CFK US ADVISORY BOARD

Richard Kohn
Member, Advisory Board

Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Richard H. Kohn was educated at Harvard College (AB, magna cum laude, 1962) and at the University of Wisconsin B Madison (MS, 1964; PhD, 1968), where he concentrated in United States military and 18th century history, and minored in military studies. He was Assistant Professor of History at the City College of the City University of New York from 1968 to 1971, and served on the Rutgers University faculty as Assistant, Associate, and Professor of History from 1971 to 1984. During the academic year 1980-1981 he held the Harold Keith Johnson Visiting Chair of Military History at the US Army Military History Institute and Army War College. From 1981 to 1991 he was Chief of Air Force History and Chief Historian for the United States Air Force, and from 1985 to 1990 an adjunct professor at the National War College. In 1991 he was Visiting Scholar in Strategic Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.

Kohn has lectured at numerous universities and to a variety of academic and military audiences, and has served as an advisor and consultant to academic and government organizations and agencies. He has been a Pulitzer Prize juror and an expert witness before the US Indian Claims Commission. President of the Society for Military History for two terms (1989-1993), he has been an elected member of the Council of the American Historical Association, chair of the Public History Committee for the Organization of American Historians, a member of the Presidential Materials Review Board for the National Archives and Records Administration, on the Advisory Board of the US Air Force's Gulf War Air Power Survey, chair of the Advisory Committee on Research and Collections Management for the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, and president of the board of directors of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History. His most recent service was on the USAF's Air University Board of Visitors and as a member of the National Security Study Group, a group of scholars and practitioners who assisted the US Commission on National Security/21st Century (the Hart-Rudman Commission), between 1998 and 2001 in reviewing American national security policies and institutions.

Among his awards are the Organization of American Historians Binkley-Stephenson Prize, the Society for Military History's Victory Gondos Memorial Service Award, two Department of the Army Certificates for Patriotic Civilian Service, the Department of the Air Force's Organizational Excellence and Exceptional Civilian Service Awards, and UNC-Chapel Hill's John L. Sanders Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Service.

 

A specialist in American military history and civil-military relations, Kohn is the author of Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783-1802 (1975). He edited the first-ever American issue of the Revue Internationale d'Histoire Militaire , the periodical of the International Commission on Military History; titled The United States Military under the Constitution of the United States, 1789-1989 , it was also published in book form by New York University Press in 1991. He was a co-author of The Exclusion of Black Soldiers from the Medal of Honor in World War II (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1997), the report that resulted in the award of seven medals of honor to black soldiers of that conflict. His most recent book is an edited volume with Peter D. Feaver, Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security (2001), the result of a three year project investigating the difference between military and civilian attitudes and perspectives in the United States today. His “Using the Military at Home: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” appeared in the April 2003 Chicago Journal of International Law . Kohn is currently working on a study of presidential war leadership in American history.

Address:
Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense CB# 3200, 401 Hamilton Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3200
Telephone: (919) 962-9700 (office)
Fax: (919) 962-2603
E-mail: rhkohn@unc.edu