The United States entered into war repeatedly during the twentieth century, but seldom did war reach the nation’s shores. Even the most infamous attack, Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor, occurred in what was then a U.S. territory. The United States’ physical remove from great powers in Europe and Asia produced a sense of insulation from conflict, despite how frequently and enthusiastically American leaders committed to war. Thus, while American isolationism has largely been relegated as a misnomer in the historical literature, the notion that war was something that happened elsewhere in the twentieth century has lingered.

This conference panel explores an alternate view: it examines encounters with war on American soil. Through a study of lectures delivered by visiting foreign leaders in the 1940s, an account of U.S. service members on leave in Hawaii in the 1960s and 70s, and an investigation of psychiatrists’ handling of violent crimes during the Vietnam War, this panel traces the vectors of war not outward, but inward. Planes did not drop bombs on New York, nor did enemy soldiers infiltrate the Capitol, but Americans were met with war all the same. From listening to Polish generals speak at Chicago’s Soldier Field; to protesting the arrival of off-duty service members in Honolulu; to opining on the psychological rationalization of war crimes at a meeting in Detroit, Americans consistently brushed up against armed conflict in the United States.

How they reckoned with these encounters is the panel’s central focus. Each paper asks how people within the United States addressed incursions of empire-building, violence, and fear into their supposedly insulated lives. How did Windy City residents understand General Władysław Sikorski’s reports of war in Europe? What did it mean for University of Hawaii students to come face to face with soldiers on vacation from service in Vietnam? Why did a Yale psychiatrist defend a lieutenant convicted of murdering unarmed civilians in South Vietnam?

The questions posed by this panel are of relevance to not just historians of the modern United States, but to scholars of empire and war more broadly. In considering themes of power, dissent, loss, and identity, the projects speak to issues of crisis and conflict beyond the United States and the twentieth century. But the papers also draw from a more specific historiographical base. The presentations take up Kristin Hoganson’s call to “better flag how seemingly interior and domestic spaces have functioned in the production and exercise of power.” And they situate twentieth-century American interactions with war in a body of “histories that are simultaneously connected to the world and attentive to the multiple particularities, and singularities, of the American experience,” as Mark Philip Bradley has described U.S. foreign relations.

In sum, the papers that make up this panel will investigate the persistent and pervasive encounters with war in the United States. Given the country’s long record of war-making, probing how Americans have viewed, experienced, and made sense of war will generate critical insights and discussion.