Jay Luvaas

He was the founder of the modern military staff ride, and was a two-time recipient of the Outstanding Civilian Service Medal of the Department of the Army.

[3] Luvaas served in the US Navy from July 1945 to March 1946,[4] and graduated from Allegheny in 1949; he received his Ph.D. in military history from Duke University in 1956,[5] where he was a student of Theodore Ropp.

Luvaas died in 2009 from complications of Alzheimers and was survived by his wife, Linda Sowers, and his five children; he was interred in Evergreen Cemetery in Gettysburg.

In the final chapter, as J. Orin Oliphant points out, Luvaas analyzed Henderson's contribution to military thinking and education.

[1] Beginning in 1962, Luvaas led groups of amateur and student historians to various Virginia and Pennsylvania battlefields; the group, nicknamed the Army of Cussewago, after Cussewago Creek near Meadville, included over time Luvaas' friends, interested historians, students from Allegheny, and cadets from West Point.

[1] Luvaas argued that the primary value of the subject of history to a military officer is not merely a factual background, but also a grasp of trends and the meaning of ideas.

[15] The combined spirit if the professional soldier and the civilian historian, Benjamin Franklin Cooling suggests, is a new school of military history that unifies old and new historical styles: it modifies the patriotic gore described by Edmund Wilson with contextual and integrative studies of leadership and theory.

There is room for both the "informed and broader contextual study of military history as suggested by Professor Jay Luvaas, ... and [for] his more popular resurrected "historical rides" to Civil War battlefields.