War Historian to Speak

Liddle's Distinguished Lecturer Series presentation is scheduled for 2 p.m. in the Dr. James S. Olson Auditorium in the newly occupied Academic Building 4. A dedication ceremony for the auditorium and a reception will follow Liddle's presentation.

The new building at 20th Street and Ave. I will house the history, psychology and philosophy, and library science departments, as well as a Student Advising and Mentoring Center and a new computer services laboratory.

Liddle is the author or primary editor of 19 books on the two world wars. He has also authored highly respected articles, professional papers, scripts, and audio presentations, and has organized a number of museum exhibitions as well as developed video and television productions.

"Dr. Liddle's accomplishments are monumental, and the collections he has built are invaluable to the study of military history," said Phillip Parotti, Sam Houston State University English professor and author.

Liddle founded and edited two significant journals of military history: "The Poppy and the Owl," about World War I, and "Everyone's War," which was published by The Second World War Experience Centre.

His two most recent publications make extensive use of material from The Second World War Experience Centre, including photographs. They are "The Great World War 1914-1945: Lightning Strikes Twice," which examines contrasts and similarities of experience in the two world wars, and "For Five Shillings a Day: Experiencing War 1939-45."

He is also credited with the founding of two of the world's most important war archival collections.

His first great effort was "The Liddle Collection," which he began compiling more than 30 years ago and completed while at the University of Leeds from 1988-1999. That collection documents the experiences of more than 6,900 men and women during World War I.

His present work is a similar project relating to World War II. He and his assistants have traveled widely interviewing thousands of men and women about their personal war experiences, capturing each of their records on tape.

They also collect letters, diaries, journals, records, maps and equipment documenting every aspect of the second world war.

The poignancy of their work is illustrated by a memory Liddle related in 1999 at the dedication of The Second World War Experience Centre. He told of being handed a prototype longbow by a man who had been ordered in 1940 to devise such a weapon "in the emergency of a possible invasion and the acute shortage of firearms."

"He placed the bow he had made in my hands," Liddle related at the dedication. "I found it then, and find it now, hard to imagine any single item which could more tangibly convey to school children, students, indeed to everyone, a clearer sense of our state of readiness at that time.

"Such is the educative power of a single three-dimensional item and the man instructed to make it-had given it to me-what a thrill-and what a lesson."

Liddle is known internationally for his authoritativeness and lecturing skill. He has presented professional papers at international conferences in France, Germany, Canada, Russia and Egypt, and lectured extensively in Canada and the United States.

In the United States, specifically, he has lectured at Yale, Georgetown, University of Ohio, Nebraska, Texas A&M, North Texas State, Oakland University, Florida State and The Citadel.

Liddle follows previous Distinguished Lecturers who, since the program's inception in 1980, have included former President George Bush, Polish President Lech Walesa, historian Arthur Schlesinger, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, astronaut John Young, and others.

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SHSU Media Contact: Frank Krystyniak
Jan. 8, 2003
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