Shauna on the goAbout
Shauna Hann
Historian · Educator · Certified Executive Bourbon Steward
Different rooms, same job: make the hard thing make sense.
A chalkboard. A spin bike. A supply operation the size of a country. A glass of bourbon. Different rooms — same job.
I've spent my life making hard things make sense. I taught history at West Point, built leadership courses and taught logistics for the U.S. Army, coached in the studio for years, and now my husband and I walk people through the how and why of tasting bourbon. The subject keeps changing. What I actually do never does — I take the complicated thing, find the so what, and hand it back simple enough to use.
What I believe
People don't really learn until they feel why it matters. Facts without a reason get brain-dumped by Friday. So I don't lecture. I build a frame you can think inside, and I make the idea come alive — history you can argue over, a bourbon finish you can feel on your skin.
Where the work has taken me
Chalk dust at West Point. The low hum of a seminar room at Leavenworth. A soldier in Korea who finally sees how the pieces fit together. The rooms change; the job doesn't — I've taught history and leadership to cadets and commanders, and mentored soldiers half a world from home, always chasing that one moment when the hard thing goes clear.
And I don't only teach it. I go stand in it. I've walked the old streets of the Hudson Valley to help save what's worth keeping, in Dutchess County and Orange County both. I've stood at a podium at Carolina and made the case for why two men once drew pistols over a single word. I've talked law and history to a room in Orange County, and carried the question of what makes a man all the way to a conference floor in New York. Same thread, every time: find the why, and make it matter.
- ◆Assistant Professor, Department of History — U.S. Military Academy at West Point
- ◆Assistant Professor — U.S. Army Command and General Staff College
- ◆Pre-Command Course Director — Army Logistics University, Fort Gregg-Adams — the course preparing incoming battalion and brigade commanders to take command
- ◆M.A., History — The Ohio State University (U.S. History to 1877); doctoral work, ABD
- ◆Phi Alpha Theta — the national history honor society
- ◆Certified Executive Bourbon Steward
- ◆Co-Founder & Educator-in-Chief — Drunken Unicorn (bourbon education)
- ◆Contributor & Editor — Chasing the Unicorn (podcast)
- ◆Presenter, University of North Carolina — the history of dueling & honor
- ◆Presenter — a New York conference on masculinity
- ◆Speaker, law & history — Orange County, New York
- ◆Historic preservation — New York’s Hudson Valley (Dutchess & Orange Counties)
Off the clock
The same instinct just points at other things. Rescuing rabbits. Volunteering with veterans. Cleaning up rivers. Tutoring kids and college students alike. Lesson or life, I like leaving things better than I found them.
Giving it back
I mentor when I can, the way someone once did for me. Whether it is a soldier finding their footing, a student stuck on a hard idea, or a whole room that thinks a subject is not for them, I want to be the one who helps it finally make sense. A why you can hold. That is the point of all of it.
Always on the go
I chase the moment a thing comes alive — standing where the history happened, hearing the old bells ring, letting the place pour through me. Then I come home and try to give a little of that away.
That's the whole thing, really. Come along.