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Americangirl01
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Joined on 04-19-2007
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Almost Oklahoma, Texas
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Posts 919
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Interesting Read - Part II
Lifelong Learning
Why Military History Matters
 Not surprisingly, this dearth of experience worries many military and nonmilitary historians. War may not always be the trendiest of subjects -- especially in times of peace -- but there's no doubt it is a field worth studying. As Trotsky put it, "You may not be interested in war. But war is interested in you."
And yet, in an analysis Lynn conducted of the past 30 years' worth of articles published in the American Historical Review, he found that not a single article had appeared on the conduct of -- to name a few -- the Revolutionary War, World War II or Vietnam. The AHR represents the cutting edge of scholarly research, serving as a measure for the rest of academe of what scholars should be working on. Lynn, for one, is appalled by this scholarly oversight.
"The new wisdom," as he puts it, "decrees that the death of at least 60 million people, the Holocaust and the reshaping of the world by warfare from 1937 to 1945 fall short of deserving a single article in nearly [three] decades because apparently more important matters had to be discussed."
Beyond war studies' inherent value, some historians point out that it is also one of the few humanities disciplines that actually train real-world practitioners. Most of the officers who teach history at West Point, for example, get their military history Ph.D.s at civilian institutions.
"It is up to us to teach people good history," says UNC's Lee, whether students are voters in an upcoming election or ROTC members who will be serving abroad in a few years. "This is something that history departments should offer as part of a liberal arts education. The better educated we are historically, the less likely we are as a country to make stupid mistakes."
New tactics, cautious optimism
Lynn's 1997 article served as a call to arms, of sorts, for many in the military history community, who are determined not to let their discipline continue to decline without a fight. In his essay, Lynn argued that the only way to get respect in academia was to play academia's game -- to begin using some of the techniques developed by the social, ethnic and cultural historians who now rule the academic roost, emphasizing the importance of linguistics, say, or memory.
"We're not going to retilt academia," says Lee. Instead, military historians are trying to move the field away from its association with battles and generals -- musing, say, about whether one of Napoleon's commanders should have gone left or right at Waterloo -- and toward broader insights about the cultural and social significance of war.
They point to several recent books as examples of the new direction military historians are moving in: Emily Rosenberg's "A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory," which examines how the attack on Pearl Harbor is remembered -- and how it has been used to justify, for example, the government's response to 9/11; John Lynn's "Women, Armies, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe," which looks at the role women played in the armies of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries; and Kenneth Chase's "Firearms: A Global History to 1700," which tackles the question of why Europeans, of all people, were the ones who perfected the technology of the firearm, when the Chinese invented it.
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"There is a perception [among academics] that military historians are working well-trod ground -- that we know everything there is to know about the Allies during World War II," says Lee.
That misconception is intensified by the sheer quantity of military history books lining bookstore shelves, most of which aren't written by academics and aren't worthy of comparison to scholarly work.
"They can make us look primitive in our approach to history," says Lee. "The solution isn't to complain about it, but to try to generate military historians who do good and creative work and who can speak the same language their colleagues do."
Small victories
This new approach does seem to be enjoying some early success. In the past year, several prominent leaders of the historical community have publicly acknowledged that military history has been overlooked, to the academy's detriment -- including, most notably, the editor of the influential American Historical Review, the source of Lynn's ire.
"There has definitely been a realization among historians, maybe tied to 9/11 or Iraq, that war is such an intrusive and large-scale phenomenon that we can't shield ourselves from it," says Robert Schneider, a professor of history at Indiana University, who has been editing the journal for the past three years. "War is something that affects all of society. I think we've neglected some of the traditional subjects for too long."
These concessions are music to many military historians' ears, who hope they are the first steps back to broader academic acceptance. Hiring practices are notoriously hard to change, but here, too, there have been a few positive signs: In fall 2007, Ohio State hired Col. Peter Mansoor, an aide to Gen. David Petraeus, the military commander in Iraq, to fill a vacant military history teaching position.
A group of historians have discussed trying to create more room for themselves on campuses by raising funds from wealthy donors to start endowing more military history chairs around the country. (At $3 million or so per position, a tall order.) Lynn himself will be taking a place at Northwestern next year, where he's been welcomed with open arms after announcing his retirement from Illinois. "I hope we've turned a corner," he says, but he's not sure the fate of military history has been settled. The stakes, with the war in Iraq dragging on, have certainly never been higher, but most historians are equally cautious about the future of their field. "Someone's going to be writing books about war -- there's a huge demand for it," says Citino of Eastern Michigan University. "I personally would rather it be written by a scholar, instead of a reenactor or your friendly neighborhood war buff." That decision, ultimately, will be left to the academy to decide. http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/Departments/AdultLearning/?article=MilitaryHistoryII
"We cannot solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." Albert Einstein
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