DIANA L. AHMAD, Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita at Missouri University of Science and Technology (S&T, Rolla, Missouri), holds degrees from the University of Missouri (Ph.D.), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (M.A., B.A.). She retired from S&T in 2022. While not serving in the United States military, she taught for the University of Maryland Asian Division (now known as the University of Maryland Global Campus) for nearly nine years teaching at American military bases in Japan (i.e., Yokosuka, Atsugi, Misawa, Okinawa), Guam, Kwajalein, and Korea (i.e.,Yongsan, Camps Casey, Pelham, Garry Owens, Howze, Henry, Kunsan). Her research focuses on the expansion of the United States into the American West in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, but she goes beyond the beaches of the North American west coast. She focuses on the first two United States Navy Captains in charge of American Samoa and Guam (Capts. Benjamin Franklin Tilley and Richard Phillips Leary) and the impact they had on the development of the two Pacific Territories. Ahmad’s research also includes the impact smoking-opium had on the demands to exclude the Chinese from the United States and animals on the overland trails to California and Oregon. Currently, she is the Book Review editor for the Nevada Historical Society Quarterly (The Q). She has reviewed over thirty books that focus on the history of the United States Navy for Tuesday Tidings (National Maritime Historical Society), Sea History, and the Naval Historical Foundation. She also lectures regularly at the local public libraries in southeastern Wisconsin, at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Green Bay. She was also honored with the United States Naval Academy’s McMullen Seapower Grant for Young Naval Historians (2007). She has also presented three papers at the USNA’s symposiums, as well as served as a commentator for various panels there.
HOMEPORT: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
AREAS OF EXPERTISE: United States Expansion to the American West (including the Pacific Islands), smoking-opium use in the West, animals on the journey west, and Anglo-American experiences in Hawai`i, Guam, and American Samoa.
NOTABLE PUBLICATIONS:
“Scoundrel or Gentleman: The Reign of Captain Benjamin Tilley, U.S.N., on American Samoa,
1900-1901,” The Nautilus IX (Spring 2018), 7-28.
Keynote Address: “Two Captains, Two Regimes: Benjamin Franklin Tilley and Richard Phillips Leary, America’s Men on the Spot” Naval Historical Foundation’s Naval Heritage Speakers Program, St. Charles, Missouri.
Two Captains, Two Regimes: Benjamin Franklin Tilley and Richard Phillips Leary,Pacific Island Commanders, 1899-1901,” International Journal of Naval History 10:1 (October 2013). www.ijnhonline.org.
“Embracing Manifest Destiny: The Samoa Experience,” Journal of the West 45:2 (Spring 2006): 66-74.
Conference papers at, for example, the Naval Academy Symposiums, Society of Military History, American Studies Association, and Western Social Science Association.
The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Century American West
(Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2007).
Success Depends on the Animals (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2016)