Retired History Professor Emeritus Dennis Showalter, known to many even outside the department as \u201cthe most engaging professor at the school,\u201d died Dec. 30, 2019, from complications related to esophageal cancer in Colorado Springs. He was 77.<\/p>\n
Dennis claimed German military history as his specialty, but others note his influence on worldwide military history was his real claim to fame. As the author of 27 books on military history, Dennis\u2019 love of the subject was shared with more than just his loyal and loving students at CC. He was invited to the Pentagon to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2019 on military doctrine and served in Tokyo as a consultant to the Japanese Ministry of Defense.<\/p>\n
In 2018, Dennis won the Pritzker Military Museum and Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. His reaction then was beyond surprise. \u201cI still don\u2019t believe it; it was unexpected,\u201d Showalter said. \u201cI hope it gives both my work and my future line of work a platform. It\u2019s not merely desirable but necessary for citizens of the United States to study military history.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dennis was born on Feb. 12, 1942, in Delano, Minnesota. He attended St. John\u2019s University for undergrad and earned his master\u2019s and Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. He married writer Clara Anne McKenna in November 1965, and had two children \u2014 Clara Kathleen and John Showalter \u2014 who all survive him today.<\/p>\n
Dennis also taught at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, the Air Force Academy, West Point Military Academy, and the Marine Corps University. He was featured in multiple military history documentaries and was known for turning \u201chistory haters into history buffs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dennis once said, \u201cTen years of teaching in a liberal arts college stressing classroom interaction have convinced me that the professor who hopes to remain an effective instructor must<\/em> also maintain himself as a productive scholar.\u201d True to form, he was in the middle of writing his 28th book, \u201cModern Warfare,\u201d upon his death and expressed wishes for his family to finish and publish it after his passing.<\/p>\n January 8, 2020<\/strong><\/p>\n I write in reference to the loss of Professor Dennis E. Showalter this past Dec. 30, as reported in a tribute in the Colorado Springs Gazette<\/em> on Jan. 4.\u00a0I first heard Dr. Showalter at a lecture delivered in Olin Hall in the spring of 1970.\u00a0He was a new assistant professor and I was a freshman. His talk was on aspects of Germany\u2019s rise to military power on the eve of World War II. I was not a declared history major at that time, but had deep interest in the field and was enrolled in Dean George Drake\u2019s Survey of Western Civilization to 1700, taught as a seminar in Cutler Hall and at the dean\u2019s home.\u00a0Showalter\u2019s lecture, as well as meeting him in person, changed my life\u2019s trajectory. I entered CC with the goal of becoming a high school music director and left in 1973 bound for graduate courses in history at U.C. Santa Barbara.\u00a0In the interim, classes offered by Tom K. Barton, Arthur Pettit, Susan Ashley, Lewis Geiger, William Hochman, and especially Harvey Carter and Dennis Showalter, directed my focus toward emulating my two most esteemed mentors at CC.<\/p>\n Showalter\u2019s zeal for his subject, passion to both inform and entertain his varied audiences from civilian service clubs to officer-candidates in our military academies, and his oratorical skills as lecturer remain my role model for successful college teaching from the lectern.\u00a0He was also an excellent advisor and leader in seminars. As a scholar he produced over 20 major works, sharing his research and careful analysis of military issues far beyond Colorado Springs. Unlike many professors, Showalter published the research he shared in classes with colleagues and was always open-minded to peer review, a hallmark of the academy. As Mike Neilberg, professor of history at the U. S. Army War College put it in the Jan. 4 Gazette <\/em>article, \u201cHe was a mentor and role model to an entire generation of military historians.\u201d\u00a0His 2018 Pritzker Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing (the ceremony for which I attended in Chicago) was both \u201ca combination of an Oscar and a Pulitzer\u201d as correctly reported in the Colorado College Bulletin<\/em> (Summer 2018, p. 7).\u00a0But there is so much more to the story of Showalter\u2019s success and influence at the college and beyond.<\/p>\n I have many friends from my CC days who also admired Showalter for his method of teaching; and, I was his colleague as a visiting lecturer during 1977 to 1978, learning much from him as I taught seven different courses across nine blocks. I would not have made it through that \u201cboot camp ordeal\u201d (as he described it) without his advice and encouragement.\u00a0Over the past four decades I corresponded occasionally with him and always looked forward to a meal and an update at reunions. I also own most of his books and have used some in my own class lectures on American military matters.<\/p>\n Many of us who took Showalter\u2019s courses continue to talk about both the classes and the man who brought such unique energy and authority on a daily basis into Palmer Hall.\u00a0This coming fall I am teaching History of Warfare for the first time after over 40 years as instructor of courses in North American history. My typed notes from War and Society Since the Renaissance (which I took in 1971) will form much of the material on the modern era. I am dedicating the course to the memory of Professor Showalter and trust the college will be celebrating his life with a major event and story in the Bulletin<\/em>.<\/p>\n W. R. Swagerty \u201973 Retired History Professor Emeritus Dennis Showalter, known to many even outside the department as \u201cthe most engaging professor at the school,\u201d died Dec. 30, 2019, from complications related to esophageal cancer in Colorado Springs. He was 77. Dennis claimed German military history as his specialty, but others note his influence on worldwide military history was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1388,"featured_media":15542,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[43,28],"class_list":["post-15728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spring-2020","tag-letters-to-the-editor","tag-milestones"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/files\/2020\/04\/milestones-dshowalter_BUL-SPR20.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1388"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15728"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15849,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15728\/revisions\/15849"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nTo the Editor:<\/em><\/h3>\n
\n<\/strong>Professor of history and director, John Muir Center
\nUniversity of the Pacific<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"