Chris Hamner

Christopher Hamner’s first book, Enduring Battle: American Soldiers in Three Wars, 1776-1945, was published by the University Press of Kansas in spring 2011 as part of its Modern War series. The book examines the changing experience of ground combat from the War for Independence to the Civil War to the Second World War, focusing on ways that individual soldiers’ motivations to withstand the trauma of combat evolved as technological advances recast the battlefield. His second book, tentatively titled The Weight of War: American Soldiers in Post-Industrial Combat from Vietnam to Iraq, picks up some of the themes of soldiers’ experiences on the ground, examining the changing nature of battle from the Vietnam War and the 1991 Gulf War to the twenty-first century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, focusing on the ways that the experience of combat changed on the increasingly asymmetrical, irregular battlefield.

In addition, Hamner serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Papers of the War Department 1784-1800, an innovative online archive that seeks to reconstitute the files of the original War Office, destroyed by fire in autumn 1800. By collecting and uniting surviving sender and recipient copies of documents destroyed in the conflagration from hundreds of archives, the archive helps open a window to a critical part of early American history long believed lost to posterity. Mason’s Center for History and New Media has hosted the site, which features a growing index and high-resolution images of more than 45,000 documents from early American history, since 2006.

His teaching interests include war and American society, the individual experience of combat, and the effects of technological change on the experience of warfare. He serves as Lead Historian for two Teaching American History programs in Virginia and Maryland, working with public school teachers to develop more effective ways to incorporate primary sources into the history classroom. In addition, he serves as co-chair of Mason’s annual War on the Silver Screen film festival.