Staff Historian Completes Tour as the Class of ’57 Chair of Naval Heritage
L
ong-time NHF staff historian Dr. Dave Winkler recently completed a year teaching at the U.S. Naval Academy as a member of the history department faculty. He had this opportunity thanks to the generosity of the Class of 1957, which, for their 50th anniversary gift to the academy, endowed a Chair of Naval Heritage. Dr. Williamson Murray served as the first chair during the 2007–2008 academic year. Subsequent chairs have included Gilbert Andrew, Hugh Gordon, Ronald Spector, Craig L. Symonds, James Bradford, Gene Alan Smith, William F. Trimble, David Alan Rosenberg, Nicolas A. Lambert, and Kathleen Broome Williams. Over the summer, Dr. Winkler will be leaving this chair to fill the Charles Lindbergh Chair of Aerospace History at the Smithsonian. For Pull Together, we asked Dr. Winkler to share some thoughts about his time in Annapolis.
PT: So what were your teaching responsibilities at the Naval Academy? Winkler: I had a two-course load during each semester:
the basic HH104 Introduction to Naval History class that all plebes take and an upper-level course. For the fall upper-level class I leveraged my experience with the NHHC’s Combat Documentation Detachment 206. I turned a report I wrote for Commander Fifth Fleet on the history of the U.S. Navy’s presence in Bahrain into a course on U.S. naval operations in the Middle East post–World War II. In the spring I drew upon my quarter century of experience doing oral history with the NHF to teach a course on oral history methodology, assigning the class to interview members of the Class of ’57 on their experiences during the Vietnam War.
PT: Please talk about the intro course— any surprises? COURTESY CAPTAIN RINN
Winkler: What surprised me about the introduction
course was that you were encouraged to approach it with a clean slate—there were no lesson-plan templates to follow. I did use the current text America, Sea Power, and the World, compiled by Knox Medal recipient James Bradford, as well
as the naval atlas and concise history produced by another Knox awardee, Craig Symonds. To augment the textbooks, I used many of the 200 historical perspective articles I have written for the Navy League’s Sea Power magazine for the past two decades. I broke the class into Fire Teams, and each Fire Team would present an article as a case study. Sadly, another thing I discovered was that general knowledge of American history, let alone American naval history, is lacking with many of these incoming midshipmen. Thus at times I had to scale back on discussing specifics in favor of providing broader overviews of the state of the nation during various timeframes between armed confrontations.
PT: Did your experience with the Naval Historical Foundation help with the upperlevel classes? Winkler: I taught 75-minute
classes on Tuesday and Thursday mornings over 15 weeks, which meant I had to deliver over 37 hours of quality content to upper-class midshipmen who were mostly history majors. Whereas my predecessors, having taught naval history courses at other universities, could recycle curricula, I was starting from scratch. To compensate, I leaned on many members of the NHF who were subject Dr. Winkler with Capt. matter experts to come in and Paul Rinn in front of the share their experiences. Capt. Tecumseh statue facing Andrew A.C. Jampoler, who Bancroft Hall wrote Sailors in the Holy Land, kicked off my Middle East Ops class with an engaging talk about the 1840s Lynch expedition to the Dead Sea. We used a new text published by Naval Institute Press, Middle East 101, and the coauthors Cdr. Youseff Aboul-Enein
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Pull Together • Summer 2020
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