Prof. Samuel J. Watson, Ph.D.

Professor Samuel Watson is the chief of cadet academic development in history for the Department of History & War Studies (HWS) at the United States Military Academy (USMA).

The son of Army officers, he earned a bachelor's degree in history and political science from Indiana University and his master's and doctorate from Rice University. Professor Watson has taught at Houston Community College, Texas Southern University, and the University of St. Thomas. 

He began his service at West Point in 1999 in the Military History division, moved to the American History division in 2002, was promoted to associate professor in 2005, and to full professor in 2013. 

Professor Watson has directed the HWS senior thesis program since 2013, and has taught five different core courses, 10 different electives, and 13 different senior thesis colloquia. He has served on Ph.D. committees for six universities and has led or participated in more than 25 staff rides at West Point. 

He is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of American Military History, forthcoming in 2025. In 2014, his books Jackson's Sword and Peacekeepers and Conquerors (University Press of Kansas), on the U.S. Army officer corps as diplomats in the borderlands and frontiers between the War of 1812 and the war with Mexico, together won the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award. 

Professor Watson is an author and editor for The West Point History of the American Revolution, The West Point History of the Civil War, and The West Point History of Warfare, which won the Society for Military History/George C. Marshall Foundation Prize for the Use of Digital Technology Teaching Military History in 2016 and the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award in 2014 and 2017. 

He served as an elected trustee of the Society for Military History, as its northeastern regional coordinator, on its Moncado Article Prize Committee, and as chair of its Coffman First Manuscript Prize Committee. He was a mainstay of the West Point Summer Seminar in Military History from 1999 until its conclusion in 2016. 

Professor Watson has served as a reviewer for federal National Historical Public Records Commission grant applications for the Papers of the War Department (1784-1800) and the Papers of Ulysses Grant, and on a National Endowment for the Humanities grant evaluation committee for Veterans Dialogues on the Experience of War. 

He serves on the editorial boards of the Modern War Studies series (University Press of Kansas) and the Journal of the Early Republic and has served as a book manuscript referee for 13 presses and as an article manuscript referee for 12 different scholarly journals. He has written nearly 100 book reviews in scholarly journals and has presented more than 50 papers at academic conferences, as well as more than 20 talks to the public.