Our speaker for the February meeting, David A Smith, will be making a return visit to NY from Baylor University in Waco Texas, which was covered with 1 to 3 inches of "frozen wintry mix" while New York was being hit with over 10 inches of white fluffy snow! From Waco TX to NY and everywhere in between... quite a storm! Congratulations and our thanks to all of you who bravely made it to Monday's CWF meeting!
The meeting will take place on Monday, Feb 16th at Draught 55, 245 East 55 St, NY NY. Our meetings start at 6:00PM sharp with a pay bar and socializing starting at 5:30PM. If you plan to attend please contact Ann Plogsterth at either 212-877-6814 or plogsterth@aol.com. Cost is $ 65 which covers the dinner and expenses to bring our speaker to our city. As usual, your earliest possible reply greatly aids both our planning and the planning by the restaurant to furnish the correct number of meals. As a reminder to everyone, showing up for a meeting without having notified Ann of your attendance in advance will possibly result in us not having enough food for everyone who attends. So please do not let that happen!
Jim Santagata
VP Operations
Mobile: 718-930-0611
As already mentioned, David is a return speaker to the CWF. He was extremely well received during his past visits! I remember him as one of the most engaging speakers we've ever had! David is presently a senior lecturer in American history at Baylor. He has additional appointments as a Fleet Seminar Professor at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and a visiting lecturer at the Center for European Studies at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. His teaching specialties include Military, Maritime, and Global history. He received his undergraduate degree in History from Texas State University in San Marcos, and his PhD in Modern American History from the University of Missouri in the year 2000.
His latest book is Mahan: The Life of Maritime Strategy’s Greatest Revolutionary which will be out from the Naval Institute Press in spring 2026 and will be the first full-length biography of American naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan in almost 50 years.
His other books include A New Force at Sea: George Dewey and the Rise of the American Navy, and The Price of Valor: The Life of Audie Murphy, the Life of America’s Most Decorated Hero of WWII. He has also written about other aspects of American cultural and political history. His weekly show about art, culture, and history, David & Art, has been carried on KWBU, Waco’s NPR station, since 2018 and for 8 years before that he wrote a weekly column for the Waco Tribune-Herald on Art, Culture, and History.
David’s topic in February will be The Civil War in Global Perspective. The larger world, by 1860's standards, was becoming increasingly interconnected. Advances in transportation and communication along with revolutionary weapons and ways of waging war, ensured that other countries would have to follow the war's twists and turns with an eye towards their own self-interests, while also feeling the war's effects at this dawn of globalization. His talk examines the Civil War from this global perspective. From looking at questions about slavery and emancipation, to tracking naval arms races across the Atlantic; from difficult diplomacy that threatened to widen the war, to the growing territorial ambitions of European nations, looking at the Civil War from outside the US weaves a very different story from that with which Americans are familiar.