It's not really a profitable activity to compare our personal experiences with academic historians because both sets of experiences are valid. But Fouchault and Marx were central to academic discourse between historians where I was taught and when I complain about that in other fora I see a lot of agreement from folks who are currently teaching.
This article should acknowledge that academic historians at elite universities don't consider Army historians to be real historians in any professional sense. And military history is a hated subfield in the profession, with military historians only really engaging with other military historians. This situation could be improved if army historians spent years studying and debating Marx and Foucault, but academic historians are never really going to get over the unsavory fact that military historians study the mass killing of other human beings.
Interesting. Given the large percentage of PhDs working at CMH, the leading academic history professors who serve on the Amy’s historical advisory committee, and the expert scholars who peer review CMH products well before publication all to ensure the Army lives up to uncompromising and objective scholarly standards and produces works that stand the test of time, I find the stereotype of Army historians stale. I do agree it is harder to find military historians who have a balance of scholarly skill and an understanding of warfare. CMH tries to bridge that with doctoral fellowships.
I hope even elite academic historians can recognize that any worthy study of change and continuity will have unsavory aspects if it involves human nature in extreme circumstances. My opinion is don’t hate the historian for the scholarship that helps us understand. Hate the human habit for destruction. Maybe if those universities supported the study of military history, more people would understand the cost of warfare to society and we wouldn’t have to study war anymore.
Looking forward to part 2. CMH’s Revolutionary War 250 (plus the digital Army Trails on Founding the Nation) commemorations should be awesome public history! (I know, don’t get the elite academy historians started on public history)
Oh, I'm like 90/10 on the side of the Army on this one. I recognize the credentials and scholarship of CMH folks, and if I had to make a criticism it would only be that military history has a reputation for being narrow and traditional and unchanging over time, and military historians could do a better job of mining other fields of history for approaches and content that could make the discipline of military history more approachable to ordinary Americans who've never served in the military.
Conversely, my ire is directed at the 90 percent of academic historians who think that anything involving the military is morally unclean, and who don't want to soil themselves with it.
This is properly an example from the field of archeology, not history, but the one that sticks in my mind is the professor who discovered the remains of an early native American fortification, basically a line of post holes where the posts had decayed, and he wrote series of 5 separate grant proposals seeking funding to excavate and investigate. Each successive grant proposal deemphasized the military aspects of the discovery, and the fifth one which was accepted did not use the word fortification at all, and deliberately obscured the military applications.
There are probably more undergrad MH electives than ever before. When I went to school at a big state school in the 80s, there was no MH. I took courses and wrote MH papers. By the 90s we started getting Vietnam and WWII courses (which are still the majority). And we still have a bunch of grad programs. Above all, there are more scholars than ever who do not ID as MHs , but work on war and society. As for Army history, it is fundamentally about telling what the Army has done, and helping the Army do it better in teh future, so operational history is a wise priority. But if one looks in the CMH catalog, one can see more than a little Army, war, and society.
Thanks for sharing Sam! And that's really encouraging to know there are more undergrad MH electives. Good point too about the many scholars who do not ID as MHs, but who do work in the field.
Thanks Jim, I agree the 250 should be great public history and hopefully we see even more institutions and communities launch military oriented programming.
Keep in mind that "elite universities" are a small part of American higher education. True they have the money, and they produce grad students--but go to the Society for Military History meeting and you'll meet lots of civilian academics producing grad students. Many of those professionally trained PhDs will go into professional military education or work at CMH or elsewhere in Army history.
Very few academic historians spend much time with Foucault or Marx anymore.
I agree with your general concern--but the question is what to do about it. The Society for Military History Summer Seminar does good work--Beth Bailey was a historian of American gender and sexuality, wanted to do some MH, went to the West Point Summer Seminar, wrote two outstanding MH books, and now IDs in large part as a MH.
That's not universally the case. I teach at West Point, and have lots of academic friends, many of them military historians, but many not. Many civilian academic historians study war. You make a good point about the politics in general, but when I go to a conference, people ask me what it's like to teach at WP, and they're interested in what I work on. Admittedly, they're not interested in combined arms tactics, but few MHs are interested in workers' strikes. History, like academia, is full of specializations. That hinders synthesis, but it is how we achieve depth.
Thanks Sam. Really appreciate the examples of the sort of cross-sector work in history, where folks who are not strictly MHs engage and collaborate with the military.
Thank you for the note. My opinion is that the situation is not quite as stark, but the data I've seen definitely underscores the decline in the study of military history, to your point.
Thanks, I kind of thought this might be part of part 2. And I should admit what I've put forward is the stereotype, though my experiences tend to validate it.
Great article, Dan. Especially for those of us who are not as familiar with Army institutions.
Thanks David! I’ve enjoyed reading your reviews and notes on great military writing!
It's not really a profitable activity to compare our personal experiences with academic historians because both sets of experiences are valid. But Fouchault and Marx were central to academic discourse between historians where I was taught and when I complain about that in other fora I see a lot of agreement from folks who are currently teaching.
This article should acknowledge that academic historians at elite universities don't consider Army historians to be real historians in any professional sense. And military history is a hated subfield in the profession, with military historians only really engaging with other military historians. This situation could be improved if army historians spent years studying and debating Marx and Foucault, but academic historians are never really going to get over the unsavory fact that military historians study the mass killing of other human beings.
Interesting. Given the large percentage of PhDs working at CMH, the leading academic history professors who serve on the Amy’s historical advisory committee, and the expert scholars who peer review CMH products well before publication all to ensure the Army lives up to uncompromising and objective scholarly standards and produces works that stand the test of time, I find the stereotype of Army historians stale. I do agree it is harder to find military historians who have a balance of scholarly skill and an understanding of warfare. CMH tries to bridge that with doctoral fellowships.
I hope even elite academic historians can recognize that any worthy study of change and continuity will have unsavory aspects if it involves human nature in extreme circumstances. My opinion is don’t hate the historian for the scholarship that helps us understand. Hate the human habit for destruction. Maybe if those universities supported the study of military history, more people would understand the cost of warfare to society and we wouldn’t have to study war anymore.
Looking forward to part 2. CMH’s Revolutionary War 250 (plus the digital Army Trails on Founding the Nation) commemorations should be awesome public history! (I know, don’t get the elite academy historians started on public history)
Oh, I'm like 90/10 on the side of the Army on this one. I recognize the credentials and scholarship of CMH folks, and if I had to make a criticism it would only be that military history has a reputation for being narrow and traditional and unchanging over time, and military historians could do a better job of mining other fields of history for approaches and content that could make the discipline of military history more approachable to ordinary Americans who've never served in the military.
Conversely, my ire is directed at the 90 percent of academic historians who think that anything involving the military is morally unclean, and who don't want to soil themselves with it.
This is properly an example from the field of archeology, not history, but the one that sticks in my mind is the professor who discovered the remains of an early native American fortification, basically a line of post holes where the posts had decayed, and he wrote series of 5 separate grant proposals seeking funding to excavate and investigate. Each successive grant proposal deemphasized the military aspects of the discovery, and the fifth one which was accepted did not use the word fortification at all, and deliberately obscured the military applications.
The decline in military history studies is alarming. It feels like the pendulum might be moving again, though, still early days.
There are probably more undergrad MH electives than ever before. When I went to school at a big state school in the 80s, there was no MH. I took courses and wrote MH papers. By the 90s we started getting Vietnam and WWII courses (which are still the majority). And we still have a bunch of grad programs. Above all, there are more scholars than ever who do not ID as MHs , but work on war and society. As for Army history, it is fundamentally about telling what the Army has done, and helping the Army do it better in teh future, so operational history is a wise priority. But if one looks in the CMH catalog, one can see more than a little Army, war, and society.
Thanks for sharing Sam! And that's really encouraging to know there are more undergrad MH electives. Good point too about the many scholars who do not ID as MHs, but who do work in the field.
Thanks Jim, I agree the 250 should be great public history and hopefully we see even more institutions and communities launch military oriented programming.
Keep in mind that "elite universities" are a small part of American higher education. True they have the money, and they produce grad students--but go to the Society for Military History meeting and you'll meet lots of civilian academics producing grad students. Many of those professionally trained PhDs will go into professional military education or work at CMH or elsewhere in Army history.
Very few academic historians spend much time with Foucault or Marx anymore.
I agree with your general concern--but the question is what to do about it. The Society for Military History Summer Seminar does good work--Beth Bailey was a historian of American gender and sexuality, wanted to do some MH, went to the West Point Summer Seminar, wrote two outstanding MH books, and now IDs in large part as a MH.
That's not universally the case. I teach at West Point, and have lots of academic friends, many of them military historians, but many not. Many civilian academic historians study war. You make a good point about the politics in general, but when I go to a conference, people ask me what it's like to teach at WP, and they're interested in what I work on. Admittedly, they're not interested in combined arms tactics, but few MHs are interested in workers' strikes. History, like academia, is full of specializations. That hinders synthesis, but it is how we achieve depth.
Thanks Sam. Really appreciate the examples of the sort of cross-sector work in history, where folks who are not strictly MHs engage and collaborate with the military.
Thank you for the note. My opinion is that the situation is not quite as stark, but the data I've seen definitely underscores the decline in the study of military history, to your point.
But we'll dive into this dynamic more in Part II.
Thanks, I kind of thought this might be part of part 2. And I should admit what I've put forward is the stereotype, though my experiences tend to validate it.