Nation, College, Wartime: Archaeology at a WWI Student Army Training Corps Camp at New Hampshire College
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Nation, College, Wartime: Archaeology at a WWI Student Army Training Corps Camp at New Hampshire College Jillian Price 1 & Meghan C. L. Howey 2
Published online: 29 April 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract During World War I, the U.S. War Department contracted with 157 universities to form the National Army Training Detachments whose mission was to train college-age draftees in 66 critical army trades (subsequently the Student Army Training Corps). This program is an overlooked part of First World War history and has received little to no archaeological inquiry. This paper investigates the New Hampshire College camp. Working between documentary and archaeological materials, this paper explores how the interrelated duties of educational institutions, businesses, government, and individuals merged with an American wartime imagined community here but also how in their lived experiences of the camp, people materialized the complications of balancing citizenship, difference, duty, and nation. The social lives of the lower-rank men who inhabited these camps, the composite communities formed at them, and the impact of the government’s assertion of control over institutions of higher education all carry material ramifications that deserve further investigation. Keywords World War I . Student Army Training Corps . University of New Hampshire . Nationalism . Barracks
* Meghan C. L. Howey [email protected] Jillian Price [email protected]
1
Department of History, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA
2
Department of Anthropology, University of New Hampshire, 73 Main Street, 313 Huddleston Hall, Durham, NH 03824, USA
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Int J Histor Archaeol (2016) 20:289–317
Introduction Facing a severe shortage of vocational experts in World War I, the US War Department contracted with 157 universities and schools to form the National Army Training Detachments whose mission was to train college-age draftees in 66 critical army trades (this subsequently became the Student Army Training Corps [SATC]). Colleges across the country re-drew their campus maps and reorganized their course schedules to accommodate these vocational trainees, as the U.S. Army placed its staff in professors’ offices and converted dormitories into Barracks (Dooley 1919, p. 3). New Hampshire College, a land-grant agricultural college in the small town of Durham, NH, was one of these institutions of higher education transformed into a vocational army training camp (Fig. 1). New Hampshire College became the University of New Hampshire in 1923. The first detachment arrived at New Hampshire College on May 16, 1918. The campus, and, by extension, the surrounding town, quickly became Boccupied^ by the
Fig. 1 Location of New Hampshire College (now the University of New Hampshire) in Durham, New Hampshire
Int J Histor Archaeol (2016) 20:289–317
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army: the college newspaper came under government control, the War Department introduced new war-themed courses, and the army dominated local businesses with priority order forms. The
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