Wright State researcher wins prestigious history book award

Jonathan Reed Winkler, P.h.D. says history is ultimately literature and should be well written and not directed to just the few people who know something about what is a very narrow topic.

Intrigued by a magazine article that described the laying of a communications cable that snaked across the ocean floor from England to Japan, Jonathan Reed Winkler, Ph.D., began researching what would become an award-winning book most recently honored by the American Historical Association.

Currently an associate history professor at Wright State University, Winkler had been living in the Washington, D.C., area and researching Nexus: Strategic Communications and American Security in World War I when the 9/11 terrorist attacks sent a plane hurtling into the Pentagon. That changed his whole approach to the book.

“It made me pay closer attention to the military side of the story, where I discovered there was a lot more going on that previous historians had not looked as closely at,” said Winkler, who got his doctorate from Yale and taught at the U.S. Naval Academy and the University of Maryland. “They hadn’t really incorporated the national security concern together with the diplomatic concern.”

Nexus sheds new light on how the United States developed its own global communications system following World War I.

“It’s the first time the U.S. government really comes to see that having international communications systems under its own control or its own influence is critical for being a world power,” Winkler said.

The book has won the Paul Birdall Prize in European Military and Strategic History from the American Historical Association for 2010. Winkler will receive the award Jan. 7.

The prize is awarded every two years for the most important work on European military or strategic history since 1870 by an American or Canadian.

It took Winkler 18 months to research Nexus. He spent time at the National Archives and the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., as well as the archives of the Cable and Wireless plc company in England.

Winkler said the biggest challenge was juggling all of the different amounts of information coming from different directions.

“I had to be thinking about what the diplomatic actions were, what the Army’s interests were, what the Navy’s interests were, what the Commerce Department’s interests were, what the business interests were, what the technology was doing at the time,” he said.

Then Winkler had to write the book — a task that took another 18 months.

“I found I needed to write the story so that anybody could understand it,” he said. “So I took a lot of time to make sure that the writing and that the descriptions were in such a way that my mother could read it. And she tells me that she could.”

Winkler said history is ultimately literature and should be well written and not directed to just the few people who know something about what is a very narrow topic.

“We should write something that should last for the ages,” he said.

Excerpt:

“Like the glare of sunlight in a darkened room, the experiences of World War I awakened U.S. officials to the broader requirements of being a world power. Among these were a large naval force, a strong military, a sturdy domestic base of industry and finance, and a corresponding system of transportation and communications to project this political, military and economic influence across the seas.”

The American Historical Association is the largest historical society in the United States, serving 14,000 history professionals representing every historical period and geographical area. It was incorporated by Congress in 1889 for the promotion of historical studies, the collection and preservation of historical documents and artifacts, and the dissemination of historical research.

Winkler said he is honored to have won the Paul Birdsall Prize.

“I’m finding this was a topic that everybody in so many different fields that make up history recognize is important,” he said.

Nexus also won the 2008 Theodore & Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize and the 2009 Outstanding Publication Award from the Ohio Academy of History.