Race and the History of the Modern US Military 1

Abstract

My charge – to trace the changing master narrative of ‘ race ’ in US military history over the past forty years – proved confounding. I could easily find the most proxim-ate end of the narrative. Studies of race, or of groups defined through racial or ethnic identity, are currently trending in military history. A study of race and the US military in the Second World War received the 2022 distinguished book award from the Society for Military History: Thomas A. Guglielmo ’ s deeply researched and insightful work, Divisions: A New History of Racism and Resistance in America ’ s World War II Military . 2 And I can list a double handful of scholars, myself included, who are writing on the topic right now. Looking back to the distant past of my own graduate school years – at the University of Chicago from 1980 to 1986