Daniel Ussishkin

Daniel Ussishkin

Professor of History

ussishkin@wisc.edu

608.263.1839

Office: 5243 Levy Hall
Office Hours: TBA

Daniel Ussishkin

I am a historian of modern Europe in general, and of modern Britain more particularly. My first book, Morale: A Modern British History (Oxford University Press, 2017), tries to answer the following question: how is it that modern Britons (and many others who took a similar path) have come to understand questions of conduct and its management in terms of collective attitude and morale? I try to answer this question by tracing the myriad iterations of the concept itself as it had emerged during the past two centuries, and by examining how Britons first tried to understand what morale actually was and then sought ways to secure it, thereby giving rise to entirely novel institutional practices and forms of knowledge, and linking those to myriad political projects.

I am now working on questions on imperial governance, as well as on a cultural history of the end of formal imperial rule in four former British Asian colonies.

Education

Ph.D., University of California – Berkeley
M.A., University of California – Berkeley
B.A., Tel Aviv University

Books

Morale: A Modern British History

Daniel Ussishkin. Morale: A Modern British History. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Arguably no nation is as closely associated with the term morale as Great Britain. Yet this concept that seems so innate to the British people was carefully cultivated within many spheres of modern national life. In this first critical history of morale, Daniel Ussishkin asks how is it that modern Britons have come to regard morale as a category of conduct, vital for the success of collective effort in war and peace, and a mark of good, modern, and human managerial practice, appropriate for a democratic age. He narrates the intellectual, cultural, and institutional history of morale in modern imperial Britain: its emergence as a new concept during the long nineteenth century, its changing meanings and significations, and the social and political goals those who discussed, observed, or managed morale sought to achieve. Formalized as a new military disciplinary problem during the long nineteenth century, morale came to permeate nearly every civilian sphere of life during the era of the two world wars as a new way of managing human conduct. This book traces how it gradually emerged from a problem that was regarded as residual at best to one that was seen as the epitome of proper managerial practice, its institutional manifestations and promotion by myriad organizations and the social-democratic state, and its emergence as a potent political concept from Britain’s social-democratic moment until the ascendancy of the New Right. Daniel Ussishkin’s Morale tells the history of concept central to the management of war, business, and civic society not just in Britain but in modern culture writ large.

Selected Publications

  • “Morale and the Postwar Politics of Consensus,” Journal of British Studies 52, no. 3 (July, 2013), pp. 722-743.
  • “The Will to Work”: Industrial Management and the Question of Conduct in Interwar Britain,” in Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas, eds. A Brave New World? Empire and Nation-Building in Britain between the Wars (London: Institute for Historical Research, 2012).

Selected Awards

  • 2017-2019 Vilas Associate
  • 2013 Center for the Humanities First Book Award, UW – Madison
  • 2009-2011 Hanadiv (Rothschild) Postdoctoral Fellowship in European History
  • 2008-2009 Newhouse Humanities Center Fellowship, Wellesley College
  • 2007 James Kettner Prize for the Best Dissertation in History, UC Berkeley

History Courses