Sea Control - Sea Control 379 - Pacific Wars, 1864-1897, and the Making of the U.S. Navy with Dr. Tommy Jamison

Episode Date: September 11, 2022

Links1. “Looks Like a Chilean War:” The Baltimore Incident as a Counterfactual Exercise,” by Tommy Jamison, CIMSEC (October 22, 2015). 2. Sea Control 239: “Things Done By Halves” with Dr. BJ Armstrong, CIMSEC (April 11, 2021). 

Hey folks, it's Jared Walker-Mills is your host today and he's speaking with the Naval Postgraduate Schools Professor Tommy Jamison about the U.S. Navy's development from 1864 to 1897 and how Pacific nations shaped that development. This episode was edited and produced by Marie Williams. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters, whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of our local chapters and contact information on the website at simsec.org, so if you're interested, please reach out and get involved. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kim Rusment.

You're listening to Sea Control, posted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Welcome back aboard the Sea Control Podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. I'm your host, Walker Mills, and today we're talking with Dr. Tommy Jameson, who's an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. We're going to be talking about his doctoral dissertation, Pacific Wars, Peripheral Conflict in the Making of the U.S. New Navy, 1864 to 1897. Tommy, welcome aboard. Can you introduce yourself a bit to our listeners? Hey, Walker, thank you so much for inviting me to be here. It's a delight and a privilege.

I'm a historian by training and by vocation here at the Naval Postgraduate School in beautiful Monterey, California. I did my graduate training at Harvard University, from which I hold a PhD and MA in international history. Before grad school, I had the pleasure of serving as a lowly intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy for five years. And I think maybe most relevantly to our conversation, or certainly not irrelevantly, I was an early contributor to SIMSEC back in its sort of incipient year 15. I think the first thing I ever got published in my academic career was actually published on the SIMSEC website, dealing with a war scare between the United States and Chile in 1891. So from those humble beginnings spring this dissertation, and I remain really

profoundly grateful for SimSec support in those early days. We're excited to have you on the show and it's great to hear, you know, kind of a SimSec success story because we, you know, those of us kind of behind the curtain know how it's kind of a shoestring operation, but we're proud to contribute there. Before we start, I'd like to remind our listeners that the opinions presented here are solely our own and should not be taken as representative of any of the institutions that were associated with. Tommy, 1864 to 1897 is a period I think many of us associate with Reconstruction and robber barons. I'm remembering like AP, U.S. history. So can you give us some context and what was going on at this time in the Pacific outside of the United States?

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. If you take a national perspective on this period, the post-Civil War era, some of the dominant themes are the story of the rise of industrial capitalism, from which we get the robber barons, and also the story of reconstruction. Another way to frame those two major developments, however, is as localized or nationally specific manifestations of broader global trends that are shaping everything in the international system, and are certainly relevant to the Pacific. What do I mean by that? Okay. So you get robber barons, but those robber barons are getting frigging rich because they are able to leverage the fantastic success of industrial capitalism to achieve extraordinary amounts of wealth. That's true,

not just in the United States, but also globally as industrial technology spread out, they create a great divergence to use a term coined by Kenneth Pomerantz between the dynamo of the North Atlantic industrial economies and the rest of the world. But they also create like lots of new technologies that are knitting together a global economy, steamships, telegraphs, and so forth. So that's relevant to the United States. It's also definitely relevant to the Pacific world. Reconstruction, what is it? Well, it's putting back the pieces together of the United States after the Civil War. It's an effort to do essentially national consolidation. That's definitely happening in the United States. It's one of the major events in our national history,

But it's also a global phenomenon of the mid-19th century as all sorts of ancient regimes decay, leading to civil wars or aggressive foreign wars, out of which you get consolidated modern nation states. So what's an example of that? Well, the United States is a good one. Civil war, put things back together, you get a nation state. China has the Taiping Civil War, more or less contemporaneously with the U.S. Civil War. putting that back together gives you a more centralized state apparatus the major restoration is going to bring us with this the franco-prussian war which gives you modern germany and so on and so on and so on so these are big things that are happening globally and they matter a lot to the

pacific because you're starting to see the emergence of consolidated nation states that are reacting and attempting to leverage the advantages of new industrial technologies and And in the Pacific, in the developing world and the world outside of the North Atlantic, consolidated nation states, industrial technologies collide with a third phenomenon. And that is the growth of global maritime empires, which are spreading out across the international system at a fantastic rate, enabled by industrial technology, enabled by centralized nation states. And with those empires, during what Eric Hobson called the age of empires, get out into the Pacific, they create a reaction. And that is amongst many local societies in Japan and China and Peru and Chile who look at the spread and proliferation of European technology and see an opportunity to get their hands on some of that and then underwrite self-strengthening movements to come up with some sort of defensive capacity against the spread of North Atlantic empires. And that creates a real moment of dynamism in the Pacific world, of political experimentation, of technological experimentation, of naval improvisation and naval appropriation of

advanced industrial technologies. And some of the most fascinating little experiments in small navies are actually happening, not in the places that we usually think of, usual suspects like Germany or France or the UK or whatever, but in little places like Chile or Japan, which are attempting to leverage new and radical technologies to really compete with the big boys and the great powers, as it were, and try to come up with some sort of means of achieving maritime resistance against the spread of imperialism in the Pacific. So it's quite a dynamic region. And that dynamism, I think, to date has been undervalued by historians who are interested in what's happening in the North Atlantic, because that's where the money is and that's

the great powers are. But the story in the Pacific, I think, is really quite revolutionary and well worth our attention as a result. I remember reading the introduction of your dissertation. I thought, you know, it's fascinating. And not just because you talk some about the naval history of some of these Latin American countries that I'm more familiar with. But it seemed to me like it was kind of a gap in at least my own understanding of the history of the United States Navy. And so I think you kind of gave some hints in that description. But, you know, what was there something specific that drew you to this period or motivated you to undertake this project or pick this theme? Yeah. You know, Walker, I think you and I probably probably share that sense of surprise about what is happening in the Pacific.

And I empathize with that quite deeply. I'll confess to something that's a little embarrassing. And that is that when I was sitting in Guam in my last year in the Navy, preparing for my language exams when I was going to show up to graduate school, I picked up a book in Spanish on something called The War of the Pacific. And my initial impression when I found it on Amazon was that this was going to be about like military operations in World War Two. It's going to be like U.S.-Japan stuff. And I reckon I would I would sort of understand that to be a good chance to practice my Spanish. In fact, it was about this equally significant, from the perspective of Latin America, conflict between Peru, Bolivia, and Chile that remade the political geography of the western slope of South America and also provided an opportunity to test some of the newest cutting-edge naval technologies on the planet at the time in any service in the world circa 1879. And that was really surprising to me as someone who considered themselves generally interested and generally fluent in the history of naval development, certainly professionally interested in this subject, but had never actually heard about this particular conflict. And I found that to be true about a lot of my peers in military professional circles and even academic circles who are surprised to hear about the number of experiments in military self-strengthening and naval self-sustaining and the number of naval races and wars that are all happening in the Pacific world during this time. So it's sort of, I think, a sense of surprise that drew me to this topic and then a hope to correct what I saw in my first couple of years of tuning on this project as a pervasive bias in the existing literature about the origins of the United States as a great maritime power that lists really decisively towards the Atlantic world.

So U.S. relationships with European powers, with U.S. ambitions for the Caribbean basin and the building of the Panama Canal, it has undervalued, has underestimated the significance of a different perspective on U.S. foreign policy and foreign relations. And that's just like, what did the world look like if you weren't sitting in Washington, D.C. or New York or Annapolis or Newport, but rather you were in San Francisco or Seattle looking out onto a space that Herman Melville called the tide beating part of Earth? What role did the Pacific play in the transition of the United States from a continental regional power into a great maritime power? How should we weigh this incredible spate of wars and dynamism in the Pacific world against what's happening in Vietnam? So I guess my own ignorance, I found something that interested me, that surprised me, which is always a good place to start for a research project. and then a sense that there was a real opportunity to engage with a prestigious and relatively extensive body of literature about a topic that I think is really important. How do we get the United States as a great power and how do we get the United States contemporaneously as a Pacific

power? So I guess that's what drew me to the topic initially and what is sustained by interest in it here today. I just think that's a really fascinating answer. Some of my work teaching cadets at the at the columbian naval academy i both see some of these historical admirals and figures that you know growing up in the united states we've not heard of um but are quite important in the kind of latin american naval tradition and a lot of them are from this this period um and they fought in naval battles that are important here but that you know i had never heard of before um and sometimes i'll have my cadets do a kind of research project and they'll often proposed to write about amphibious operations or naval battles that I realized

I've never heard about. And so that was kind of my eye opening into there's this whole history of naval conflicts and conflicts in Latin America that I think we just aren't in the United States military, at least simply aren't exposed to. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's entirely fair. That's entirely fair. It reflects, as I say, the interest that we have, I think, as a society to bias what's happening in Europe. Eurocentrism is the academic word for it, and something that really undervalues, underestimates the agency of what's happening in the Western atmosphere. So I empathize with that entirely. And then certainly, as you kind of mentioned already, and I think we may talk about a little

bit more, you know, that some of the technology that was being used was, you know, on par with what was being developed in Europe or being used in Europe or the United States at that time. So it wasn't, you know, there were certainly conflicts that Europeans and the United States, we could pay attention to and learn from. That's right. That's right. I think in some ways, the Pacific offers a vast practical laboratory for the testing of radical and revolutionary technologies. So many of these are developed in the North Atlantic world. They're built by the usual suspects in places like Newcastle or Liverpool and then exported to the Pacific world. But because the Pacific is full of relatively late adopters, people who have come to the game at a relatively late stage, self-serving movements from Chile to China to Japan are willing to really roll the dice on some new technologies.

And as a result, when those technologies are used in conflict, actual war, they provide a real operational laboratory for advanced industrial economies and military bureaucracies to try to understand the effects of new weapons. So it's like surprising to people to learn that the first time the Royal Navy ever shoots a propelled torpedo, an automobile torpedo, at anything in anger, it's at a Peruvian ironclad warship. The first time anyone ever uses a propelled torpedo to sink another ironclad warship, it's the Chileans during the Chilean Civil War. The first engagement between ironclad steam-powered fleets is probably the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, 1895. So this kind of goes on and on and on. We see all sorts of precedents happening where while the money and the funding, the technical laboratories may have been in the North Atlantic world, so much of the action, the real test, the acid test of conflict is happening in the Pacific. And people were able to evaluate and do keenly try to evaluate how these technologies will play out, will play out in practice and not just in theory. So I want to shift a little bit. You write in the dissertation, you have a lot of interesting characters, you know, and this kind of makes it makes it easier reading and draws your attention. And so I was wondering if there was anybody that you that played key roles that you kind of wanted to talk a little bit about.

And I know one of the characters that our listeners will be familiar to is you talk about how some of these developments in the Pacific would have directly influenced Mahan in some of his writing. Yeah, absolutely. Who has a pretty extensive body of experience in the Pacific world, but he's certainly not the only guy who makes his way out into the Pacific writ large, particularly if we include the western slope of Latin America and our definition of the Pacific region, which you should. Imagine the world after 1865. It's an uncomfortable one for many who are in the United States Navy. It's a really uncomfortable one for all sorts of Confederates who have just been put out of a job by the conclusion of the U.S. Civil War, and all of whom have a lot of experience with new technologies. And that experience is quite valuable to states around the Pacific Rim who are interested in acquiring advanced technologies, but also in acquiring the human capital to run them, the software, if you will, to actually use the hardware effectively in combat. So you get a lot of demand for stuff after the Civil War. At the very same time, the United States Navy goes through a period of demobilization that is unparalleled in its history. from like 700 ships in 1865, down to about 50 operational ones. So you think about like budget

cuts today, like you chop 10% off of the operating budget of the US Navy, everyone freaks out, freaks out. Like imagine if you went from 700 ships to 50 in the course of five or six years, because that's the story of the post-Civil War demobilization. And it creates an opportunity for people to have to find, to go out into the world because they don't really have much of a choice. They got to go find new jobs. So who are we talking about? Well, there's guys like John Randolph Tucker, the admiral, the Confederate officer in charge of the defense of Charleston Harbor, who ends up serving as an admiral in the Peruvian Navy, commanding ironclad warships recently imported from Great Britain and attempting, planning to use those ironclad warships

and a few auxiliary vessels to steam across the Pacific and attack Spanish garrisons in Manila during a war between Chile, Peru, and Spain in 1866. That's a surprising story about technology and experience moving out from the United States and then into the Pacific world and helping to stir up some of the dynamism there. This guy is actually pretty representative of a broader trend. John Lay, the most significant, most successful innovator in the United States Navy torpedo service during the Civil War, is also in Peru in 1866, tinkering with tinkering with indigenously produced torpedo mines there that can serve as Harvard defense weapons. And he kind of goes on a global roadshow after his experience in Peru and will indeed end up

up in Tianjin, China, attempting to sell his own self-developed automobile torpedo to the Qing dynasty as a way of defending that vast coast from European and Japanese imperial pressure. Basically, trying to sell a very, very early iteration of anti-access area denial weapons to the Chinese state. This is an American who's cut loose by the United States, maybe after the Civil War and goes out into the Pacific world with his wares for sale. You know, these Americans are significant. They stir things up, but they're mirrored by really successful and I think totally fascinating self-strengtheners around the Pacific Rim who are interested in this just tricky intellectual puzzle, the high stakes puzzle of, gosh, what do we do with all these radical new

technologies? What should we spend our finite budgets on? What should we acquire? What should not. And they themselves are really terrific characters that come up time and time again. A man named Garcia y Garcia, who's in Britain overseeing the construction of a Peruvian ironclad, and comes up with a plan to use it to attack Spanish colonies and the West Indies en route to Peru. Or Li Hongzhang, maybe the most significant Chinese statesman of the 19th century, who is keenly interested in the nitty-gritty of naval technology and naval development and undertakes some of the most, I think daring might be an appropriate word for it, daring acquisitions of naval technology in the 19th century.

These people come up time and time again, and I find them to be totally fascinating as well, and they're one of the things that I think help animate the narrative here. Not just a story of like a boat going here or there, but really people who are involved in the transmission of knowledge and also in the acceleration and the catalyst of innovation. Again, it's just fascinating to hear and that use of kind of people to, I guess you could say, anchor some of the narrative and kind of personalize it. So it's not just, you know, about where this ship went and what this technology was. um it reminds me a little bit um you know i say this is a compliment of um some of the work that i've read from bj armstrong the professor at the um at the u.s naval academy you know and he's also kind of i think shed some light on periods of u.s naval history that uh are sometimes overlooked

and forgotten and we've been fortunate to have him on the the podcast as well yeah in comparison to bj armstrong i will take uh most certainly as a as a compliment here but you bring him up and so you know, BJ teaches at the Naval Academy, and I'll just, I'll flog one more character that comes to mind apropos of that. And that is the gentleman that I think will likely be the subject of my second manuscript project. It's someone named Philo Norton McGiffin, who people sort of know occasionally at the USNA, at the Naval Academy, as a prankster or a troublemaker who graduates in 1882 into the real teeth of the demobilized old US Navy and can't get a job. So he graduates from the US Naval Academy, but he doesn't score high enough on his entrance exams

to actually get a commission because there's just not enough spots on boats. Like the US Naval Academy during this period is graduating more people than there are spots available for them and the operational fleet. So the United States says, hey, thanks for your service. You're on your own right now. And luckily for McGiffin, as soon as he separates from the United States Naval Service, a war breaks out between China and France, the Sino-French War from 1883 to 1885. McGiffin takes his skills, takes his knowledge, takes his expertise. In his early 20s, travels to Tianjin, China, secures an interview with Li Hongzhang, this statesman and naval builder in the Qing Empire, and actually gets permission from him to found a naval academy

in the port of Weihaiwei. So here's a guy who has left the United States Navy, a graduate of the Naval Academy, and within a matter of half a decade, he's running as a superintendent, the newest and perhaps the most successful naval academy in the Qing Empire up until the Sino-Japanese War. People are moving around a lot, and they really end up finding themselves in some pretty extraordinary situations. So these terms, old Navy and new Navy, may be familiar to folks that came up through the U.S. Naval Academy, but as a Marine, what do those mean? And how are you kind of dividing the history of the U.S. Navy into an old and new sections? Yeah, it's sort of, yeah, right. It's sort of, I think, self-serving by

actors at the time who are attempting to justify why people should be investing in said new Navy. But there's some truth to it. So what the old Navy is, is essentially a wooden Navy that is powered by steam, but usually uses sail for propulsion because it's cheaper than using coal. And this is a period of a real economy after the Civil War. Many of the votes actually antedate the Civil War built in the 1850s. And it's a Navy that's essentially a global police force, a constabulary force, an imperial force that's designed to go out into the world, protect American merchants, protect American missionaries, and to show the flag in places from Madagascar to China, to Europe, to Latin America, to occasionally land Marines to protect

U.S. interests, and so forth. But it's certainly not a fleet that is designed to compete on par with the great powers of Europe. It's a police force. It's not a great power naval force. And the transition to the new navy sometime between 1882 and 1898 is one in which this old navy that's wooden-hulled, that's steam-powered, is replaced by a modern steel fleet, in large part because of the intellectual activity of someone like Alfred Baron de Hamlet, of whom listeners here will be familiar, but also because, as I argue, of a sense of falling behind even the smallest navies in the world. The smallest navies in the Pacific have ironclad battleships, steel cruisers, rifled artillery. The United States doesn't. And as it continues

to patrol around an increasingly large periphery of economic interests and imperial interests in the world, the delta between the U.S. self-image as one of the most important nations in the world, even a messianic image as a rising power in the world, is really running afoul of how weak and outdated its Navy is. And nothing illustrates that more clearly with them when people like Alfred Thayer-Mahan are rolling into Callao, Peru, or Valparaiso, Chile, and seeing the real concrete results of a world in which technology has taken off like a rocket ship, and U.S. naval investments have flatlined and not been updated since the 1850s. So that growing delta, that sense of, hey, we're falling behind even the smallest of navies, becomes a really important

argument for the creation of what, in effect, we can call it the great power of the United States Navy, which will win the battles of 1898 and really has been with us ever since after World War I and World War II. Is it fair to say that naval thinkers in this period were, that they felt threatened or they were kind of afraid of some of these developments in Latin America by Peru and Chile? I mean, is that a fair assessment? This is the crux of the debate, and I suppose it depends on people. Reasonable people can argue about this, I think. There is a sense, I believe, a sincere sense of physical threat to the Pacific coast of the United States. It's one that doesn't seem terribly real to people in New York or Washington, D.C., because they're relatively

physically removed and relatively well protected. But the Pacific coast is essentially denuded of resources, exposed, and is also in a world where it faces rising naval powers in Japan and China and Peru and Chile as well. The United States doesn't always have the most amicable relationship for these powers. And there is a possibility, a threat of sporadic or satastic violence launched against the Pacific coast of the United States. So no one ever invents as sincerely the idea that the United States will be conquered by a place like Chile. But there is a strain of thinking that says that the United States is exposed to a naval bombardment or a naval raid from a place like Chile or Japan, and that in itself was seen as unacceptable. Now, it's also clear that that

sense of vulnerability, that sense of exposure, created a different sort of threat, one that I've alluded to earlier in this conversation, which is a threat to the U.S. self-image as the preeminent power in the Western Hemisphere. What does it mean to your pretensions to superiority if your Navy what in the 19th century was really seen as a key index of civilization is just lagging so far behind all of these other nations, Chile, Peru, even China, an empire and a people that are treated with all sorts of horrendous and despicable racial condescension. So what does it mean if the Chinese have a larger Navy than the United States in 1888, 1890, 1891? That's a real question. And it creates a sense of threat to identity that is quite motivating to naval officials and to popular

observers. Now, those threats, I think, are sincere. They're felt. People feel them quite keenly. But then it's also true and fair to say that that sense of threat, that sense of fear is mentalized by naval thinkers into a powerful rhetorical argument to say, hey, you got to shell some money out here. We got to do something. You may feel like the United States is a continent nation and it doesn't have a lot of interests overseas, but we got to at least do something to try to catch up with these Pacific powers. And you've got to give us some money. We have to do some sort of naval reforms. And that argument, I think, well, it's very extensive. It appears in almost every day of the congressional debates over naval funding in the 1880s and early

1890s. But it also gets some traction. It's one of the most powerful rhetorical arguments that are available to the navalists and they appeal to it quite frequently. So yeah, there's a sense of threat for sure. And then that threat is exaggerated by a bureaucracy in order to achieve some institutional self-interests. One of the things I want to touch on kind of briefly is the impact of, I mean, this era is pre-Panama Canal, right? So there's almost two US navies, or is that how they thought about it? That there's the East Coast and then there's the West Coast And there's and I would feel like that would that would put the United States Navy in an even more vulnerable position, not being able to move assets between the two coasts. A hundred percent. Yeah, a hundred percent. That sort of speaks to a world in which which is very, very different geostrategically from our own and which we should be sympathetic to as we look back onto the past.

This this is a world that that doesn't have the same advantages that the United States has post 1914 and the digging of the Panama Canal. And it feels a lot more vulnerable. It's my sense that California is in effect, and certainly places like Alaska and Hawaii, are in effect overseas colonies for the United States. And they function the same geostrategically to other overseas colonies for other European empires and end up creating a justification for a major ocean going fleet as a result, in the same way that the British imperial possessions in the Far East do for the Royal Navy. So yeah, the sense of distance in the 19th century is just way more relevant than it is for the 20th century. And it helps explain the sense of vulnerability that people felt in places like San Francisco, all the way out on the far edge of the US continental empire in North America. Yeah, I think that's totally well spotted. Yeah, again, just another kind of really interesting way to think about, you know, how the thinkers at the time would have thought about their own geostrategic position. So I want to kind of end with one final question, which I guess is really the big question. But, you know, why? Why does this matter today? And what should naval leaders take away from this history? Yeah, it's sort of the so what, dude? Like, what do we care? What does it matter to the president?

And I'll just caveat this by saying that it's difficult enough to explain the past without trying to predict the future. But I do think that the past, in this case, has some lessons that are pretty poignant and pregnant for policymakers in the present. You know, what do I mean by that? Well, first, I think it's just worth thinking about a world in which the United States is a regional power, a global power and what it looked like to have a force structure suited and designed for that moment. Another thing I think is relevant here is to historicize, to place in historical context, the really long history of the United States as a Pacific nation. This is something that doesn't come out of a box after World War II. It's not something that was invented by the Obama

administration and the pivot to Asia, it's something that has a long history and a good deal of traction in U.S. strategic thinking and economic thinking and ideological conceptions dating all the way back to the 19th century. William Henry Seward calls the Pacific the chief theater of events in the world's great hereafter. And if there's a better slogan for the pivot to Asia or the emphasis on the Western Pacific in the 21st century, I'm not quite sure what it is. A corollary of that is that the United States and China have been maritime powers in the Pacific, often engaged in competitive naval racing all the way back into the 1880s and 90s. And certainly, the United States and China have long been, in the industrial era, two vast and relatively secure continental powers, again on either side of the Pacific, who are attempting to make an affirmative case for why sea power, naval power, would be a useful thing to attain, a useful thing to expend scarce resources on.

That's a long story. It's not something that has come about after the 1980s and 1990s. It's not something that comes out of the box with thinkers like Wu Zhongli. We can trace this back to some of the debates that are happening in the Qing Empire in the 1880s and 1890s under people like Li Hongzhang. And then last, I think this isn't really necessarily relevant just for naval leaders, but it's also relevant for all of us as citizens, which is is to be sensitive to the rhetoric surrounding the nature of threat like what do we mean when we really say threat what what what is what are you actually threatening here are we threatening the physical security of the United States we're threatening the ideological convictions of the United States the ideological pretensions of the United States or this is is

this a case when threat is being used as a tool by an institution to get something it wants and And this is a story, certainly, of all those things colliding. And it should sensitize us to the way that bureaucracies use threat and exaggerate threats in order to achieve their aims. And I think that's something that's as relevant to debates over the budget in the 21st century as it is to debates over the transition from the United States as a regional power to the United States as a great power at the end of the 19th century. Fascinating. Yeah. And yeah, this fascinating stuff. But unfortunately, we're just about out of time for today. But before we go, I'd like to give you a chance to tell us what you're working on. You mentioned potentially another manuscript project and where, if anywhere, our listeners

can find you online. So right now, I'm working on getting this dissertation transformed into something that's publishable and readable by an academic audience. And so hopefully, this will be out as a book in the next year or two. That's my ambition. I'm on Twitter, TJamison underscore sort of Tommy. But of course, the best way to get in touch with me meaningfully would be to talk to your detail or to try to come to the Naval Postgraduate School to pursue your master's, which is a course of action. I cannot recommend highly enough. Awesome. And as someone who spent some time at the Naval Postgraduate School, I can say that that's a little bit of time. that's absolutely a great place to be

I'd like to thank my guest Dr. Tommy Jamison for talking to us about his doctoral dissertation Pacific Wars Peripheral Conflict and the Making of the U.S. New Navy 1864 to 1897 thanks again and take care thanks very much for the opportunity Walker

I had a great time © transcript Emily Beynon We are the police. We are the police. We are the police.