Ohio University

Undergraduate, History

Student

Honors Tutorial College

About

I am currently enrolled as an undergraduate student within the History Department of the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. I have been studying here since 2010 after I was honorably discharged from the United States Army, having served two combat tours as a Sergeant (Assault Team Leader) in the light infantry in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Poetic justice brought me eastward from my hometown of Kansas City, Missouri. My fifth great grandfather, John Burk, was a fifer on the Virginia Continental Line during the American Revolution, and following his discharge from Washington's Army, he was awarded 200 acres in southern Ohio with which he endeavored to start a new peacetime life. I felt that it would only be proper to utilize my own benefits gleaned from serving my country in the same fashion, and for that reason I now dwell not far from the graves of some of my distant ancestors.

My professional and academic interest is principally focused on the portions of the American Midwest (chiefly the southern portions of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Iowa as well as the northern portion of Missouri) which remained loyal to the Union during the American Civil War and the experiences of their inhabitants during the early to mid-19th Century and how those experiences eventually culminated in the experience of the sectional crisis and eventually in the war itself.

I hope to better understand the military history of the  American Civil War (namely the Western  Theater of the same) by shedding light on the impacts which social and cultural history had on both the men who fought the conflict as well as the societies from which they came and which they represented while under arms. I firmly believe that the conflict defined us as a nation, and further that much of the brutal realities of the event are lost in the romanticism the war has been subject to over the past centuries. The sheer horrible nature of war as well as the exceptional selflessness of the American spirit are both clearly  visible, perhaps like at no other moment in American History, during the Civil War. I hope through my work to illustrate vividly the sacrifices of those who strove so hard to preserve the Union from 1861-1865. Further, I feel that with my combat experience, I might be able to, at the very least, impart some faint understanding of the true nature of armed combat to a readership that otherwise might feel very alien to the battlefield.

Additionally, I recognize that as a member of the "Internet Generation," it would be a true disservice to the discipline should I not fully endeavor to embrace modern technology and strive to push history into the digital realm. I am currently in the process of developing several projects which play into meeting and filling the gap between the level of use of modern digital technology by the hard sciences and that used by historians.

I am also writing a book which I hope to publish within the next two years.

I am a member of both The American Historical Association (AHA) and The Organization of American Historians (OAH).

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