War College ( Harold Keith Johnson Chair of Military History ) in Carlise , and has taught at Marine Corps Command and Staff College , National War College and the United States Military Academy at West Point. In 1972 he gave the Harmon Memorial Lecture in Military History at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

Weigley is known for hypothesizing a specifically American way of waging war. According to Weigley, the typical American way of waging war changed from a strategy of attrition in the war of independence against the militarily superior British to a strategy of annihilating the enemy as completely as possible by providing and concentrating a superior number of troops and firepower which came into play after the Civil War as an expression of the increasing imperial power of the USA.

He tried to gain a broad understanding of military history and its integration into political history and the history of ideas. In his book, he attributed the Confederate's defeat in the civil war to the inner turmoil of their identity as a nation. He wrote a history of the US Army and of Dwight D. Eisenhower's strategy in World War II in Europe. His book The age of battles on early modern European wars won the Society for Military History's Distinguished Book Award in 1992. In it he examines military thinking and organization based on the battles of Gustav Adolf , Louis XIV , Marlborough , Nelson , Napoleon Bonaparte and Wellington and comes to the conclusion that they were a common expression of a delayed undecided wrestling due to previous political failure.

His book on the US Civil War won the Lincoln Prize . In 1989 he received the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for life's work. In 1969/70 he was a Guggenheim Fellow . In 1992 he won the Society for Military History's Outstanding Book Award. He was president of the American Military Institute and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania . Since 1993 he was a member of the American Philosophical Society .

He was married and the father of two children.

Fonts (selection)

  • Quartermaster General of the Union Army: A Biography of MC Meigs, Columbia University Press, 1959
  • Towards an American Army: Military Thought from Washington to Marshall, Columbia University Press 1962
  • History of the United States Army, Macmillan 1967
  • The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy, Macmillan Publishing, New York 1973
  • Editor: New Dimensions in Military History - an anthology, San Rafael, Presidio Press 1975
  • Eisenhower's Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany, 1944–1945, Indiana University Press 1981
  • The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo, Indiana University Press 1991
  • A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861-1865, Indiana University Press 2000
  • American military strategy from its beginnings through the first world war , in Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986, 408-443

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Member History: Russell F. Weigley. American Philosophical Society, accessed January 1, 2019 .