Doctoral Fellow in History, Latin American Studies Awarded Multiple Grants

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Aaron Moulton

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Aaron Moulton, Doctoral Academy Fellow in the department of history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, has won the Samuel Flagg Bemis Dissertation Research Grant and the 2012 Harry S. Truman Library Institute Research Grant. Moulton will use the funds to conduct research in the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador, and Mexico and to support archival work for his dissertation.

The Bemis Grant is awarded through the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. The society, the leading organization for historians of American foreign relations, supports doctoral students whose dissertations cover aspects of U.S. foreign relations history. Moulton will receive the award at the society's luncheon at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans in January.

The Harry S. Truman Library Institute is a non-profit associated with the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum and supports researchers who wish to use the collections of the presidential library in Independence Missouri.

Moulton’s dissertation, The Transnational 'Cold' War in Central America and the Caribbean: Revolutionary Exiles, Counterrevolutionary Exiles, Dictators, and the United States, 1944-1954, presents an international history of the battles between transnational networks of revolutionaries, presidents, counterrevolutionaries and dictators in the larger Caribbean Basin.

Moulton argues that dictators used counterrevolutionary exiles and U.S. resources to contain revolutionary exiles and presidents in their own "backyard." By the early 1950s, dictators and counterrevolutionary exiles targeted Guatemala, the sole remaining 'mecca' for revolutionary exiles seeking to eliminate the dictatorships of Rafael Trujillo and Anastasio Somoza. Their attempts to remove Guatemala emerged form a regional conflict and goals independent of the U.S.-USSR bipolar Cold War, serving as an important foundation for the infamous 1953-1954 U.S.-sponsored coup.

Randall Woods, distinguished professor and John A. Cooper Professor of History, and Kathryn Sloan, associate professor of history, serve as Moulton’s dissertation directors.