This year’s Hurley Seminar will be about 1917. The title of this year’s Seminar is: “From Passchendaele to Petrograd, 1917: The Year the Germans Almost Won the First World War.” Speakers are Dr. Nick Lloyd, Senior Lecturer, Defence Studies Department, King’s College London, who will present: Passchendaele: 100 Years On” and Dr. Sean

The Alfred and Johanna Hurley Military History Seminar is now well into its third decade, offering cutting-edge discussions on issues of national security and military history every fall. The seminar was conceived by UNT President and retired Air Force General Dr. Al Hurley in 1983. Its unique concept was to move fluidly between the battlefield and the academy by teaming a “scholar” with a “warrior,” an expert on a particular war with a veteran of that campaign. The seminar continues in that spirit, and has added new dimensions by adding historians and national security officials to broaden the discussions. Recent seminars have featured speakers like former CENTCOM Commander General Anthony Zinni (“The General’s Dilemma: Aligning Warfighting With Politics, from the American Revolution to the War in Afghanistan”), Oxford’s Chichele Professor of the History of War Dr. Hew Strachan (“The British Army in Iraq and Afghanistan”), Sir Michael Howard (“War Among The Peoples”), Dr. Sean McMeekin (“The War of the Ottoman Succession: Re-Examining the First World War a Hundred Years Later”), retired Australian colonel and counter-insurgency expert Dr. David Kilcullen (“The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One”), and Dr. Victor Davis Hanson (“The Significance of Ancient Warfare for the Present and the Future.”) Year in and year out, for 30-plus years and counting, the Hurley Seminar balances in-depth discussions of current wars with new interpretations of important historical questions like The Future of NATO, German combat power in World War II, the national security implications of the Kennedy assassination, and the Origins of World War I.