Tanks for Everything

By Dr. Brian Regal

History is all around us if we only take the time to look and listen. Several years ago my partner Lisa and I were headed to Frenchtown for a bit of Sunday afternoon antiquing. As we headed down the highway that leads into town I was delighted to suddenly see an old friend parked along the roadside. It was a friend I hadn’t seen in years, decades in fact. I pulled over to say hello and introduce Lisa. My friend was an M60A3 battle tank. The same model I served on years before when I worked for Uncle Sam. It was now parked on the grass outside the local National Guard Armory.

Seeing this vehicle brought back many memories of friends and adventures I had around the world. I knew every nut and bolt, every inch, and every ounce of this fifty-five ton war machine that was once the scourge of the Russians and the Warsaw Pact, and which helped keep World War III from happening.

New Jersey has decommissioned military vehicles and equipment on display all over from Bergen to Burlington. Most people just drive right past them hardly noticing or realizing what they represent. These once fearsome weapons of war sit mute, their histories of heroic daring do and sacrifice long forgotten. They try to remind us, but they rarely do as we don’t listen. You can find such relics from all periods of American history from the Revolution to the Gulf conflicts scattered around.

Sometimes you find these relics in groups like at the New Jersey Militia Museum at Lawrenceville, or at Sea Girt, but mostly they exist as solitary, lonely old heroes like the M551 Sheridan at the American Legion hall in South Plainfield or the M60A3 (there are a lot of these around) in Burlington not far from where the Jersey Devil is buried. There are M3 Stuarts, M26 Pershings, and M42 Dusters standing silent guard. There are also artillery pieces such as the pair of 37mm anti-tank guns at the American Legion Post near Chester or the two captured German guns on Kearny Avenue brought back by WWI doughboys. There’s the enormous muzzle loading Dahlgren guntaken from the Civil War USS Richmond in Lambertville.

These machines have stories. The men and later women who served on them called them home. They lived on them, ate on them, communed with the universe in them, depended on them for their lives. They hung their personal gear on the outside, and pictures of loved ones inside, and dreamed of their futures while riding them. They thought of them as friends. They gave them names like Lucky Legs, China Girl, Mary Ann, Opps Upside Ya Head, The Beast, Joan J, and Candy-O (I named my M60 Dreamboat Annie for Ann Wilson of the band Heart). They held off the Japanese attack at Tenaru on Guadalcanal, hammered the Rebel works at Vicksburg, broke into the Rhineland and froze at the Bulge. They stood down the Commies on the Iron Curtain and liberated Kuwait. Today, few of us care or even remember.

If you see one of these vehicles along the roadside, go up to it and listen close. It’s like when you hold a seashell to your ear so you can hear the ocean. These are not statues which are designed to remind us of history. These old tanks and guns don’t represent history, they are history. They were there. They will tell you their stories if you let them. They want you to learn the important lessons they have to teach about honor, courage, history, and even friendship. Because history is all around us, if only we take the time to look and listen.

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Brian Regal teaches the history of science, technology, and medicine at Kean University. He was a Tread Head in the 1970s and 80s. His latest book is The Battle Over America’s Origin Story (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2022).

Who Owns History?

Seeing Greeks protest the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum, 

I saw how much history mattered.

By

Fabiana Nobre, History Major

As an international flight attendant, I am lucky to be able to visit sites in Europe that I am studying in class. During the Summer 2022 term, there was a remarkable coincidence. As I was taking HIST 3110 Greek Civilization, I visited the British Museum in London, which houses the Elgin Marbles. They are statues taken by a British official in the early nineteenth century from the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens. As it turns out, my professor Dr. Bellitto had assigned for the final exam an article about this event and the questions raised about repatriating them back to Greece. The day I visited the British Museum, a group of Greek activists were protesting for the return of the statues. A class met real life met a final exam.

The history of ancient Greece matters because it is the root of our modern democracy, the birth of philosophy. It has influenced our educational system, politics, literature, architecture, art, theater, sports (the Olympics), astronomy and medicine. The Romans imitated the Greeks, and the rest of the Western world, Europeans in particular, imitated the Romans. Therefore, we are all imitating the ancient Greeks. There is no doubt that the ancient Greeks are one of the most fascinating and brilliant civilizations of the world.

I had never questioned where museums acquired their artifacts. In fact, it was something that had never crossed my mind. I had always assumed that they were acquired through donations or purchases. To me, the beauty of learning history is that I am constantly learning more about human behavior. To imagine that many artifacts have been stolen should not have been a surprise. One of Dr. Regal’s favorite lines is: “it’s all fun until an historian shows up.” Some disappointments for sure will come up; some preconceptions you had will be turned upside down and inside out. And you start questioning everything you thought you knew. For instance, the lighting of the torch at the Olympics is now a disappointment to me as now I know it was something Adolf Hitler adapted, and not something the ancient Greeks were doing in the original Olympics. After reading chapter 8 of Roger Atwood’s Stealing History, which is about the Elgin Marbles and was part of Dr. B’s final exam, I was even more disappointed with the power of colonization, and that the history of a culture can just be picked out and stolen. Knowing the history of colonization, this should not have been a shocker.

When I visited the British museum in June 2022, I noticed a group of people carrying the Greek flag; I instantly had the goosebumps. After entering the museum, and going straight to room 23, I realized that there was a protest going on. There was a group of Greeks (and non-Greek supporters) who were celebrating the 13th anniversary of the Acropolis Museum in Athens, and therefore, asking for the return of the Parthenon Marbles there. I approached a Greek woman and asked her about the protest to return the Elgin Marbles to Athens. She politely corrected me, and said “please, don’t ever call them that. He was a thief.”

Travelers have always visited the Acropolis, and many would take the liberty of taking away something ancient as a souvenir. What the British ambassador to Constantinople, Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, did, was nothing new. However, the immensity of what he stole is quite disturbing. My jaw dropped, she wasn’t wrong, and in that moment, it clicked—the ding moment Dr. Bellitto talks about. These people were there fighting to reclaim an important part of their history—a history carved nearly 2,500 years ago. I was quite emotional, as the feeling in the room was a mixture of sadness, revolt and hope. I spoke to a man named Dimitris, who had a tattoo of Achilles in his forearm, and of Zeus in his upper arm. This is a culture who are passionate and proud of their history. In that moment, their history became a critical current event.

Kean History Alumni Update

This past summer, Dr. Bellitto caught up in the UK with two Kean History alumni as they pursued graduate studies abroad. He asked them to reflect on their current work and how Kean History prepared them for their next steps.

Elizabeth Thorsen, University of York

After taking classes on the Middle Ages with Dr. Bellitto, I decided that I wanted to pursue the field further and get a master’s degree in Medieval History. After deciding that I wanted to experience history as much as I wanted to learn about it, I applied to several schools in the United Kingdom and ended up at the University of York in England. In grad school, I took a mixture of content and skills classes.

Kean’s History Honors program prepared me for the discussion-based content courses, especially the heavy reading. In addition, Dr. Bellitto’s and Dr. Argote-Freyere’s papers helped me hone my writing skills, especially relating to being concise. Access to Kean’s archive material and the Livingston Booklist project also provided me with experience working with documents, which made my Latin and Paleography skills courses less daunting.

Studying in the United Kingdom provided me with several opportunities to see medieval ruins, explore castles, and experience history in a way that I had never before. I was even able to travel to Paris and stand in the courtyard where the woman I am writing my master’s dissertation on was burned at the stake in 1310.

Grad school has allowed me to hone and further develop the skills that I had already acquired during my undergraduate experience at Kean, and the opportunities I was given to research, write, and present history through the History Honors program prepared me for rigorous grad school courses. As I am completing my MA thesis, I will also be starting a job teaching US History 1 at the Freshman Academy of Perth Amboy High School. In the future, I hope to return to school and achieve an MLIS so that I can become an archivist.

Michael Collins, University of Oxford

After completing a dual B.A. in History and Political Science at Kean in 2014, I earned an M.A. from Rutgers in 2018 before being accepted as a DPhil candidate to Oxford in 2020. My dissertation is focused on the subject of what British officials in West Africa in the nineteenth century thought the political significance of their work. There’s reams of papers on what this or that Marquis or Earl thought of the imperial project – I want to know what the men carrying it out thought their duty was and how their sensibilities shaped the empire itself.

At present, I have two years remaining in my program before graduation. Studying takes plenty of time right now and I have difficulty imagining exactly what will come after. All I know is this – I want to continue researching and teaching the history of the British Empire and the history of Africa, whether that be in the United States or overseas. There are many unorganized archives in Africa though and, if my teaching skills are not in immediate need, I would be glad to assist in the process of cataloguing them.

I genuinely regard my time at Kean as essential to preparing me for this moment. I was not a good student coming out of high school. Through the faculty there, who were always there for me, I gained an appreciation of the fact that good work requires hard work and risks. Sometimes, you have to go digging for material that was never digitized. Sometimes, you have to make an argument that challenges the accepted understanding. Patience, perspiration, and a family of very generous editors will take you farther than we tend to think!