Prof. Samuel J. Watson

Professor Watson is the son of Army officers. He earned his BA in History and Political Science from Indiana University and his MA and PhD from Rice University, and 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. He has directed the History Department's senior thesis program since 2013, and has taught five different core courses, ten different electives, and thirteen different senior thesis colloquia. He has served on PhD committees for six universities and has led or participated in more than twenty-five staff rides at West Point. Professor Watson serves on the About’s Civilian faculty Advisory Council and chaired the Academic Freedom Advisory and the Library Advisory committees. He is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of American Military History, forthcoming in 2025, and of James W. Kershner, Sylvanus Thayer: A Biography (West Point Press, forthcoming 2026). 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. He 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 in 2017. Professor Watson served 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 thirteen presses and as an article manuscript referee for twelve different scholarly journals. He has written nearly a hundred book reviews in scholarly journals and has presented more than fifty papers at academic conferences, as well as more than twenty talks to the public. As you can tell, he reads a lot.