'I am striving to understand social change, and how people in the past understood the world they lived in'

University of Kansas faculty are striving to advance knowledge, interpret our world, solve problems, spark innovation, create beauty and catalyze imagination through their research, scholarship and creative activity. Through the “I Am Striving” series, we’ll learn more about what inspires KU researchers, as well as the goals and impact of their work. 

Q&A with Beth Bailey, Foundation Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Center for Military, War & Society Studies

Explain your research as you would explain it to someone outside your field, such as your grandparents. 

I'm a U.S. historian, and I study the history of the U.S. military right now. I'm primarily interested in how social change happens, but I started in a very different place. In the first half of my career, I wrote about the history of gender and sexuality. And I was interested to know how Americans in the 20th century, across the range of the 20th century, understood what it meant to be a man and what it meant to be a woman, and what kinds of rules and conventions and regulations shaped the kinds of actions that were considered to be appropriate for men and women. And then how those people in different times challenged those rules and regulations in what we call the sexual revolution. I actually wrote a book about the sexual revolution in Lawrence.

But about 20 years ago — I don't know mid-career crisis or something — I decided I was going to start doing military history, which was a massive shift because I didn't have any military connections, no knowledge of the historiography, nobody in my family had served other than in the reserves, just the timing of their ages during the wars. So I spent a lot of time trying to come to understand the U.S. Army. I think about what kinds of problems the U.S. Army as an institution confronts. How did the U.S. Army, for example, deal with the fact that it was ordered to move from conscription based to an all-volunteer force? Right at the time that it was at the later of its reputation in the United States in the wake of the U.S. war in Vietnam? How did it understand the problem? What did it do? How did the U.S. Army confront a racial crisis that was taking place in its ranks? How did they define the problem? What did they do? I'm thinking about the process of social change by looking at institutions and asking how they define the problems they see, and then what they tried to do to solve them . 

What does your research look like? What methods do you use? 

As a historian, I use archives, and I love archives. It's wonderful to get into a box of documents and start sorting through them and finding unexpected patterns and connections, and then assembling an understanding of how the people who generated these documents saw the world that they lived in. And what's important to remember as you're doing that is that the people who created these documents created them for their own purposes, not for the purposes of a historian. They're not trying to answer my questions. I have to approach them with a lot of awareness of the context in which people were working; I can't just take them at face value. What makes it history? What makes it a historical method instead of a political science method or another kind of social science method is that historians really believe in specificity and contingency. We don't tend to try and build models that are predictive. Instead, we say, “OK, what is the specific context, the specific time, the specific place, the specific actors in this moment? What are they trying to do? And what are the factors that we can't anticipate that we can't predict, the contingent factors?” When we as historians analyze an event or actions or an individual, we're not trying to create something that is widely generalizable; we're trying to understand specifically what happened at that time in that place from which we can draw lessons, but the lessons are not nearly as broad as people who were seeking to create models that are predictive. 

What inspires your research? Why are you passionate about this work? 

I'm inspired by a couple of things right now, specifically working on the military. I am inspired by an understanding that too few historians take the U.S. military seriously in thinking about anything other than war. And too few people who are interested in social change think about the ways in which social change isn't just the struggles of those people who are heroically in the street trying to bring about that change. In looking at the U.S. Army, what I'm doing is trying to say, “How did those people who were confronting demands for change deal with them? And why did they deal with them the way that they did?”

I'm passionate about trying to get historians and the general public to think of the U.S. Army as something that plays a significant role in the United States in realms other than war. But I'm also inspired by the fact that I love to write, and I love to dig through archives and find patterns and create narratives. And so that is one of the things that keeps me going. The last book I wrote, I think I have 13 linear feet of documents that I compiled, not counting what I had digitally, to work through. And that's a daunting prospect. The fact that I so much like seeking those patterns and putting things into juxtaposition that other people haven't thought of in that context keeps me going through what is often a project that takes years to complete. 

How does your research directly impact your field, society, Kansas and the world? 

I always think of multiple layers of impact. So partly what I'm doing is writing for my colleagues in military history, and I'm trying to change in some ways, the ways in which we approach writing about the U.S. military and how we think about its role, not only in war but in peace. But I'm also writing for people who are interested in the process of social change. And the argument that I'm making is that while understandings may be widespread in society — while it may be that the broader U.S. society defines gender or race in a particular way — the actions of individuals matter, individual choices matter. There are ways in which we can create social change by making individual choices and individual actions. 

What is a recent study/example of work you’d like to share? 

My book, “An Army Afire,” came out this past May. It's the book I've been working on for close to the last decade, even though I did some other things in the meantime. And it's about how the U.S. Army as an institution confronted a racial conflict in its ranks — a racial crisis and racial violence that was so bad that its leaders got to the point where they were convinced that this racial crisis was going to impede the ability of the U.S. Army to fulfill its mission of national defense. What I do in this book is analyze how the U.S. Army confronted this crisis. Absolutely, there were missteps. Absolutely, there was some bad faith involved. But overall, what we've got is a story of creativity and commitment. It's a story of success. The point of the U.S. Army was to try to stabilize the Army, and it certainly stabilized the Army. But it's also a success, a limited success, for those people within, the people of color, the Black Americans who were fighting for social change because even though the changes were not sufficient and perfect, the situation of those people in the U.S. military, those who followed after them, dramatically improved because of the reforms that the U.S. Army took in response to their demands for change. 

What do you hope are some of the outcomes of your research and work? 

What I hope in terms of outcomes is partly to continue to be part of a cohort of military historians today who are doing really fascinating work and broadening the field of military history — not to replace the significant work that's being done about operational decisions and actions in the military, but to think about the military in its broader role in American society.

But I also think — and here I'm repeating myself — that my research shows that individual actions do matter. Over and over in the research I've done, I find people who demand change, who respond to demands for change, who innovate, who make hard decisions, and what they do matters. And so that's, my larger message, my inspirational message that comes from many decades of doing research in U.S. society over the past 100 years.