This panel attempts to push the historiographic boundaries of military history, combining global, labor, and cultural history approaches with close attention to the interplay of race, gender, sexuality, class, and power. Who is the appropriate subject of military history? What do historians see when we focus on the workers in US military conflicts? Here, we define workers both as US officials and soldiers who carry out operations, and also as the wide range of civilian workers around the globe whose labor shapes military engagement. In particular, we focus on the relationship between civilian labor and the US military, including how at times civilians use their encounters with U.S. militarism for their own ends, often in the face of significant power imbalances and violence. Our intersectional perspective opens up an expansive view of what it means to study war. The papers examine not only how war has restructured political hierarchies between nations, but also racial, gender, sexual, and class hierarchies within and between nations.

While our panel is chronologically focused on the period from WWI to the Korean War, our historical eyes are keyed on present conflicts, both military and scholarly. A recent debate over whether to hold the Society for Military History conference in Texas, in light of recent state laws banning abortion and encouraging vigilantism, for example, raised prescient questions for us. Thinking about abortion as crucial to understanding US military history illuminates the range of intimate, reproductive, and physical labor that is often invisible to the American public, but that is an essential part of US military operations. It also asks us to connect gendered, sexualized, and racialized histories of the US military to our present moment and political circumstances. What kind of histories are tellable within and beyond the field of military history? In what way might we examine the work of misogyny in US military officials’ medical experimentation on Afro-Caribbean migrant women sex workers during WWI; of racism and homophobia in the training of Black pilots in Tuskegee in WWII; and of xenophobia and imperialism in the gendering and racialization of Korean workers as an expendable labor force during the Korean War? How do we challenge the historical narratives that are used to justify contemporary conflicts, such as the role of the US as a protector of women, children, and democracy? How might we as historians illuminate these political uses of the past, particularly when they seek to elide issues of labor, gender, race, sexuality, and violence?