User:J Leatherwood

Also known as: 157.182.123.51

Jeffrey M. Leatherwood was born on October 20, 1970 in Nuremburg, Germany, and spent his formative years living on military bases. As a young child, he was surrounded by Army culture. His late father, Grady, was a career NCO who twice served in Vietnam, and his grandfather, Woodrow, won two medals fighting across France and Belgium in WWII.

After serving a single term with the U.S. Army's field artillery branch, Leatherwood attended Western Carolina University, a small North Carolina college, where he received two bachelor's degrees in English and History. After a brief stint in newspaper journalism and advertising, Leatherwood returned for a master's degree at Cullowhee in 2003.

It was during this period that Leatherwood began the research for what would become his first book, Nine From Aberdeen. Within one year, he had finished a book-length master's thesis on the hitherto unknown U.S. Army Ordnance bomb squads of World War II, a forerunner of our modern-day EOD services who still risk their lives in war and peace.

Leatherwood went on to earn his doctorate in 19th and 20th Century U.S. and World History at West Virginia University. During his five years as a WVU graduate student, he became an educator, teaching a variety of undergraduate classes, including Modern Military History. Leatherwood also completed his dissertation on the 1919 Charlotte Streetcar Strike, one of North Carolina's greatest peacetime tragedies.

After graduation in 2009, Dr. Leatherwood has continued to teach Humanities and History courses for WVU's Eberly College of Arts and Sciences. After two years of further research and writing, "Nine from Aberdeen," was published in 2012 through Cambridge Scholars Publishing, a United Kingdom press committed to helping first-time academic writers.

Leatherwood has been invited to speak at national EOD reunions in support of his book on World War II bomb disposal. Leatherwood has future plans to publish his dissertation on the Charlotte Strike as a full-length regional history through a major state university press.