GDG- Military history

[jack]

Thanks Norm.

Silence follows.

Regards,

Jack
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Norman Levitt" <njlevitt at hotmail.com>
To: <gettysburg at arthes.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2007 1:03 PM
Subject: GDG- Military history


> Esteemed GDG Member Contributes:
>
>
>
>
>>From the "New Republic":
>
> -----------------------------------------------
>
> Military history bites the dust.
> Casualty of War
> by David A. Bell
> Post date 05.09.07 | Issue date 05.07.07
>
>
> sk most Americans about important subjects in history, and it's a good bet 
> that "war" will rank near the top of the list. Certainly, it holds a 
> commanding position in the history marketed to the general public. Among 
> the "hot books" currently listed on the website of the History Book Club, 
> fully one-third--ranging from straightforward, popular titles like Battles 
> of the Dark Ages to a new collection of essays by the esteemed Civil War 
> historian James McPherson--fall into the category of military history. 
> Viewers tuning in to the History Channel on a recent weekend could choose 
> from at least seven hours of military history programming, including an 
> hour devoted solely to cannons. Popular taste, in other words, bears out 
> the judgment of Edmund Burke, who quipped--long before the horrors of 
> modern mechanized warfare--that the annals of good deeds would "not afford 
> matter enough to fill ten pages. ... War is the matter which fills all 
> History."
>
> Yet the discipline of history, as it exists in major U.S. universities, 
> seems to have forgotten Burke's lesson. At Harvard this spring, for 
> instance, only two of 85 history courses focus mainly on war. This is not 
> surprising, because Harvard does not have a single specialist in military 
> history among the 58 members of its history department. Neither does my 
> own history department at Johns Hopkins; just two of our 61 spring courses 
> are principally concerned with war. And so it goes across the country. The 
> current issue of the American Historical Review, the flagship journal of 
> the profession, includes reviews of no less than 194 new history books, 
> only 15 of which, by my count, qualify as military history.
>
> The subject does remain entrenched in some small corners of the university 
> world--notably at the service academies and in publications like the 
> Journal of Military History. At major research universities, a few 
> specialists, such as Omer Bartov of Brown or Geoffrey Parker of Ohio 
> State, have continued to do marvelous work integrating the study of armies 
> and military operations with such topics as the Holocaust or the "world 
> crisis" of the seventeenth century.
>
> Yet most historians pay scant attention to military history, particularly 
> the part that concerns actual military operations. And so, even in the 
> midst of the Iraq war--the fifth major U.S. deployment since 
> 1990--professors are teaching undergraduates surprisingly little about 
> this historical subject of rather obvious relevance. To take just one 
> example, the problem of how societies have historically evaluated their 
> adversaries' intentions and capabilities remains understudied and rarely 
> taught at a university level.
>
> How can we explain the academy's odd neglect? One frequently mentioned 
> reason is that few contemporary historians have any personal experience of 
> the military. Today, a historian has to be in his mid-fifties (and male) 
> ever to have faced the possibility of the draft, and most American 
> historians come from the privileged strata of society that managed to 
> avoid military service during Vietnam. But this answer doesn't really 
> work. Historians routinely teach and write about a great many subjects 
> absent from their own experience: slavery, plague, feudalism, industrial 
> labor, human sacrifice. Why should war be different?
>
> Another frequently given reason is that historians tend heavily toward 
> pacifism, and this is probably true to some extent. For one thing, 
> repeated surveys have shown that historians' political beliefs skew 
> considerably to the left of the general electorate's. And, just this 
> winter, the membership of the American Historical Association passed, by a 
> three-to-one margin, a resolution urging historians "to do whatever they 
> can to bring the Iraq war to a speedy conclusion." But this explanation, 
> too, is unsatisfactory, since historians routinely write and teach about 
> many phenomena they detest.
>
> A more important reason, I would argue, can be found in the development of 
> the modern social sciences. As sociologists like Hans Joas and Michael 
> Mann have observed, the origins of these sciences lie in liberal, 
> Enlightenment-era thinking that dismissed war as primitive, irrational, 
> and alien to modern civilization. Canonical thinkers of the eighteenth and 
> early nineteenth centuries, such as Montesquieu and Benjamin Constant, 
> believed fervently that, as human societies grew more rational, and as 
> commerce bound nations closer together, war would disappear. "We have 
> reached the age of commerce, which must necessarily replace the age of 
> war," Constant wrote in 1813.
>
> Even Karl Marx did not fundamentally depart from these assumptions. He saw 
> class conflict, not international conflict, as the motor of historical 
> change, and he treated the latter as an artificial distraction. Nor did he 
> ever exalt violence as cleansing and redemptive, the way some of his 
> twentieth-century followers would do. In short, to most social scientists, 
> conflict between societies simply has not been as worthy of theoretical 
> interest as conflict within societies. True, one strain of 
> nineteenth-century social scientists did take war more seriously, arguing 
> that, without it, societies would weaken and wither. But they primarily 
> lived in Germany, mostly grounded their thinking in starkly racialist 
> views of human nature, and largely disappeared from the scene after World 
> War I. There have been other significant exceptions--Carl Schmitt and 
> Raymond Aron, to name just two--but the fact remains that the social 
> sciences have mostly avoided giving war the attention it deserves.
>
> Historians did not always fall into this pattern. In the nineteenth 
> century, history was still predominantly a literary, narrative art, and 
> the past offered no more dramatic or compelling subject than military 
> conflict. Masters like Ranke, Macaulay, Michelet, and Parkman all took 
> military science seriously and put climactic battles at the heart of their 
> stories. In the twentieth century, however, history moved away from this 
> tradition and toward the social sciences. The leaders of the influential 
> "Annales school" of history, which developed in France in the early 
> twentieth century, explicitly downplayed "event history"--by which they 
> particularly meant military history--in favor of "deeper" geological, 
> social, and economic factors. The most important annaliste, Fernand 
> Braudel, held to this principle so strongly that he drafted much of his 
> masterpiece, The Mediterranean, while in a World War II POW camp in 
> Germany! Historians of the twentieth century resisted these tendencies 
> better than others (not surprisingly, given the cataclysmic impact of the 
> world wars). So did historians of Civil Warera America. But, in accounts 
> of most other periods, war lost its formerly commanding position.
>
> In a narrow sense, neglect of military history is easy enough to justify. 
> Surely scholars should have the freedom to pursue those subjects they find 
> most intellectually compelling, and I myself, as a paid-up member of the 
> guild, would look askance at any outside authority trying to tell me what 
> sorts of courses I should teach or what books I should write.
>
> But then, in the real world, nonintellectual concerns constantly impinge 
> upon what professors teach and write, while the question of the 
> university's civic--as opposed to intellectual--obligations is not easily 
> put aside. During the cold war, the government and private institutions 
> like the Ford Foundation provided impressive funding for various sorts of 
> "area studies," so as to increase American understanding of the regions in 
> which we might find ourselves confronting the Soviets. It was not a 
> question of forcing existing professors to teach or write on new subjects, 
> but of encouraging movement into the desired areas. The years after 
> September 11 have seen a welcome surge in the number of faculty positions 
> and courses devoted to Islam and the Middle East, without producing any 
> charges of a distorted intellectual agenda. Members of wealthy ethnic 
> groups routinely endow professorships to spur research and teaching on 
> their own particular history.
>
> It seems to me that, at the very least, the study of military history 
> could use more encouragement of this sort. With the United States facing a 
> long-term terrorist threat--not to mention numerous rogue regimes, and the 
> likelihood of having to send our Armed Forces to end genocide or protect 
> vital interests in locations yet to be determined--our nation is almost 
> certain to remain in the shadow of war for a long time to come. Given this 
> fact, surely a broader, more rigorous intellectual knowledge of war itself 
> is a matter of some civic interest.
>
> Of course, promoting such historical knowledge does not mean subsidizing 
> more books on subjects like cavalry tactics at the Battle of 
> Antietam--which the public itself already subsidizes quite nicely. Nor 
> does it mean--despite the knee-jerk fears of some of my colleagues--  
> promoting politically conservative forms of history, as if only 
> conservatives are driven to the study of war. It simply means studying and 
> teaching about war in ways that historians find intellectually persuasive 
> and important. But it also means asking historians to do something that 
> scholars all too often shudder away from: putting some trust in the 
> instincts of the general public. On this subject, at least, those 
> instincts are quite correct.
>
> David A. Bell is a contributing editor at The New Republic and the author 
> of The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We 
> Know It.
>
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