General Petrus J.M. "Peter" van Uhm is the current Chief of the Netherlands Defence Staff. In November 2011 he spoke to an audience of scientists, artists and businessmen, etc., complimenting them on their commitment to building a better world and noting the instruments they had chosen to do it: microscope, pen, brush, camera, money, etc. He then states that he too is committed to building a better world, and then--as a soldier walks out on stage with a semi-automatic rifle and the audience titters in anticipation--explains why "I chose a gun."
One of my History of War students pointed out this clip to me in light of our frequent classroom discussions about the code of the warrior.
(Hat tip to Mike Kitching)
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
Reconstruction as an Insurgency
Mike Few: Traditionally, social scientists, viewing conflict through the lens of the state, prefer to quantify wars as resulting in a win, loss, or tie; however, history shows that the construction, reconstruction, or deconstruction of the state following a conflict is often a long process with mixed results. Why did the Civil War not end after Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston surrendered to Union Gen. William T. Sherman at Bennett Place, Durham, NC and General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, at the home of Wilmer and Virginia McLean in the rural town of Appomattox Court House, Virginia?
Mark Grimsley: It’s important to acknowledge that in an important sense, the war did end in 1865, because the federal government’s two goals—the restoration of the Union and the destruction of slavery—had both been achieved. White southerners gave up the idea of an independent Confederacy, and they showed every sign of accepting the lenient terms for return to the Union offered by the administration of Andrew Johnson. The Republican-controlled Congress, however, believed that more stringent terms were necessary to achieve the fruits of victory. In the words of Richard Henry Dana, a prominent Republican, they insisted on holding the former Confederate states in “the grasp of war” until the political dominance of the Southern elite was eliminated. A key component of their plan to accomplish this involved the imposition of universal male suffrage for African Americans. Essentially, the Reconstruction insurgency was a successful effort to break the grasp of war and restore what Southern conservatives termed “Home Rule.”
A more clunky response, since you mention social scientists, would be to point to the Correlates of War Study, which defines a war as any event that results in a thousand or more battlefield deaths each year. If you substitute “deaths from political violence” for “battlefield deaths,” then several years during Reconstruction would come close to meeting this standard. In Louisiana alone, for example, an estimated 2,500 people perished between 1865 and 1876.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Progress Report
I'm now about 2/3 of the way through the process of migrating the blogs from my old web provider to the new one. The really welcome development is that I've reached a point where malicious script is no longer a problem. That means I can resume making regular posts. I look forward to doing that.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Outsmarting the Bad Guys
My various Wordpress blogs have been plagued with malicious script, and what with the demands of work and life I haven't yet found time to address the issue decisively.
Luckily, it dawned on me that I could redirect Facing the Demon to its original home--the place you've just landed.
Luckily, it dawned on me that I could redirect Facing the Demon to its original home--the place you've just landed.
Friday, January 6, 2012
Military History and the American Historical Profession
Brian Carroll, a visiting professor at Central Washington University, is teaching an interesting course concerning (you guessed it) military history and the American historical profession.
Among the assigned readings were several posts from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age. The only problem, of course, was that his students couldn't access the posts because I'd taken BTOOTSA offline. But not to worry. They're all here on War Historian, immediately below this post.
Among the assigned readings were several posts from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age. The only problem, of course, was that his students couldn't access the posts because I'd taken BTOOTSA offline. But not to worry. They're all here on War Historian, immediately below this post.
Military History: Past, Present, and Future
A guest post by John Maass, a graduate student at The Ohio State University
This post was originally published on February 23, 2006. John has since completed his PhD and is now a historian at the US Army Center of Military History.
In the twentieth century, there have been three separate and somewhat distinct strands of military history, although in the early part of this period, the distinctiveness of each was not nearly as pronounced as it is today. These three strands are popular military history, academic military history, and military history as used by professionals in the field of national security/defense, uniformed officers, academy instructors, etc. I will outline the characteristics of each and their current trajectories below.
Popular military history is characterized by an emphasis on battles and campaigns, on the heroics of military leaders, and “grand narratives.” In the first half of the twentieth century, almost all military history was written in this fashion, by academics and popular authors alike. Notable examples of non-academic works include Douglas Southall Freeman’s R.E. Lee and Lee's Lieutenants, Bruce Catton’s trilogy on the Army of the Potomac, and novelist Shelby Foote’s massive three-volume narrative of the Civil War. There were also numerous studies of Napoleonic and World War II battles, campaigns and leaders, including David Chandler’s work on the campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte and Hitler biographies written by John Toland, Alan Bullock, et al.
Academic historians also employed the narrative technique to provide a solid framework for their stories and for good reading, such as Douglas Edward Leach, Samuel E. Morison’s multi-volume narrative on the US Navy in World War II, and James I. Robertson’s Civil War books. These works used stirring narratives, focused on the combat and the drama of events, and usually portrayed somebody as the readily identifiable hero. They were largely celebratory or laudatory in tone, even while depicting the “losers” of wars like the Confederacy and its heroic generals.
Some of this largely uncritical tone may have been influenced by the consensus school of history that dominated academic writing from the WWII years through the mid-1960s, and before that the proper subject of military history was seen as focusing on the leaders and their battles: War, this generation seemed to be saying, is after all about fighting. Military historians also tended to conceptualize warfare as progressing toward greater sophistication. As academic historian Dennis Showalter has expressed it, military history remains the "last stronghold of the Whig interpretation" of history.
Popular military history and its emphasis on combat and leaders today remains, well, popular. It also sells very well in the bookstores, and as Jeremy Black has pointed out in his recent book Rethinking Military History (Cambridge, 2004), much of what gets written about military history is dictated by what publishing houses are willing to bring out to the market. Traditional “trumpet and drums” military studies sell, not an unimportant consideration to publishers and authors alike. This is the type of military history the general public wants to read—chronological narratives that tell stories about war and the men (rarely women) who fought them.
For many years, writers both in and out of the academy were happy to oblige them, particularly regarding the U.S. Civil War. One can also see the lure of the popular history market in two ways. First, the history sections at the big box bookstores (Borders, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million) are dominated by military titles, including battle books and biographies of generals. People buy that kind of book, plain and simple. Second, unlike many other fields of history, one can see quite a significant crossover of academics writing solidly researched work meant in part if not in whole for the popular military history market. Examples: David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride and Washington’s Crossing; James McPherson’s recent book on Antietam; Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War on the French and Indian War; Stephen Ambrose’s Crazy Horse and Custer; and almost everything by Gary W. Gallagher. It is likely that as long as people have money to spend on books, popular history (in all forms, not just military history) is going to be with us. And, as noted above, it will likely always be part of academic military history as well.
Another trend in professional/academic military history has been the writing of and use of this brand of scholarship for the professional military officer or national security professional. These people are usually military/defense professionals either in uniform or civilians, who want military history to be a part of their professional development. This usually means that they place great value on "lessons learned" type of books, that is to say scholarship on very specific events, time periods or aspects of war (including logistics, planning, civil/military relations, etc.) to help them do their jobs. Members of this group do not want cultural history overlays to their military history books, nor do they want to see race, class and gender as the focus of a book. It's not that they object to this kind of scholarship; rather, they do not see that they have a use for it in their jobs. For these professionals, studying campaigns and battles means seeing what actual people did in real situations in the past and trying to extract lessons from the past as to what worked and what did not. This is what staff rides are all about; that is to say, the practice of taking military officers on guided tours of actual battlefields and figuring out what happened and why, what decisions commanders made and what the effects were, etc.
The use of military history as a tool of professional military education has a long history, and in the United States goes back to Alfred Thayer Mahan at the US Naval War College, who in the late 1890s (and afterward in retirement until his death in 1914), instructed naval officers in doctrine and theory through the use of history to learn lessons from the past.
Over the past two decades, historians (particularly in the academic word) have moved away from battles and leaders to more nuanced studies of warfare in general or previously ignored topics within the field. This has been called “The New Military History”, although given its roots in the late 1960s one might argue that it really isn’t new any longer. Nevertheless, scholars continue to delve into this area. For instance, a greater emphasis on the experience of the common soldier and his conditions, motivations, and post-war memories has been healthy for the field. While these deal with war, they do not focus on the generals, and many give a gritty, inglorious counterweight to top-down, grand narratives of campaigns. These include works by Joseph Reid, Gerald Linderman and James McPherson on common soldiers of the Civil War; studies by Charles Royster, Mark Lender and Gregory Knouff on Revolutionary War soldiers’ motivation; and works by Carol Reardon, Paul Fussell and David Blight on war memories. Additionally, the field has seen from academia some studies on war itself, with an emphasis not on battles but on ideas, on meanings, and revisions of previously held myths and fables. Mark Grimsley’s The Hard Hand of War (1995), for example, provides a convincing revision of the oft-repeated tale of Sherman’s March and its wanton destructiveness. He finds that Sherman’s men were not nearly as destructive as legend has come down to us, and that pillaging, burning, etc., was kept largely under control in Georgia and was directed at military and logistical targets for the most part.
An interesting debate, still very much part of military history, has centered on the issue of Confederate nationalism. Gary Gallagher (The Confederate War, 1999) has taken the side that the South was indeed a nation whereas Paul D. Escott in After Secession (1989) argues the opposite. A similar debate has centered on the effectiveness of the militia in early American warfare, with scholars such as Don Higginbotham, Lawrence D. Cress, and John Shy providing significant academic, non-battle oriented scholarship to the field.
Academic military history in recent years has also expanded to include the influence of social, cultural and gender history. As noted above, research on the lives of the common soldiers has been a healthy subject of inquiry in the past several decades, as have studies on war and its effects on society. Royster’s work (A Revolutionary People at War, 1979) on the Continental Army as a reflection of society and character during the American Revolution is another notable example of this scholarship. Gender is the lens through which Belinda J. Davis looks at the German home front during WWI (Home Fires Burning), in her study of the role of unruly women and food shortages. This work not only looks at noncombatants in military history, it also focuses on events behind the lines and not the battles. Mary Renda’s Taking Haiti is another gender study, in this case, masculinity and the Marine occupation of Haiti in 1915-1916. Again, no battles take place nor is it told from the generals’ perspective, yet it is clearly a military history. Cultural history too is now part of military history as two books exemplify. Wayne Lee’s Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina (2000) places wartime violence in a cultural perspective, to show that cultural norms dictated the levels of violence in North Carolina during the Revolution. Jill Lepore’s 2001 study of the Pequot War (In the Name of War) gives a cultural study of what war meant to the Puritans, how they wrote about it, and how the Pequot leader Metacom has come down to us over the years.
What have been the effects of the two developments, that of popular history and the use of military history for professionals? The sheer magnitude of the market for popular histories of war in the “trumpet and drums” genre has to some extent prevented the publication of military history written in other ways. If one looks at publishing as a zero-sum game, in that publishers have only a limited amount of books they can each produce, then the more books we get these days on Napoleonic naval history (do we really need another book on Nelson?) and Civil War generals (enough on Lee already!), the less we will see on other less explored areas. Financial pressures on both publishers and authors will drive this trend to a large degree. As noted above, the vast majority of people who read military history (and thus buy the books on the store shelves) want books about battles and leaders, especially with a dramatic, fast paced narrative. The resultant de-emphasis on issues of race, class, gender, memory, etc., has caused non-military historians to look on military history, even the academic kind, as antiquated, narrow, and unengaged with modern methodologies. Similarly, the desire of military professionals of various stripes to look to military history for lessons learned and professional education has led to a pronounced presentist approach by these types of students, in that they do not look at the field in terms of methodology, approach, interpretive challenges and epistemological issues, but rather in a “what can this so for me right now” kind of way. Scholars producing work for this purpose can easily be led to a superficial analysis of the past in which they tend to extract from history that which is relevant to today in today’s terms, which may not always or even often be accurate.
What are the major challenges confronting military historians in the twenty-first century? Military history is still far too narrowly defined. I agree with John Lynn, Jeremy Black and several other current military historians who have noted recently some major problems in military history today. There is a prevalent “Eurocentricity” in our military studies, especially in our emphasis on Western Europe and the U.S. We have to branch out to other regions, eras and cultures to get a true picture of world military history, which will tell us things about our own typicality, biases and gaps in scholarship. Even when most military historians do include in their work non-western societies and how they wage war, it is almost always in relation to western methods of war, not studies of non-western groups alone. In a similar vein, we currently have too great of a focus on the leading powers and dominant military systems, including the U.S., the Soviet Union and the warfare each practiced. In studies of earlier times the emphasis is on Greece, Rome, and their enemies. Do most military historians know anything about, say, African warfare in any era? Our understanding of nonwestern warfare is usually influenced by stereotypes we hold of other cultures and peoples, e.g., that Asian warfare is based on subterfuge and trickery. Really?
Technology has biased many scholars (as Jeremy Black notes) in explaining military capability in what he calls a “fascination with technology.” The general public too is partly to blame for this emphasis on the new and exciting, since that sells well in stores. The emphasis on technology is too great and there has as a result been a presentist primitivization of non-western combatants, which hardly seems accurate and may be explained in part as our own cultural bias. There has also been a trend to simplify the non-western military history. Care should be taken to avoid focusing too much on resources and technology, especially weapons systems.
I also see an overemphasis on state to state conflict rather than studies of the use of force within states (except of course for major civil wars, like that of the U.S., and England in the seventeenth century). Military history can include the violence of the North Carolina Regulator movement of the eighteenth century, pan-Indian resistance to white encroachment (as detailed by Gregory Dowd in A Spirited Resistance), and non-battle topics such as militia, peacetime preparedness or memories of warfare. Or as Jeremy Black has called for, a focus on political tasking in the setting of force structures, doctrines and goals, and in judging military success. Given the current war in Iraq, and the “war on terrorism” which does not seem to be going away any time soon, the history of asymmetrical warfare may be well worth exploring. This would include looking at these types of conflicts in our own time, but also in the distinct past as well-including the war in the South during the American Revolution, and the partisan warfare of the US Civil War.
Much work needs to be done, especially in the area of world military history, in an important effort to free military history of its western biases and its emphasis on the operational and “battle-focused” nature. Military history can be many things, and while studies of combat and battles shouldn’t be ignored, the field is much larger than just narratives of Napoleon vs. Wellington, or what technical lessons soldiers can learn from past conflicts.
This post was originally published on February 23, 2006. John has since completed his PhD and is now a historian at the US Army Center of Military History.
In the twentieth century, there have been three separate and somewhat distinct strands of military history, although in the early part of this period, the distinctiveness of each was not nearly as pronounced as it is today. These three strands are popular military history, academic military history, and military history as used by professionals in the field of national security/defense, uniformed officers, academy instructors, etc. I will outline the characteristics of each and their current trajectories below.
Popular military history is characterized by an emphasis on battles and campaigns, on the heroics of military leaders, and “grand narratives.” In the first half of the twentieth century, almost all military history was written in this fashion, by academics and popular authors alike. Notable examples of non-academic works include Douglas Southall Freeman’s R.E. Lee and Lee's Lieutenants, Bruce Catton’s trilogy on the Army of the Potomac, and novelist Shelby Foote’s massive three-volume narrative of the Civil War. There were also numerous studies of Napoleonic and World War II battles, campaigns and leaders, including David Chandler’s work on the campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte and Hitler biographies written by John Toland, Alan Bullock, et al.
Academic historians also employed the narrative technique to provide a solid framework for their stories and for good reading, such as Douglas Edward Leach, Samuel E. Morison’s multi-volume narrative on the US Navy in World War II, and James I. Robertson’s Civil War books. These works used stirring narratives, focused on the combat and the drama of events, and usually portrayed somebody as the readily identifiable hero. They were largely celebratory or laudatory in tone, even while depicting the “losers” of wars like the Confederacy and its heroic generals.
Some of this largely uncritical tone may have been influenced by the consensus school of history that dominated academic writing from the WWII years through the mid-1960s, and before that the proper subject of military history was seen as focusing on the leaders and their battles: War, this generation seemed to be saying, is after all about fighting. Military historians also tended to conceptualize warfare as progressing toward greater sophistication. As academic historian Dennis Showalter has expressed it, military history remains the "last stronghold of the Whig interpretation" of history.
Popular military history and its emphasis on combat and leaders today remains, well, popular. It also sells very well in the bookstores, and as Jeremy Black has pointed out in his recent book Rethinking Military History (Cambridge, 2004), much of what gets written about military history is dictated by what publishing houses are willing to bring out to the market. Traditional “trumpet and drums” military studies sell, not an unimportant consideration to publishers and authors alike. This is the type of military history the general public wants to read—chronological narratives that tell stories about war and the men (rarely women) who fought them.
For many years, writers both in and out of the academy were happy to oblige them, particularly regarding the U.S. Civil War. One can also see the lure of the popular history market in two ways. First, the history sections at the big box bookstores (Borders, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million) are dominated by military titles, including battle books and biographies of generals. People buy that kind of book, plain and simple. Second, unlike many other fields of history, one can see quite a significant crossover of academics writing solidly researched work meant in part if not in whole for the popular military history market. Examples: David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride and Washington’s Crossing; James McPherson’s recent book on Antietam; Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War on the French and Indian War; Stephen Ambrose’s Crazy Horse and Custer; and almost everything by Gary W. Gallagher. It is likely that as long as people have money to spend on books, popular history (in all forms, not just military history) is going to be with us. And, as noted above, it will likely always be part of academic military history as well.
Another trend in professional/academic military history has been the writing of and use of this brand of scholarship for the professional military officer or national security professional. These people are usually military/defense professionals either in uniform or civilians, who want military history to be a part of their professional development. This usually means that they place great value on "lessons learned" type of books, that is to say scholarship on very specific events, time periods or aspects of war (including logistics, planning, civil/military relations, etc.) to help them do their jobs. Members of this group do not want cultural history overlays to their military history books, nor do they want to see race, class and gender as the focus of a book. It's not that they object to this kind of scholarship; rather, they do not see that they have a use for it in their jobs. For these professionals, studying campaigns and battles means seeing what actual people did in real situations in the past and trying to extract lessons from the past as to what worked and what did not. This is what staff rides are all about; that is to say, the practice of taking military officers on guided tours of actual battlefields and figuring out what happened and why, what decisions commanders made and what the effects were, etc.
The use of military history as a tool of professional military education has a long history, and in the United States goes back to Alfred Thayer Mahan at the US Naval War College, who in the late 1890s (and afterward in retirement until his death in 1914), instructed naval officers in doctrine and theory through the use of history to learn lessons from the past.
Over the past two decades, historians (particularly in the academic word) have moved away from battles and leaders to more nuanced studies of warfare in general or previously ignored topics within the field. This has been called “The New Military History”, although given its roots in the late 1960s one might argue that it really isn’t new any longer. Nevertheless, scholars continue to delve into this area. For instance, a greater emphasis on the experience of the common soldier and his conditions, motivations, and post-war memories has been healthy for the field. While these deal with war, they do not focus on the generals, and many give a gritty, inglorious counterweight to top-down, grand narratives of campaigns. These include works by Joseph Reid, Gerald Linderman and James McPherson on common soldiers of the Civil War; studies by Charles Royster, Mark Lender and Gregory Knouff on Revolutionary War soldiers’ motivation; and works by Carol Reardon, Paul Fussell and David Blight on war memories. Additionally, the field has seen from academia some studies on war itself, with an emphasis not on battles but on ideas, on meanings, and revisions of previously held myths and fables. Mark Grimsley’s The Hard Hand of War (1995), for example, provides a convincing revision of the oft-repeated tale of Sherman’s March and its wanton destructiveness. He finds that Sherman’s men were not nearly as destructive as legend has come down to us, and that pillaging, burning, etc., was kept largely under control in Georgia and was directed at military and logistical targets for the most part.
An interesting debate, still very much part of military history, has centered on the issue of Confederate nationalism. Gary Gallagher (The Confederate War, 1999) has taken the side that the South was indeed a nation whereas Paul D. Escott in After Secession (1989) argues the opposite. A similar debate has centered on the effectiveness of the militia in early American warfare, with scholars such as Don Higginbotham, Lawrence D. Cress, and John Shy providing significant academic, non-battle oriented scholarship to the field.
Academic military history in recent years has also expanded to include the influence of social, cultural and gender history. As noted above, research on the lives of the common soldiers has been a healthy subject of inquiry in the past several decades, as have studies on war and its effects on society. Royster’s work (A Revolutionary People at War, 1979) on the Continental Army as a reflection of society and character during the American Revolution is another notable example of this scholarship. Gender is the lens through which Belinda J. Davis looks at the German home front during WWI (Home Fires Burning), in her study of the role of unruly women and food shortages. This work not only looks at noncombatants in military history, it also focuses on events behind the lines and not the battles. Mary Renda’s Taking Haiti is another gender study, in this case, masculinity and the Marine occupation of Haiti in 1915-1916. Again, no battles take place nor is it told from the generals’ perspective, yet it is clearly a military history. Cultural history too is now part of military history as two books exemplify. Wayne Lee’s Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina (2000) places wartime violence in a cultural perspective, to show that cultural norms dictated the levels of violence in North Carolina during the Revolution. Jill Lepore’s 2001 study of the Pequot War (In the Name of War) gives a cultural study of what war meant to the Puritans, how they wrote about it, and how the Pequot leader Metacom has come down to us over the years.
What have been the effects of the two developments, that of popular history and the use of military history for professionals? The sheer magnitude of the market for popular histories of war in the “trumpet and drums” genre has to some extent prevented the publication of military history written in other ways. If one looks at publishing as a zero-sum game, in that publishers have only a limited amount of books they can each produce, then the more books we get these days on Napoleonic naval history (do we really need another book on Nelson?) and Civil War generals (enough on Lee already!), the less we will see on other less explored areas. Financial pressures on both publishers and authors will drive this trend to a large degree. As noted above, the vast majority of people who read military history (and thus buy the books on the store shelves) want books about battles and leaders, especially with a dramatic, fast paced narrative. The resultant de-emphasis on issues of race, class, gender, memory, etc., has caused non-military historians to look on military history, even the academic kind, as antiquated, narrow, and unengaged with modern methodologies. Similarly, the desire of military professionals of various stripes to look to military history for lessons learned and professional education has led to a pronounced presentist approach by these types of students, in that they do not look at the field in terms of methodology, approach, interpretive challenges and epistemological issues, but rather in a “what can this so for me right now” kind of way. Scholars producing work for this purpose can easily be led to a superficial analysis of the past in which they tend to extract from history that which is relevant to today in today’s terms, which may not always or even often be accurate.
What are the major challenges confronting military historians in the twenty-first century? Military history is still far too narrowly defined. I agree with John Lynn, Jeremy Black and several other current military historians who have noted recently some major problems in military history today. There is a prevalent “Eurocentricity” in our military studies, especially in our emphasis on Western Europe and the U.S. We have to branch out to other regions, eras and cultures to get a true picture of world military history, which will tell us things about our own typicality, biases and gaps in scholarship. Even when most military historians do include in their work non-western societies and how they wage war, it is almost always in relation to western methods of war, not studies of non-western groups alone. In a similar vein, we currently have too great of a focus on the leading powers and dominant military systems, including the U.S., the Soviet Union and the warfare each practiced. In studies of earlier times the emphasis is on Greece, Rome, and their enemies. Do most military historians know anything about, say, African warfare in any era? Our understanding of nonwestern warfare is usually influenced by stereotypes we hold of other cultures and peoples, e.g., that Asian warfare is based on subterfuge and trickery. Really?
Technology has biased many scholars (as Jeremy Black notes) in explaining military capability in what he calls a “fascination with technology.” The general public too is partly to blame for this emphasis on the new and exciting, since that sells well in stores. The emphasis on technology is too great and there has as a result been a presentist primitivization of non-western combatants, which hardly seems accurate and may be explained in part as our own cultural bias. There has also been a trend to simplify the non-western military history. Care should be taken to avoid focusing too much on resources and technology, especially weapons systems.
I also see an overemphasis on state to state conflict rather than studies of the use of force within states (except of course for major civil wars, like that of the U.S., and England in the seventeenth century). Military history can include the violence of the North Carolina Regulator movement of the eighteenth century, pan-Indian resistance to white encroachment (as detailed by Gregory Dowd in A Spirited Resistance), and non-battle topics such as militia, peacetime preparedness or memories of warfare. Or as Jeremy Black has called for, a focus on political tasking in the setting of force structures, doctrines and goals, and in judging military success. Given the current war in Iraq, and the “war on terrorism” which does not seem to be going away any time soon, the history of asymmetrical warfare may be well worth exploring. This would include looking at these types of conflicts in our own time, but also in the distinct past as well-including the war in the South during the American Revolution, and the partisan warfare of the US Civil War.
Much work needs to be done, especially in the area of world military history, in an important effort to free military history of its western biases and its emphasis on the operational and “battle-focused” nature. Military history can be many things, and while studies of combat and battles shouldn’t be ignored, the field is much larger than just narratives of Napoleon vs. Wellington, or what technical lessons soldiers can learn from past conflicts.
The Types of Military History
This was originally a two-part post, published on December 26, 2006 and January 30, 2007.
In the spring of 1979 I took my first military history course with Allan R. Millett, whom many readers will recognize as one of the most distinguished names in the first generation of academic military historians; that is to say, those self-identified military historians who began teaching and publishing circa 1970. Allan had a standard opening lecture that focused on military historiography, especially what he usefully denominated the five basic types of military history.
The first he called inspirational military history. Works in this category emphasized human qualities, sought to elicit an emotional response, and usually centered on combat. They were essentially humanistic morality plays. Many campaign narratives and military biographies (as well as some autobiographies) conformed to this type.
Next came national military history. This could be viewed as a subset of inspirational military history but merited a separate category because of its notable appeals to patriotism and nationalism. This type was more or less obviously designed to strengthen allegiance to the state by emphasizing the costs of national traditions and values: "Freedom Isn't Free" with footnotes.
Few books in this genre, however, actually announce themselves as nationalistic propaganda. The example Allan used back in 1979 was in a fact a textbook by R. Ernest Dupuy and Trevor N. Depuy entitled The Military Heritage of America (1956). This isn't a book I ever pulled from a library shelf, so I just now read a few reviews to get a feel for it. The authors, both of them U.S. Army colonels, were a father and son team -- the son a 1938 West Point graduate who was once professor of military science at Harvard University, president of the American Military Institute (the predecessor of the Society for Military History) and, intriguingly for this Buckeye, director of the Ohio State University military studies program from 1956 through 1958. The book's purpose, according to the authors, was "to provide for all Americans a military history presented from the American point of view." (ix) But its main audience was ROTC cadets and it focused heavily on leadership -- really combat leadership -- and the "immutable" principles of war. John K. Mahon, in his review of Military Heritage for the Journal of Southern History, has a criticism that anyone who writes military history should shrink from deserving: "Ninety percent of the book consists of highly condensed combat narrative. . . . Such condensed battle history is war with the blood squeezed out."
Having read the reviews, I still felt I had to take Allan's word for it that The Military Heritage of America was really a strong example of national military history. Then I discovered that the book is available online and found this mighty passage on page one:
National military history, indeed.
Third on Allan Millett’s list came antiquarian or hobby history, which is often not history in any real sense but consists rather of books about military uniforms and weapons, especially the latter. These are long on descriptions of, say, the M1 Garand rifle or the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault weapon and short on the political purposes these deadly instruments have served. Power might grow out of the barrel of a gun, as Mao Zedong once famously said, but readers of this genre are interested less in the power than the gun barrel.
Allan shot by the first three categories -— inspirational, nationalistic, and antiquarian —- within a few minutes. He devoted the bulk of the lecture to the remaining two, which he called “military utilitarian” and “civilian utilitarian” military history.
The former tend to be books written by and for the personnel of military institutions. Some of it focuses on the heritage of various units and is designed to instill a feeling a pride and esprit de corps among those who serve in them. Some of it is intended to influence civilian policymakers to make the “correct” choices about manpower policy or weapons appropriations. But most of it is written to support the professional education of military officers. It employs history to underscore principles of leadership, strategic and operational art, the challenges of counterinsurgencies and civil affairs, and so on: all the formidable array of issues a good officer is expected to master. The American armed forces, like those of other nations, employ dozens of career military historians, many of them quite gifted, to generate this form of military history, some of which is classified and most of which is never seen by the general public.
Last came civilian utilitarian military history, the sort that formed the principal rationale for teaching courses on the subject in a liberal arts university. Military history, Allan argued, matters for the same reason that all history matters. It affords a window into the human condition and the nature of human societies: an especially useful window because war often places extreme pressure on those societies, exposing its strengths and weaknesses.
Military history could also serve to make students better citizens. This was especially true for citizens of a superpower like the United States, whose preeminent status in world politics depended heavily upon military strength and the willingness to use it. At the height of the Vietnam War, Department of Defense consumed 70 percent of all Federal discretionary spending. In the years since, that figure has never dropped below 48 percent. Also in the years since, American policymakers have sent troops into harm’s way on numerous occasions, most notably Lebanon (1983), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), Desert Shield/Desert Storm (1990-1991), Somalia (1993), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001- ) and Iraq (2003- ). Many of these have proven to be dubious ventures. Policymakers have invariably supported their rationales for war with historical analogies, some of them specious, most of them tendentious, and nearly all of them expressed in the most superficial terms. An informed citizenry, Allan averred, ought to have a healthy skepticism. Thus, an important reason for students to secure a firm grasp of military history was to be in a position to critically assess the wisdom of U.S. military expenditures and, especially, the resort to armed conflict and the conduct of military operations.
In the spring of 1979 I took my first military history course with Allan R. Millett, whom many readers will recognize as one of the most distinguished names in the first generation of academic military historians; that is to say, those self-identified military historians who began teaching and publishing circa 1970. Allan had a standard opening lecture that focused on military historiography, especially what he usefully denominated the five basic types of military history.
The first he called inspirational military history. Works in this category emphasized human qualities, sought to elicit an emotional response, and usually centered on combat. They were essentially humanistic morality plays. Many campaign narratives and military biographies (as well as some autobiographies) conformed to this type.
Next came national military history. This could be viewed as a subset of inspirational military history but merited a separate category because of its notable appeals to patriotism and nationalism. This type was more or less obviously designed to strengthen allegiance to the state by emphasizing the costs of national traditions and values: "Freedom Isn't Free" with footnotes.
Few books in this genre, however, actually announce themselves as nationalistic propaganda. The example Allan used back in 1979 was in a fact a textbook by R. Ernest Dupuy and Trevor N. Depuy entitled The Military Heritage of America (1956). This isn't a book I ever pulled from a library shelf, so I just now read a few reviews to get a feel for it. The authors, both of them U.S. Army colonels, were a father and son team -- the son a 1938 West Point graduate who was once professor of military science at Harvard University, president of the American Military Institute (the predecessor of the Society for Military History) and, intriguingly for this Buckeye, director of the Ohio State University military studies program from 1956 through 1958. The book's purpose, according to the authors, was "to provide for all Americans a military history presented from the American point of view." (ix) But its main audience was ROTC cadets and it focused heavily on leadership -- really combat leadership -- and the "immutable" principles of war. John K. Mahon, in his review of Military Heritage for the Journal of Southern History, has a criticism that anyone who writes military history should shrink from deserving: "Ninety percent of the book consists of highly condensed combat narrative. . . . Such condensed battle history is war with the blood squeezed out."
Having read the reviews, I still felt I had to take Allan's word for it that The Military Heritage of America was really a strong example of national military history. Then I discovered that the book is available online and found this mighty passage on page one:
This thing called war, armed combat between nations, is a fearsome thing. All-embracing to the countries directly involved, it can and frequently does, through the disruptions it causes, affect other nations economically, socially, and politically. There is an element of finality about war -- immediate finality, despite possible later long-drawn-out and inconclusive arguments at the peace table. The vanquished succumbs to the will of the victor, in terms of immediate loss of power, prosperity, and, at times, national existence, to say nothing of the appalling cost in the flesh and blood of its citizens.
Call war an extension of diplomacy, condemn it as a plague, thrill to its so-called glories, as you will. The fact remains that it is not just a phenomenon, something monstrously foreign to our civilization, but -- whether we like it or not -- it has been a fundamental element of man's struggle for existence. Therefore, until man's nature changes, war is likely always to be with us, in one form or another. Nor is war an act of God, comparable, for instance, to elemental cataclysms such as earthquakes or hurricanes. Rather, it arises from international relationships, from the aspirations, ambitions, successes,failures, and trickeries of the men and the governments directing the nations of the world. We as a nation pride ourselves on being a peaceful people. But our own United States was born through human conflict and rededicated through the fires of a tremendous civil war. Since the onset of the Revolution marking the birth of the nation, and down through the Korean War, the United States has been engaged in no less than eight major wars, plus an untold number of minor campaigns, expeditions, pacifications, and other armed bickerings, including more than a century of almost continuous warfare against the North American Indian. It would seem unreasonable, then, with this case history of less than two centuries of national life before us, to assert that war is something exceptional.
Today's world turmoil, resulting from the torrent of godless communistic ideology which gnaws at the dikes safeguarding all we hold sacred, should be evidence that the United States must be prepared for future wars, in which the national existence will depend upon the success of our arms. War, being no affair of mutual contract, needs but one willing party for its launching, regardless of the wishes or desires of the other party. Every American, then, should examine war -- its past, its present, and above all, the method of its waging.
National military history, indeed.
Third on Allan Millett’s list came antiquarian or hobby history, which is often not history in any real sense but consists rather of books about military uniforms and weapons, especially the latter. These are long on descriptions of, say, the M1 Garand rifle or the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault weapon and short on the political purposes these deadly instruments have served. Power might grow out of the barrel of a gun, as Mao Zedong once famously said, but readers of this genre are interested less in the power than the gun barrel.
Allan shot by the first three categories -— inspirational, nationalistic, and antiquarian —- within a few minutes. He devoted the bulk of the lecture to the remaining two, which he called “military utilitarian” and “civilian utilitarian” military history.
The former tend to be books written by and for the personnel of military institutions. Some of it focuses on the heritage of various units and is designed to instill a feeling a pride and esprit de corps among those who serve in them. Some of it is intended to influence civilian policymakers to make the “correct” choices about manpower policy or weapons appropriations. But most of it is written to support the professional education of military officers. It employs history to underscore principles of leadership, strategic and operational art, the challenges of counterinsurgencies and civil affairs, and so on: all the formidable array of issues a good officer is expected to master. The American armed forces, like those of other nations, employ dozens of career military historians, many of them quite gifted, to generate this form of military history, some of which is classified and most of which is never seen by the general public.
Last came civilian utilitarian military history, the sort that formed the principal rationale for teaching courses on the subject in a liberal arts university. Military history, Allan argued, matters for the same reason that all history matters. It affords a window into the human condition and the nature of human societies: an especially useful window because war often places extreme pressure on those societies, exposing its strengths and weaknesses.
Military history could also serve to make students better citizens. This was especially true for citizens of a superpower like the United States, whose preeminent status in world politics depended heavily upon military strength and the willingness to use it. At the height of the Vietnam War, Department of Defense consumed 70 percent of all Federal discretionary spending. In the years since, that figure has never dropped below 48 percent. Also in the years since, American policymakers have sent troops into harm’s way on numerous occasions, most notably Lebanon (1983), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), Desert Shield/Desert Storm (1990-1991), Somalia (1993), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001- ) and Iraq (2003- ). Many of these have proven to be dubious ventures. Policymakers have invariably supported their rationales for war with historical analogies, some of them specious, most of them tendentious, and nearly all of them expressed in the most superficial terms. An informed citizenry, Allan averred, ought to have a healthy skepticism. Thus, an important reason for students to secure a firm grasp of military history was to be in a position to critically assess the wisdom of U.S. military expenditures and, especially, the resort to armed conflict and the conduct of military operations.
Beyond the Culture of Complaint
This post was originally published on December 28, 2006.
A few months ago, the executive director of the Society for Military History asked me to write a brief essay for the SMH newsletter, outlining my thoughts about the field, especially the need to dispense with the reflexive negativity about military history's status within the academy. The result has been published in the new issue, so I take the liberty of reprinting it here. It recapitulates in condensed form a lot of what I've been saying on this blog since its inception:
The Future of Military History: Beyond the Culture of Complaint
Mark Grimsley
The Ohio State University
[Published in the Headquarters Gazette,
newsletter of the Society for Military History,
Vol. 19, No. 4 (Fall 2006):2-3.]
© 2006 by Mark Grimsley
On September 26, 2006, National Review Online published an op/ed piece by John J. Miller entitled, “Sounding Taps: Why Military History is Being Retired.” It drew a picture of the field of military history having been hounded almost out of the academy by “tenured radicals.” Although highly tendentious in its portrayal, it drew strength from juicy quotes by a number of military historians, many of them quite distinguished, in support of its basic contention.
In the short run, the article may have had a positive effect. A central element in its portrait was the failure of the University of Wisconsin to fill the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair in American Military History despite the presence of a million dollars in its endowment fund, allegedly because “tenured radicals” within its history department were actively hostile to military history. The explanation was incorrect: A million dollars is about half of what it costs to endow a chair nowadays and Wisconsin is currently in very tight financial straits, so that no funds were available to cover the difference between the endowment’s revenues and the actual cost required to pay a chair holder’s salary and benefits. Even so, six weeks after “Sounding Taps” appeared so did an announcement that a search was underway to fill the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair. It may reasonably be assumed that the bad publicity from the National Review piece had much to do with this new development.
I hope, however, that no one will draw from this the lesson that complaining about the state of the field will serve as a strategy for growing the field. Enlarging the place of military history within academe ought to be a significant objective of the Society for Military History, and we cannot rely for that purpose upon the occasional rare alignment between our own bitterness and the interests of a magazine of partisan political affairs. (Indeed, an article like “Sounding Taps” was as likely to hurt as to help, by inadvertently convincing potential benefactors that investing in military history would be a futile exercise.) We need instead to maintain a positive vision for the field backed by a specific strategy for its development, and to test the assumption of a relentless hostility toward military history by our colleagues in other fields.
We might begin by seeing the state of academic military history in less catastrophic terms, for I and others sincerely did not recognize the field as “Sounding Taps” portrayed it. I’ve no doubt that many military historians believe that the field has seen a decline in the top levels of university programs. I would be curious, though, to know exactly when we reached our high water mark. For example, it cannot really be said that the University of Wisconsin ever had a military history program to lose. Edward M. “Mac” Coffman did an extraordinary job of producing grad students -- so much that it is easy to see why one would think there was such a program, and a vibrant one at that -- but there was never a second tenure-track or tenured military historian at Wisconsin. The field did lose a program when John Shy and Gerald Linderman retired from the University of Michigan and were not replaced, but I wonder if either of them was hired as military historians and, therefore, how much of a commitment Michigan ever had to the field. Somewhat the same thing might be said for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where John A. Lynn continues to do great work, á la Mac Coffman, but has lost a second military historian in the field.
The program at Ohio State University, on the other hand, has never weakened significantly over the past fifteen years, while programs at Texas A&M University, Kansas State University, and elsewhere have done very well. The program at Duke University did nearly disappear at one time, but in the form of a combined program with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has become quite robust, with six full-time military historians and six affiliated faculty.
According the Society for Military History web site, at present ten American universities have an MA program in military history and nineteen American or Canadian universities have an MA/PhD program. I'm not sure how long-standing are these programs, but surely some of them have grown, or even made their initial appearance, in the past decade.
As for academic jobs in military history, there have never been many so far as I can recall. Most military historians I know were actually hired as Americanists or Europeanists; they merely happened to have a research specialization in military history. Our situation is not much different from that of others: The market, especially for tenure track positions, is tight in practically every academic field. In short, military history is in about the same shape as when I entered graduate school in 1987.
What has disappeared is the optimism about the future that surfaced (rather briefly) around 1990. As “Sounding Taps” underlines, the tone among many senior scholars in the field -- including those who hold, or have held, leadership positions -- is often rather defeatist. Along with their rank-and-file counterparts, they complain about the marginalization of the field, blaming it on a blind prejudice against military history among academics in other fields.
It may be true that such prejudice exists. It is also irrelevant. We cannot change the views of some within our profession. But we can become better ambassadors for our own field. We can reach out to others who may not self-identify as military historians but whose work meaningfully intersects with the experience of war and with what might be called the military dimension of human affairs. We can invite them to our conferences and make it known that we value their work. Instead of ignoring or rejecting the conceptual frameworks of those in other fields, we can take an active interest in exploring those frameworks in a spirit of mutual intellectual curiosity. For example, Ohio State’s Mershon Center recently held a conference on “The War for the American South, 1865-1968,” that took the form of several vigorous, focused discussions between military historians and historians of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement.
As the success of this conference suggests, the thesis of an unreasoning hostility toward the field is overblown. Ask Prof. Rebecca Goetz, a Harvard-trained historian who now teaches early American history at Rice University. “After I read Miller’s article,” she wrote in a guest post on my blog, “I was willing to bet there are a lot of historians out there like me: that is, professional historians who are trained as intellectual, social, or cultural historians who have no formal training in military history but who teach military history in their courses when appropriate anyway. I’m not terribly comfortable teaching military history for that reason; no one has ever taught me how to do it, but like many professional historians, I decided to teach myself so that I could teach my students. . . . I think the question then becomes not, as Miller would have it, ‘how soon will military history be dead?’ but rather, how can we teach today’s historians how to teach military history as an integral part of their courses?”
I believe Prof. Goetz is on to something. Many non-military historians are not so much hostile to military as they are ill informed about it -- or in her case, less informed than she would like to be. This suggests that we have a real opportunity on our hands. We could, for instance, take advantage of a well-known National Endowment for the Humanities program to create summer seminars modeled upon the excellent West Point Summer Seminar, but tailored to non-military historians.
We can also begin to undertake our own fund raising efforts. Among people who have done well for themselves financially and want to give something back in return, a substantial number are interested in military history and defense affairs. We can work to identify and cultivate them, using methods similar to those employed by university development offices but intended to grow the field as a whole. Few benefactors immediately give gifts large enough to support, say, a faculty line in military history. It is best to start by giving them opportunities to help on a smaller scale; for example, by endowing scholarships for travel and research. Investing in such opportunities, and reaping satisfaction in the form of seeing their investment put to good use, will lead over time to large-scale, “transformative” gifts. But donors, like people everywhere, are attracted by good ideas, sound planning, and a confident, positive vision.
In short, we need to set aside the trope of a besieged military history. It blinds us to the presence of friends within the academy, like Rebecca Goetz; and indulges a negativity that will not serve us well in any attempts we make to grow the field. We simply cannot afford a culture of complaint.
A few months ago, the executive director of the Society for Military History asked me to write a brief essay for the SMH newsletter, outlining my thoughts about the field, especially the need to dispense with the reflexive negativity about military history's status within the academy. The result has been published in the new issue, so I take the liberty of reprinting it here. It recapitulates in condensed form a lot of what I've been saying on this blog since its inception:
The Future of Military History: Beyond the Culture of Complaint
Mark Grimsley
The Ohio State University
[Published in the Headquarters Gazette,
newsletter of the Society for Military History,
Vol. 19, No. 4 (Fall 2006):2-3.]
© 2006 by Mark Grimsley
On September 26, 2006, National Review Online published an op/ed piece by John J. Miller entitled, “Sounding Taps: Why Military History is Being Retired.” It drew a picture of the field of military history having been hounded almost out of the academy by “tenured radicals.” Although highly tendentious in its portrayal, it drew strength from juicy quotes by a number of military historians, many of them quite distinguished, in support of its basic contention.
In the short run, the article may have had a positive effect. A central element in its portrait was the failure of the University of Wisconsin to fill the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair in American Military History despite the presence of a million dollars in its endowment fund, allegedly because “tenured radicals” within its history department were actively hostile to military history. The explanation was incorrect: A million dollars is about half of what it costs to endow a chair nowadays and Wisconsin is currently in very tight financial straits, so that no funds were available to cover the difference between the endowment’s revenues and the actual cost required to pay a chair holder’s salary and benefits. Even so, six weeks after “Sounding Taps” appeared so did an announcement that a search was underway to fill the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair. It may reasonably be assumed that the bad publicity from the National Review piece had much to do with this new development.
I hope, however, that no one will draw from this the lesson that complaining about the state of the field will serve as a strategy for growing the field. Enlarging the place of military history within academe ought to be a significant objective of the Society for Military History, and we cannot rely for that purpose upon the occasional rare alignment between our own bitterness and the interests of a magazine of partisan political affairs. (Indeed, an article like “Sounding Taps” was as likely to hurt as to help, by inadvertently convincing potential benefactors that investing in military history would be a futile exercise.) We need instead to maintain a positive vision for the field backed by a specific strategy for its development, and to test the assumption of a relentless hostility toward military history by our colleagues in other fields.
We might begin by seeing the state of academic military history in less catastrophic terms, for I and others sincerely did not recognize the field as “Sounding Taps” portrayed it. I’ve no doubt that many military historians believe that the field has seen a decline in the top levels of university programs. I would be curious, though, to know exactly when we reached our high water mark. For example, it cannot really be said that the University of Wisconsin ever had a military history program to lose. Edward M. “Mac” Coffman did an extraordinary job of producing grad students -- so much that it is easy to see why one would think there was such a program, and a vibrant one at that -- but there was never a second tenure-track or tenured military historian at Wisconsin. The field did lose a program when John Shy and Gerald Linderman retired from the University of Michigan and were not replaced, but I wonder if either of them was hired as military historians and, therefore, how much of a commitment Michigan ever had to the field. Somewhat the same thing might be said for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where John A. Lynn continues to do great work, á la Mac Coffman, but has lost a second military historian in the field.
The program at Ohio State University, on the other hand, has never weakened significantly over the past fifteen years, while programs at Texas A&M University, Kansas State University, and elsewhere have done very well. The program at Duke University did nearly disappear at one time, but in the form of a combined program with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has become quite robust, with six full-time military historians and six affiliated faculty.
According the Society for Military History web site, at present ten American universities have an MA program in military history and nineteen American or Canadian universities have an MA/PhD program. I'm not sure how long-standing are these programs, but surely some of them have grown, or even made their initial appearance, in the past decade.
As for academic jobs in military history, there have never been many so far as I can recall. Most military historians I know were actually hired as Americanists or Europeanists; they merely happened to have a research specialization in military history. Our situation is not much different from that of others: The market, especially for tenure track positions, is tight in practically every academic field. In short, military history is in about the same shape as when I entered graduate school in 1987.
What has disappeared is the optimism about the future that surfaced (rather briefly) around 1990. As “Sounding Taps” underlines, the tone among many senior scholars in the field -- including those who hold, or have held, leadership positions -- is often rather defeatist. Along with their rank-and-file counterparts, they complain about the marginalization of the field, blaming it on a blind prejudice against military history among academics in other fields.
It may be true that such prejudice exists. It is also irrelevant. We cannot change the views of some within our profession. But we can become better ambassadors for our own field. We can reach out to others who may not self-identify as military historians but whose work meaningfully intersects with the experience of war and with what might be called the military dimension of human affairs. We can invite them to our conferences and make it known that we value their work. Instead of ignoring or rejecting the conceptual frameworks of those in other fields, we can take an active interest in exploring those frameworks in a spirit of mutual intellectual curiosity. For example, Ohio State’s Mershon Center recently held a conference on “The War for the American South, 1865-1968,” that took the form of several vigorous, focused discussions between military historians and historians of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement.
As the success of this conference suggests, the thesis of an unreasoning hostility toward the field is overblown. Ask Prof. Rebecca Goetz, a Harvard-trained historian who now teaches early American history at Rice University. “After I read Miller’s article,” she wrote in a guest post on my blog, “I was willing to bet there are a lot of historians out there like me: that is, professional historians who are trained as intellectual, social, or cultural historians who have no formal training in military history but who teach military history in their courses when appropriate anyway. I’m not terribly comfortable teaching military history for that reason; no one has ever taught me how to do it, but like many professional historians, I decided to teach myself so that I could teach my students. . . . I think the question then becomes not, as Miller would have it, ‘how soon will military history be dead?’ but rather, how can we teach today’s historians how to teach military history as an integral part of their courses?”
I believe Prof. Goetz is on to something. Many non-military historians are not so much hostile to military as they are ill informed about it -- or in her case, less informed than she would like to be. This suggests that we have a real opportunity on our hands. We could, for instance, take advantage of a well-known National Endowment for the Humanities program to create summer seminars modeled upon the excellent West Point Summer Seminar, but tailored to non-military historians.
We can also begin to undertake our own fund raising efforts. Among people who have done well for themselves financially and want to give something back in return, a substantial number are interested in military history and defense affairs. We can work to identify and cultivate them, using methods similar to those employed by university development offices but intended to grow the field as a whole. Few benefactors immediately give gifts large enough to support, say, a faculty line in military history. It is best to start by giving them opportunities to help on a smaller scale; for example, by endowing scholarships for travel and research. Investing in such opportunities, and reaping satisfaction in the form of seeing their investment put to good use, will lead over time to large-scale, “transformative” gifts. But donors, like people everywhere, are attracted by good ideas, sound planning, and a confident, positive vision.
In short, we need to set aside the trope of a besieged military history. It blinds us to the presence of friends within the academy, like Rebecca Goetz; and indulges a negativity that will not serve us well in any attempts we make to grow the field. We simply cannot afford a culture of complaint.
Crocodile Tears for Military History: An Open Letter to John J. Miller, National Review Online
This post was originally published on September 27, 2006.
Dear John,
Thanks for nothing.
"Sounding Taps," your September 26 article in National Review Online, is on the surface a sympathetic lament for the supposed marginalization of academic military history. But it is constructed so tendentiously, and overlooks so many relevant facts, that it is really quite misleading.
So misleading, in fact, that you may have done more to harm academic military history than any bunch of "tenured radicals" has managed to do in many years, if ever.
Take, for example, your starting point: Wisconsin's failure to run a search to fill the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair. You say that "more than $1 million" sits in the endowment. That sounds like a lot, but it isn't. At Ohio State, the minimum needed to fund an endowed chair is $1.5 million, and even then internal funds are routinely needed to top off the chairholder's salary. Two million dollars is a more realistic figure nowadays.
You could have started with Ohio State. We do have $1.5 million sitting in a bank to fund an endowed chair in military history, and guess what? My department, which includes numerous historians of gender, class, race, and culture -- and even a historian of fashion -- voted unanimously to run a search to fill the position at the earliest possible moment. To do less, everyone understood, would have been an insult to the benefactor, General Raymond E. Mason.
Got it? Not just an endowed chair in military history, but one endowed by, and named for, a retired Army general.
That's how radical my "tenured radical" colleagues are.
Oh, I nearly forgot: a second endowed chair in military history is coming online over the next five years, through the generosity of a donor who wishes to remain anonymous. Not because they're ashamed of military history, I feel obliged to add, given your genius for subtle distortion of anything that doesn't fit your agenda, but because they're modest. Fancy that.
It will not surprise you to know that many wealthy people who wish to give something back to their society are both politically conservative and often fascinated by military history. But they didn't become wealthy by making bad investments, and your article conveys the distinct message that giving money to support academic military history would be a bad investment.
Again, thanks for nothing.
My field's professional organization, the Society for Military History, has plans afoot to approach benefactors and "marry them" to receptive history departments in order to create more military history positions.
I sure hope those potential benefactors don't read National Review Online. You've given them good reason for pause. We'll urge the opportunity, they'll wave "Sounding Taps" in our face.
Thanks. For Nothing.
You concede that a few military history programs do exist, but their existence hurts the point you want to make, so you blat out the names and hurry on. One name you don't blat out is Duke University. Another is the University of North Carolina. I wonder why not? Could it be that Duke and UNC are too well known as bastions of liberalism? It's kinda awkward for your thesis that Duke and UNC have jointly created -- actually revived -- one of the best military history programs in the country. In fact, since unlike you I like to be honest in my presentation, the Duke-UNC program is as good as ours at Ohio State and arguably even a little better.
But it gets no mention at all from you. I wonder why?
Happen to have heard of COL H.R. McMaster, the Army officer who during Desert Storm won the battle of the 73 Easting and nowadays regularly makes headlines for his tough-minded, innovative approach to the Iraqi insurgency? He got his PhD from UNC, after study in the Duke-UNC military history program.
I could go on, and believe me, I will. That's the great thing about blogging -- I could never win an argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel, but I have access to as many electrons as National Review Online.
Let's face it, pal. You don't give -- as my drill sergeants used to say -- a lusty crap about academic military history. Yours are crocodile tears. You'd love to see us disappear, because it would make a nice talking point in the increasingly stupid culture wars.
Well, sorry to disappoint you. Our graves ain't dug yet. And right now, the only one I see wielding a shovel is you.
Thanks. For. Nothing.
Update, January 6, 2012: "Sounding Taps for Military History" had an instructive sequel. It sparked a series of exchanges between John and myself (as well as a very pleasant visit with him in Washington, DC in December 2006); a letter to the National Review signed by the entire OSU military history faculty taking issue with John's thesis; and an article in Inside Higher Ed.
Most importantly, within a few weeks the University of Wisconsin authorized a search to fill the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair, which resulted in the hiring of John W. Hall. Coincidence? The question answers itself.
Dear John,
Thanks for nothing.
"Sounding Taps," your September 26 article in National Review Online, is on the surface a sympathetic lament for the supposed marginalization of academic military history. But it is constructed so tendentiously, and overlooks so many relevant facts, that it is really quite misleading.
So misleading, in fact, that you may have done more to harm academic military history than any bunch of "tenured radicals" has managed to do in many years, if ever.
Take, for example, your starting point: Wisconsin's failure to run a search to fill the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair. You say that "more than $1 million" sits in the endowment. That sounds like a lot, but it isn't. At Ohio State, the minimum needed to fund an endowed chair is $1.5 million, and even then internal funds are routinely needed to top off the chairholder's salary. Two million dollars is a more realistic figure nowadays.
You could have started with Ohio State. We do have $1.5 million sitting in a bank to fund an endowed chair in military history, and guess what? My department, which includes numerous historians of gender, class, race, and culture -- and even a historian of fashion -- voted unanimously to run a search to fill the position at the earliest possible moment. To do less, everyone understood, would have been an insult to the benefactor, General Raymond E. Mason.
Got it? Not just an endowed chair in military history, but one endowed by, and named for, a retired Army general.
That's how radical my "tenured radical" colleagues are.
Oh, I nearly forgot: a second endowed chair in military history is coming online over the next five years, through the generosity of a donor who wishes to remain anonymous. Not because they're ashamed of military history, I feel obliged to add, given your genius for subtle distortion of anything that doesn't fit your agenda, but because they're modest. Fancy that.
It will not surprise you to know that many wealthy people who wish to give something back to their society are both politically conservative and often fascinated by military history. But they didn't become wealthy by making bad investments, and your article conveys the distinct message that giving money to support academic military history would be a bad investment.
Again, thanks for nothing.
My field's professional organization, the Society for Military History, has plans afoot to approach benefactors and "marry them" to receptive history departments in order to create more military history positions.
I sure hope those potential benefactors don't read National Review Online. You've given them good reason for pause. We'll urge the opportunity, they'll wave "Sounding Taps" in our face.
Thanks. For Nothing.
You concede that a few military history programs do exist, but their existence hurts the point you want to make, so you blat out the names and hurry on. One name you don't blat out is Duke University. Another is the University of North Carolina. I wonder why not? Could it be that Duke and UNC are too well known as bastions of liberalism? It's kinda awkward for your thesis that Duke and UNC have jointly created -- actually revived -- one of the best military history programs in the country. In fact, since unlike you I like to be honest in my presentation, the Duke-UNC program is as good as ours at Ohio State and arguably even a little better.
But it gets no mention at all from you. I wonder why?
Happen to have heard of COL H.R. McMaster, the Army officer who during Desert Storm won the battle of the 73 Easting and nowadays regularly makes headlines for his tough-minded, innovative approach to the Iraqi insurgency? He got his PhD from UNC, after study in the Duke-UNC military history program.
I could go on, and believe me, I will. That's the great thing about blogging -- I could never win an argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel, but I have access to as many electrons as National Review Online.
Let's face it, pal. You don't give -- as my drill sergeants used to say -- a lusty crap about academic military history. Yours are crocodile tears. You'd love to see us disappear, because it would make a nice talking point in the increasingly stupid culture wars.
Well, sorry to disappoint you. Our graves ain't dug yet. And right now, the only one I see wielding a shovel is you.
Thanks. For. Nothing.
Update, January 6, 2012: "Sounding Taps for Military History" had an instructive sequel. It sparked a series of exchanges between John and myself (as well as a very pleasant visit with him in Washington, DC in December 2006); a letter to the National Review signed by the entire OSU military history faculty taking issue with John's thesis; and an article in Inside Higher Ed.
Most importantly, within a few weeks the University of Wisconsin authorized a search to fill the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair, which resulted in the hiring of John W. Hall. Coincidence? The question answers itself.
Hand Wringing for Military History
This post was originally published on November 22, 2010
Columnist Ed Hooper in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes that Congress recently declared November to be "U.S. Military History Month." That's sort of interesting. The rest is sort of lame. Well, not sort of. Really lame.
Oh brother.
I was going to ignore this column, but I've received so many emails from people pointing it out to me that I guess I have to respond.
As long time readers of this blog are well aware, this sort of uninformed drivel has been around for years. The best known example is John J. Miller's "Taps for Military History", published in 2006 in The National Review, which produced this rebuttal from the military historians here at Ohio State, as well as several posts on this blog.
In the years since, any number of columnists have published rip-offs of Miller’s article. Hooper's differs only in that a) it is unusually thin gruel; and b) it focuses on K-12 education.
Note that Hooper offers not a shred of evidence re the demise of military history in K-12 schools: neither the extent to which it once existed (we had little or no prescribed military history in the courses I took in junior high or high school), nor the extent to which it exists now. My guess is that history and social studies teachers teach about military history (or not) in about the same measure that they always have. That is to say, I had a few history teachers in junior high and high school who included a lot of military history in their courses, and a few who did not. Judging by the teachers with whom I'm presently acquainted, that doesn't seem to have changed much.
In fact, I have some anecdotal evidence that points toward an interest in military history in K-12 education. The Foreign Policy Research Institute has done at least two symposia on teaching military history in public schools, each attended by about 40 K-12 teachers in person and available to many others on streaming video. And in just about every year for the last decade, I've been asked to speak to groups of K-12 teachers on military history or Civil War history, most recently in June of this year.
In terms of higher education, two interesting critiques of military history in academe--somewhat more nuanced than Miller's--appeared in The New Republic Online in 2007. They are here and here.
In 2009 the New York Times published a column on the supposed demise of traditional fields in history, nicely demolished on her blog by woman's historian Claire Potter.
As I've noted before--and as Hooper could have learned if he'd made the slightest stab at researching his column--the Society for Military History web site shows that there are currently 22 universities in North America with MA/PhD programs. Another 11 have MA programs. That's a considerable increase over the number of programs when I was a grad student two decades ago.
A number of departments that supposedly had military history programs back then--and were pointed out as examples of the demise of military history when military history faculty were not replaced--in fact did not have such programs. An example is Wisconsin. It used to be said that Wisconsin abandoned its military history program when its resident military historian, Edward "Mac" Coffman (who produced a string of superb military historians) wasn't replaced upon his retirement. But Mac was hired as an American historian. He produced PhDs in military history because a) the department respected his decision to shift focus to military history and b) its faculty supported him in training military history grad students. It's only in the past couple of years that Wisconsin actually created a military history position by hiring someone to fill the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair in Military History.
It's worth noting that in recent years, both the American Historical Review (the flagship journal of the American historical profession) and Journal of American History (the flagship journal of American historians) published historiographical essays on the state of military history. Again, this hardly sustains the picture of military history being driven from the academy.
Despite the above, however, the demise of military history theme is likely to remain with us because it serves as a useful arrow in the culture wars--and because it makes for a story in a way that a more accurate assessment does not. On two occasions I've been approached by reporters wanting to do stories ostensibly on the state of military history. When I supplied my perspective, they either ignored what I said or abandoned the story altogether.
All that said, the news about the state of academic military history isn't entirely good.
I do think a case can be made that military history isn't as highly regarded in academe as it might be. There are indeed a few academics who are implacably hostile to it. This partly a hold over from the antiwar protests of the Vietnam era. It also reflects the fact that many historians are politically engaged in their area of interest--woman's historians, for instance, are nearly always feminists--and they assume that we military historians must be politically engaged in the same way, which is to say that we must be right wing militarists.
Then too, our subject matter and methodologies are considered "traditional." This last is particularly inexcusable because it is based on ignorance. The boundaries of the field are expanding, and with them the methods and conceptual frameworks used to explore it But even conceding that some aspects of the field are perennial--strategic and operational history, for instance--the fact that a subject has long been studied does not reduce its importance, and the fact that some older methodologies remain well adapted to the study of military history should not be cause for derision. When academics dismiss a field out of hand because it is "traditional," they play right into the stereotype that academics are animated by what is trendy, not what is important.
Still worse, in a sense, are that many more historians aren't hostile to military history, but nonetheless see no reason to acquire an informed perspective on what the field actually studies. They just vaguely assume we do big battles and great captains. That's the part that's always bothered me. To be a good academic, I'm expected to be conversant with other fields. But historians in other fields feel no need to become conversant with mine.
Columnist Ed Hooper in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes that Congress recently declared November to be "U.S. Military History Month." That's sort of interesting. The rest is sort of lame. Well, not sort of. Really lame.
[S]ailors and soldiers are returning to a nation that no longer embraces their service as a serious educational subject.... In the commercial marketplace of book sales, cable television and movie rentals, U.S. military history is booming.... [But] the news scholastically is dismal, especially in public schools. Military history has all but vanished from America’s educational mainstream. What was once regarded as a core subject in a classical education has become irrelevant. Teaching military history requires instructing students there are times when wars are justified. It requires defining traitors and heroes by academic guidelines. The politicizing of patriotism has neutered this subject. Sterile ideologies developed to avoid professorial jingoism have proven to be as responsible as anti-American ones in the demise of military history.
Smaller colleges are trying to fill the void, but the academic offerings are dwindling. Most Ivy League colleges don’t have a single faculty member who specializes in military history.
This absence trickled down to public school systems generations ago. Gone from U.S. textbooks are the commanders and the battles; the stories of remarkable citizen soldiers who walked away from the safety of their fields, stores and factories and stepped into history’s pages are forgotten. The sociological impacts of armed conflicts or political movements relating to U.S. wars now dominate classroom instruction.
Oh brother.
I was going to ignore this column, but I've received so many emails from people pointing it out to me that I guess I have to respond.
As long time readers of this blog are well aware, this sort of uninformed drivel has been around for years. The best known example is John J. Miller's "Taps for Military History", published in 2006 in The National Review, which produced this rebuttal from the military historians here at Ohio State, as well as several posts on this blog.
In the years since, any number of columnists have published rip-offs of Miller’s article. Hooper's differs only in that a) it is unusually thin gruel; and b) it focuses on K-12 education.
Note that Hooper offers not a shred of evidence re the demise of military history in K-12 schools: neither the extent to which it once existed (we had little or no prescribed military history in the courses I took in junior high or high school), nor the extent to which it exists now. My guess is that history and social studies teachers teach about military history (or not) in about the same measure that they always have. That is to say, I had a few history teachers in junior high and high school who included a lot of military history in their courses, and a few who did not. Judging by the teachers with whom I'm presently acquainted, that doesn't seem to have changed much.
In fact, I have some anecdotal evidence that points toward an interest in military history in K-12 education. The Foreign Policy Research Institute has done at least two symposia on teaching military history in public schools, each attended by about 40 K-12 teachers in person and available to many others on streaming video. And in just about every year for the last decade, I've been asked to speak to groups of K-12 teachers on military history or Civil War history, most recently in June of this year.
In terms of higher education, two interesting critiques of military history in academe--somewhat more nuanced than Miller's--appeared in The New Republic Online in 2007. They are here and here.
In 2009 the New York Times published a column on the supposed demise of traditional fields in history, nicely demolished on her blog by woman's historian Claire Potter.
As I've noted before--and as Hooper could have learned if he'd made the slightest stab at researching his column--the Society for Military History web site shows that there are currently 22 universities in North America with MA/PhD programs. Another 11 have MA programs. That's a considerable increase over the number of programs when I was a grad student two decades ago.
A number of departments that supposedly had military history programs back then--and were pointed out as examples of the demise of military history when military history faculty were not replaced--in fact did not have such programs. An example is Wisconsin. It used to be said that Wisconsin abandoned its military history program when its resident military historian, Edward "Mac" Coffman (who produced a string of superb military historians) wasn't replaced upon his retirement. But Mac was hired as an American historian. He produced PhDs in military history because a) the department respected his decision to shift focus to military history and b) its faculty supported him in training military history grad students. It's only in the past couple of years that Wisconsin actually created a military history position by hiring someone to fill the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair in Military History.
It's worth noting that in recent years, both the American Historical Review (the flagship journal of the American historical profession) and Journal of American History (the flagship journal of American historians) published historiographical essays on the state of military history. Again, this hardly sustains the picture of military history being driven from the academy.
Despite the above, however, the demise of military history theme is likely to remain with us because it serves as a useful arrow in the culture wars--and because it makes for a story in a way that a more accurate assessment does not. On two occasions I've been approached by reporters wanting to do stories ostensibly on the state of military history. When I supplied my perspective, they either ignored what I said or abandoned the story altogether.
All that said, the news about the state of academic military history isn't entirely good.
I do think a case can be made that military history isn't as highly regarded in academe as it might be. There are indeed a few academics who are implacably hostile to it. This partly a hold over from the antiwar protests of the Vietnam era. It also reflects the fact that many historians are politically engaged in their area of interest--woman's historians, for instance, are nearly always feminists--and they assume that we military historians must be politically engaged in the same way, which is to say that we must be right wing militarists.
Then too, our subject matter and methodologies are considered "traditional." This last is particularly inexcusable because it is based on ignorance. The boundaries of the field are expanding, and with them the methods and conceptual frameworks used to explore it But even conceding that some aspects of the field are perennial--strategic and operational history, for instance--the fact that a subject has long been studied does not reduce its importance, and the fact that some older methodologies remain well adapted to the study of military history should not be cause for derision. When academics dismiss a field out of hand because it is "traditional," they play right into the stereotype that academics are animated by what is trendy, not what is important.
Still worse, in a sense, are that many more historians aren't hostile to military history, but nonetheless see no reason to acquire an informed perspective on what the field actually studies. They just vaguely assume we do big battles and great captains. That's the part that's always bothered me. To be a good academic, I'm expected to be conversant with other fields. But historians in other fields feel no need to become conversant with mine.
What Happens When Non-Military Historians Teach Military History?
A guest post by Rebecca Goetz
Rebecca Goetz is a professor of history at Rice University. This post was originally published on November 1, 2006.
(answer: students and instructor alike learn a lot from the experience)
I’ve followed Mark’s ongoing reaction to John J. Miller’s September 26 article in the National Review about the supposed death of academic military history. Underlying Miller’s claim that military history is on its deathbed was the not-so-veiled insinuation that those left-leaning liberal moonbats were responsible for military history’s death. Here’s one excerpt from the article:
"Other types of historians also came under attack — especially scholars of diplomatic, intellectual, and maritime history — but perhaps none have suffered so many casualties as the “drums and trumpets” crowd. “Military historians have been hunted into extinction by politically active faculty members who think military history is a subject for right-wing, imperialistic warmongers,” says Robert Bruce, a professor at Sam Houston State University in Texas.”
I thought this was rather an odd claim. As an undergraduate, I took a modern European history course from one of Miller’s "tenured radicals." In the class we read about strategy and tactics of Europe’s continental wars, Queen Victoria’s dirty colonial wars in Africa and India, and of course we also read about World War I and World War II. In addition to this reading, our professor lectured on aspects of the social history of European warfare: I was deeply moved by his lecture on the experiences of soldiers during World War I. As a college senior I also took a course on the American Revolution, in which the military history of the Revolution was a major topic. I suppose one could call my professor in that course a tenured left-winger as well, yet we finished the course well-versed in the reasons for the failure of Benedict Arnold’s invasion of Quebec, and for Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga. Neither of these liberal professors rook the stance that military history was bad, or that learning military history somehow makes students become militarists.
I never took a course that was purely about military history, but I like to think I graduated from college with a tripartite understanding about military history: 1) that military history is an important branch of historical learning, 2) that military history involves not only the “traditional” topics of strategy and tactics, weaponry, training, supplies, etc., but also the social history of the military experience, and 3) that military history can be comfortably and logically included in courses that aren’t explicitly about military history.
I learned this lesson from my tenured radical professors so well that as I prepared to teach my own course this fall about the American Revolution that I resolved to spend at least two weeks (six class periods) on the military history of the Revolution. I opened the mini-unit with a lecture titled “Citizen Soldiers” which was about the formation of the Continental Army: how soldiers were enlisted, how officers were selected, the virtues and vices of irregular forces, and the (attempted?) professionalization of the army under the auspices of Washington and von Steuben. Students then had to read the portions of Robert Middlekauf’s The Glorious Cause that deal with the war (in fact, I chose Middlekauf’s book over other undergraduate-suitable surveys of the Revolution precisely because it discusses the war in detail). We then had two class periods of discussion about the war in the North—basically a discussion of strategy and tactics from 19 April 1775 through Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga on 17 October 1777. Then, since the theater of warfare shifted southward, we spent two class periods discussing the war from the British invasion of Georgia in the winter of 1778-1779 through Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown on 19 October 1781. We concluded with a class period discussing the experiences of the Revolutionary soldier, using James Kirby Martin’s edition of Joseph Plumb Martin’s 1830 memoirs. We also spent a class period discussing the Revolution on the homefront, and later in the semester I’ll do a lecture on the dissolution of the Continental army, on soldiers’ pay and pensions, and the controversy over the Order of the Cincinnati.
I think my students could discuss with any military historian questions such as “why were the cannon the rebels captured at Ticonderoga and Crown Point important to ending the siege of Boston?” or “in what ways were irregular forces important to the defeat of Burgoyne in 1777?” or “how did French naval support help the American Revolutionary effort?” They could also discuss major figures from the war: Gage, Clinton, Burgoyne, Cornwallis, and the Howe brothers for Britain, and Washington, Lee, Lincoln, Greene, Gates, and others for the American side.
After I read Miller’s article, I was willing to bet there are a lot of historians out there like me: that is, professional historians who are trained as intellectual, social, or cultural historians who have no formal training in military history but who teach military history in their courses when appropriate anyway. I’m not terribly comfortable teaching military history for that reason; no one has ever taught me how to do it, but like many professional historians, I decided to teach myself so that I could teach my students. It took a lot of extra reading on my part, and even some rehearsals of my discussions, before I taught the war. I searched high and low for decent maps, memorized dates, and asked my senior colleague for advice on reading. Even with all this preparation, one of my students caught me in an error about cannonball size—I looked it up afterwards and my student was quite right.
I think the question then becomes not, as Miller would have it, “how soon will military history be dead?” but rather, how can we teach today’s historians how to teach military history as an integral part of their courses? We’ve done this with other aspects of history (for example, many historians simply now include women’s history in college classes as a matter of course, even if they aren’t actually trained to do women’s history). Mark is at work on a solution to this problem, which I believe he’ll be posting about shortly. I’d also like to entertain readers’ thoughts and ideas in the comments.
Rebecca Goetz is a professor of history at Rice University. This post was originally published on November 1, 2006.
(answer: students and instructor alike learn a lot from the experience)I’ve followed Mark’s ongoing reaction to John J. Miller’s September 26 article in the National Review about the supposed death of academic military history. Underlying Miller’s claim that military history is on its deathbed was the not-so-veiled insinuation that those left-leaning liberal moonbats were responsible for military history’s death. Here’s one excerpt from the article:
"Other types of historians also came under attack — especially scholars of diplomatic, intellectual, and maritime history — but perhaps none have suffered so many casualties as the “drums and trumpets” crowd. “Military historians have been hunted into extinction by politically active faculty members who think military history is a subject for right-wing, imperialistic warmongers,” says Robert Bruce, a professor at Sam Houston State University in Texas.”
I thought this was rather an odd claim. As an undergraduate, I took a modern European history course from one of Miller’s "tenured radicals." In the class we read about strategy and tactics of Europe’s continental wars, Queen Victoria’s dirty colonial wars in Africa and India, and of course we also read about World War I and World War II. In addition to this reading, our professor lectured on aspects of the social history of European warfare: I was deeply moved by his lecture on the experiences of soldiers during World War I. As a college senior I also took a course on the American Revolution, in which the military history of the Revolution was a major topic. I suppose one could call my professor in that course a tenured left-winger as well, yet we finished the course well-versed in the reasons for the failure of Benedict Arnold’s invasion of Quebec, and for Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga. Neither of these liberal professors rook the stance that military history was bad, or that learning military history somehow makes students become militarists.
I never took a course that was purely about military history, but I like to think I graduated from college with a tripartite understanding about military history: 1) that military history is an important branch of historical learning, 2) that military history involves not only the “traditional” topics of strategy and tactics, weaponry, training, supplies, etc., but also the social history of the military experience, and 3) that military history can be comfortably and logically included in courses that aren’t explicitly about military history.
I learned this lesson from my tenured radical professors so well that as I prepared to teach my own course this fall about the American Revolution that I resolved to spend at least two weeks (six class periods) on the military history of the Revolution. I opened the mini-unit with a lecture titled “Citizen Soldiers” which was about the formation of the Continental Army: how soldiers were enlisted, how officers were selected, the virtues and vices of irregular forces, and the (attempted?) professionalization of the army under the auspices of Washington and von Steuben. Students then had to read the portions of Robert Middlekauf’s The Glorious Cause that deal with the war (in fact, I chose Middlekauf’s book over other undergraduate-suitable surveys of the Revolution precisely because it discusses the war in detail). We then had two class periods of discussion about the war in the North—basically a discussion of strategy and tactics from 19 April 1775 through Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga on 17 October 1777. Then, since the theater of warfare shifted southward, we spent two class periods discussing the war from the British invasion of Georgia in the winter of 1778-1779 through Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown on 19 October 1781. We concluded with a class period discussing the experiences of the Revolutionary soldier, using James Kirby Martin’s edition of Joseph Plumb Martin’s 1830 memoirs. We also spent a class period discussing the Revolution on the homefront, and later in the semester I’ll do a lecture on the dissolution of the Continental army, on soldiers’ pay and pensions, and the controversy over the Order of the Cincinnati.
I think my students could discuss with any military historian questions such as “why were the cannon the rebels captured at Ticonderoga and Crown Point important to ending the siege of Boston?” or “in what ways were irregular forces important to the defeat of Burgoyne in 1777?” or “how did French naval support help the American Revolutionary effort?” They could also discuss major figures from the war: Gage, Clinton, Burgoyne, Cornwallis, and the Howe brothers for Britain, and Washington, Lee, Lincoln, Greene, Gates, and others for the American side.
After I read Miller’s article, I was willing to bet there are a lot of historians out there like me: that is, professional historians who are trained as intellectual, social, or cultural historians who have no formal training in military history but who teach military history in their courses when appropriate anyway. I’m not terribly comfortable teaching military history for that reason; no one has ever taught me how to do it, but like many professional historians, I decided to teach myself so that I could teach my students. It took a lot of extra reading on my part, and even some rehearsals of my discussions, before I taught the war. I searched high and low for decent maps, memorized dates, and asked my senior colleague for advice on reading. Even with all this preparation, one of my students caught me in an error about cannonball size—I looked it up afterwards and my student was quite right.
I think the question then becomes not, as Miller would have it, “how soon will military history be dead?” but rather, how can we teach today’s historians how to teach military history as an integral part of their courses? We’ve done this with other aspects of history (for example, many historians simply now include women’s history in college classes as a matter of course, even if they aren’t actually trained to do women’s history). Mark is at work on a solution to this problem, which I believe he’ll be posting about shortly. I’d also like to entertain readers’ thoughts and ideas in the comments.
Outflanking the Bad Guys
Cross posted (in slightly modified form) from Civil Warriors
The Civil Warriors Wordpress site has been plagued with malicious script, and what with the demands of work and life I haven't yet found time to address the issue decisively.
Luckily, I discovered that I could create a redirect to its former home, namely the blog on which you've just landed.
So Ethan and I are back in action.
Huzzah!
The Civil Warriors Wordpress site has been plagued with malicious script, and what with the demands of work and life I haven't yet found time to address the issue decisively.
Luckily, I discovered that I could create a redirect to its former home, namely the blog on which you've just landed.
So Ethan and I are back in action.
Huzzah!
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