The Albatrosses Aerospace History Seminar will meet again at 4:00 p.m. EST on June 24, 2021, when Larry Burke of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum will welcome comments and feedback on his paper, “What Kind of Man? Notions of Masculinity in Early Military Aviation.” 

 

Dr. Burke earned an undergraduate degree in Science and Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a master’s in Museum Studies from George Washington University, and, in 2014, his PhD in History and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University. He briefly taught history at the United States Naval Academy as a post-doc, before becoming Curator of U.S. Naval Aviation at the National Air and Space Museum. His first book, about the development of the airplane in the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps in pre-World War I era, is under contract with the Naval Institute Press.

 

In The Sky as Frontier, David Courtwright borrowed the framework of American Frontier Studies to describe the state of civilian flying in its earliest years as a “Type II frontier”: populated almost entirely by youthful men, eager to demonstrate their masculinity before their peers through risk-taking. In 1914, the U.S. Congress passed a law reinforcing the notion that aviation was for those who could afford (or sought out) risk when it restricted Army flight training to unmarried men under the age of 30. Using the record of the hearings leading up to the 1914 legislation along with a variety of archived letters between aviators and would-be aviators on the one hand, and various U.S. Army and Navy authorities on the other, this paper will explore attitudes toward who should and should not fly, exposing a division between those closest to military aviation and those with only indirect knowledge of the risks it entailed.

 

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