This article points out that military history used to dominate the field, but now is almost entirely absent from the top universities. But the article really doesn't make any progress explaining why. What's the conventional wisdom on this? (Politically neutral description preferred.)
I would conjecture that the Vietnam war and the resulting backlash had a severe affect on the US military, forcing a lot of military weapons research to move off-campus; military history probably got caught in that dragnet.
There are still a lot of places which do study military history though, but they are mostly think-tanks (RAND, Stratfor and countless less publicized others).
actually the reason that defense R&D moved off campus was the proliferation of foreign students and faculty as well as a more socialist ideology among a large subset of the educational space.
This is a long running debate among scholars. The main "cause" of the decline appears to be the expansion of other historical narratives. The OP has a link to "Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction" [1] by Robert Citino (2007) which goes over this theory.
That said, I think the War Is Boring post is pretty lazy. "Why Don't More Colleges Teach Military History?" (2008) by Justin Ewers published in US News and World Report [2] covers the same ground but with a more objective viewpoint including mentioning the work of John Lynn from the University of Illinois.
Lynn has written extensively about the disappearance of Military History from most colleges, beginning in 1997 with "The Embattled Future of Academic Military History" [3] and more recently in 2008 with "Breaching the Walls of Academe: The Purposes, Problems, and Prospects of Military History." [4]
> The main "cause" of the decline appears to be the expansion of other historical narratives.
Can you say more about this? To a layman this sounds like "because historians started writing more about other stuff", which of course doesn't really answer the question. What prompted them to start writing about other topics? What new principles do they use to decide what to write about?
EDIT: For instance, I'm reading the US News & World Report article:
> 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.
I don't think that's really compatible with historians merely finding other interesting things to work on.
I think it's not just new topics, but different models of why things change, and why history rolls on. The 'great men' concept of history (the bio part of the military history trifecta) has pretty much fallen apart at this point, leaving a lot of space to fill n the whys of history.
A number of things changed, though perhaps the most important would be the demographics of university students in general. As a result, there was a natural shift toward a broader look at historical topics from different points of view. There was also a late 60s/ early 70s explosion of PhDs in the humanities that didn't quite accord with job prospects which in turn created a push towards more specialization.
I'm finding it hard to believe that increased specialization or increased student diversity could come close to explaining how the editors have chosen these topics while not publishing once on World War II in 30 years. That said, I very much appreciate the points you bring up and your very helpful links for further reading.
As a degree carrying "historian" I'd offer to you that there are 2 factors.
1) The way wars are fought has dramatically changed since WW2. Study of late-20th century warfare cannot be contained to "bullets, battles and biographies." Rather warfare has become intelligence and technology based, with the 3 B's only coming to play in breif flare-ups. The actors managing the new tech and intel tools are part of the intelligence community, who's main tenant is secrecy, meaning figuring out the who, what and why is that much harder to uncover. Then once you do, you need to be computer and infosys literate to understand what happened and how. This turns off a lot of people who can't manage reconciling the skills needed for pre-1950 history with post-1950 history.
2) Social and geopolitical climate has changes since 1950. 3Bs warfare is no longer accepted in the international community. Russia's annexation of Crimea is so shocking because territory has rarely been taken by force since the end of WW2. So while the United States has invaded many nations recently, the territory was not annexed like it would have been in the past. On a national scale, academia --and the officer corps of modern military -- are no longer the exclusive playgrounds of the first and second sons, respectively, of the wealthy/aristocratic families of a nation.
TL;Dr New military history is dichotomous with old and academia is no longer dominated by people who have a vested interest in military history.
Supporting your 1), it's a lot easier to read about stuff where your side had a clear victory. "Bob moved his units into position, they defeated Bill's units, Bob claimed the flag" is a clear victory story for Bobians, and set-piece battles are something they can visualise. "Bob's units moved off into the jungle, and they never really found the enemy, and never really won, and we didn't really understand why we were there in the first place" is a hard story to feel reflected glory from.
I was told once that on the European continent, they're a bit puzzled over the Anglo obsession with WWII history. For the Anglos, it was almost a complete success story - a defensive war against a difficult (and demonic in hindsight) foe where we united unquestionably on the side of right and prevailed, and were never occupied. On the continent, the story was more about occupation, resistance, informants, people disappearing in the streets, secret police with frightening powers, so on and so forth. It was a much more painful experience, where people often couldn't even trust their neighbours they grew up alongside. And even after it ended, the continent was split in twain between two foreign superpowers bristling at each other. That kind of story is also hard to feel reflected glory from...
I think a lot of good stuff has been written about conflicts that were not so clearly victorious, such as the Vietnam war, "Black Hawk Down", the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan, the botched air-raid at dawn after the 1983 Beirut bombings, etc. (See "Supercarrier" by George C. Wilson)
On top of that background the story of how the U.S. rebuilt the force in the 1970s-1990s time period is all the more interesting. (See "Mud Soldiers" by Wilson.) Serious military accounts of Gulf War I also reveal a lot you did not see on CNN at the time.
And as you say, accounts of WWII from the perspective of the losing sides ("Japan's Imperial Conspiracy", "Adolph Hitler" by John Toland, etc.) are deeply interesting too. I am a yankee and no fan of the Confederacy, but the Civil War too takes on a lot more life when you understand the impact it had on the South.
Your war on the continent statement actually brings up a 3rd factor to my initial two.
Those secret police, insurgency, proxy army methods are more or less how the US has executed war post-WW2. And no one (well not many people) want to brag in their biography that "yeah, I was totally in charge of turning brother against brother and leveraging ideological differences to cause the [pick your nation] war of 19XX."
It's dirty warfare, but in a world where you can't violate a nations sovereignty, annex their castle and force your will upon its people, there really aren't many alternative methods.
> The way wars are fought has dramatically changed since WW2....
> This turns off a lot of people who can't manage reconciling the skills needed for pre-1950 history with post-1950 history...
> Social and geopolitical climate has changes since 1950...
But isn't there a substantial fraction of elite historians that study pre-WW2 history?
There is, but whereas a government and its generals could legitimately learn lessons from studying ancient tactics, we don't have that kind of carry-over to the present day, so that kind of knowledge becomes pure academic interest.
Insead, the CIA more or less lead the funded of creation of "mass communications studies" departments across the US in the 50s,60s, and 70s because it was research with applications to improve their abilities to engage in covert warfare.
> ...so that kind of knowledge becomes pure academic interest.
I don't understand. We're talking about academia. Elite historians study the middle ages and the ancient dynasties of China. Is it obvious that these have more useful lessons than the Civil War?
Academia and "the arts" have never been solely about the collection of knowledge for knowledges sake. Generally academics and artist have had patrons of some form who pay for a specific project, which is used to subsidize the academic's other endeavors.
History definitely falls under this umbrella, first with kings wanting their accomplishments recorded for posterity. Academic military history grew out of the practical need to study tactics. Since that need is much declined, so too are the universities offering course in the field.
You still have your collection of purists who study for the sake of study, but the number who do it because they are seeking to apply it to current issues has decreased.
It's not just military history, but other 'dead white guy' topics like Classical history (see Victor Davis Hansen). Most blame 'liberalization' to some degree, e.g. Vietnam making military topics less 'glorious', but I think the real reason is the rapid growth of universities since the 50's. There are probably the same absolute number of military historians as there were in 1920, but there was a tremendous growth in non-traditional historical fields as schools had to quickly add new classes and departments to keep up with the demand cause by increased attendance.
> There are probably the same absolute number of military historians
I have no idea if this is true, but it wouldn't answer the question. In the past, a large fraction of elite historians studied military history. Today, nearly zero.
Maybe war is studied more as anomalies in diplomatic history? Add bit of geopolitics and economic history and you probably can get lot closer to the underlying reasons.
Why did the winnig party win? Why did they use their wictory the way they did? These are the actually interesting questions. Studying individual generals, weapons and tactics gets you only so far. And even then such details average out in the long run. For example long running concentration to logistics at West Point probably explain more about current U.S. military hegemony than battlefield performance of any one general.
It would seem to me that this is just a consequence of specialization and the fracturing of large fields into smaller fields. "War" is a vague term that encompasses a lot of specific contemporary subfields that didn't exist / didn't have institutional academic recognition 100 years ago.
You can sort of observe the same phenomenon in philosophy (less interest by non-experts). As science, economics, and other fields "grew up," branched off from philosophy, and became their own fields, the old "broad" field grew less popular.
(and I say this as someone with a philosophy degree, still extremely interested in philosophy, and still a firm believer in its importance)
As a layman, I love history. I love hearing the stories of people in extraordinary circumstances. I get the same feeling from fiction, but with history? I know these things really happened. It's not all just in some author's mind.
Having said that, I get tired of military history, and I understand how many people view it as a gun-nut, testosterone-fueled endeavor. It's a bad rap, but it can look that way from the outside.
I think the problem here is drama. So much of human drama revolves around one bunch of people being violent to another. That sucks, but if you want incredible stories that make you question your values and wonder what you would do, most of the time you're listening to some kind of story involving battles.
Assuming no danger, I'd love to have been with Edison at times, or Teller. I would love to have listened to Jefferson giving the first State of the Union speech, in person. Anne Frank still makes me shiver.
But in terms of over-the-top, how-the-hell-would-you-handle-those-emotions, can you imagine being on the first boats ashore on D-Day, as we saw in "Saving Private Ryan"? Watching a fully-equipped Roman legion go into battle, as was in "Gladiator"? Being in Constantinople and seeing the First Crusade approach? Seeing the Mongols raise the flag outside your city? Being part of Pickett's Charge?
In a lot of ways I like the other stories much better. They make for great long-form novels. But the military and battle stories can punch you in the gut without any prep. If you love history, it's extremely difficult to stay away from them.
> The so-called “drums and trumpet school” of examining battles and generals isn’t the only game in town.
Might be nice if someone propagated this information to Wikipedia. Seemingly on every military-related article there is an attempt to shoehorn the conflict into a neat table listing "belligerents" and "casualties and losses", complete with little flags as if it's an 1800s-style cavalry battle [0]. As far as I can tell, the purpose of these tables is not really about providing an accurate summary of the conflict; it's about providing material so that war nuts can get their rocks off thinking about the violence.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 24.8 ms ] threadThere are still a lot of places which do study military history though, but they are mostly think-tanks (RAND, Stratfor and countless less publicized others).
That said, I think the War Is Boring post is pretty lazy. "Why Don't More Colleges Teach Military History?" (2008) by Justin Ewers published in US News and World Report [2] covers the same ground but with a more objective viewpoint including mentioning the work of John Lynn from the University of Illinois.
Lynn has written extensively about the disappearance of Military History from most colleges, beginning in 1997 with "The Embattled Future of Academic Military History" [3] and more recently in 2008 with "Breaching the Walls of Academe: The Purposes, Problems, and Prospects of Military History." [4]
[1] http://military.hist.unt.edu/Citino%20AHR.pdf
[2] http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2008/04/03/why-dont-coll...
[3] http://militaryhistoryfoundation.org/resources/lynn.html
[4] https://www.nas.org/articles/Breaching_the_Walls_of_Academe_...
Can you say more about this? To a layman this sounds like "because historians started writing more about other stuff", which of course doesn't really answer the question. What prompted them to start writing about other topics? What new principles do they use to decide what to write about?
EDIT: For instance, I'm reading the US News & World Report article:
> 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.
I don't think that's really compatible with historians merely finding other interesting things to work on.
https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/amer...
I'm finding it hard to believe that increased specialization or increased student diversity could come close to explaining how the editors have chosen these topics while not publishing once on World War II in 30 years. That said, I very much appreciate the points you bring up and your very helpful links for further reading.
[0] https://aeon.co/opinions/the-us-military-is-everywhere-excep...
1) The way wars are fought has dramatically changed since WW2. Study of late-20th century warfare cannot be contained to "bullets, battles and biographies." Rather warfare has become intelligence and technology based, with the 3 B's only coming to play in breif flare-ups. The actors managing the new tech and intel tools are part of the intelligence community, who's main tenant is secrecy, meaning figuring out the who, what and why is that much harder to uncover. Then once you do, you need to be computer and infosys literate to understand what happened and how. This turns off a lot of people who can't manage reconciling the skills needed for pre-1950 history with post-1950 history.
2) Social and geopolitical climate has changes since 1950. 3Bs warfare is no longer accepted in the international community. Russia's annexation of Crimea is so shocking because territory has rarely been taken by force since the end of WW2. So while the United States has invaded many nations recently, the territory was not annexed like it would have been in the past. On a national scale, academia --and the officer corps of modern military -- are no longer the exclusive playgrounds of the first and second sons, respectively, of the wealthy/aristocratic families of a nation.
TL;Dr New military history is dichotomous with old and academia is no longer dominated by people who have a vested interest in military history.
I was told once that on the European continent, they're a bit puzzled over the Anglo obsession with WWII history. For the Anglos, it was almost a complete success story - a defensive war against a difficult (and demonic in hindsight) foe where we united unquestionably on the side of right and prevailed, and were never occupied. On the continent, the story was more about occupation, resistance, informants, people disappearing in the streets, secret police with frightening powers, so on and so forth. It was a much more painful experience, where people often couldn't even trust their neighbours they grew up alongside. And even after it ended, the continent was split in twain between two foreign superpowers bristling at each other. That kind of story is also hard to feel reflected glory from...
On top of that background the story of how the U.S. rebuilt the force in the 1970s-1990s time period is all the more interesting. (See "Mud Soldiers" by Wilson.) Serious military accounts of Gulf War I also reveal a lot you did not see on CNN at the time.
And as you say, accounts of WWII from the perspective of the losing sides ("Japan's Imperial Conspiracy", "Adolph Hitler" by John Toland, etc.) are deeply interesting too. I am a yankee and no fan of the Confederacy, but the Civil War too takes on a lot more life when you understand the impact it had on the South.
Those secret police, insurgency, proxy army methods are more or less how the US has executed war post-WW2. And no one (well not many people) want to brag in their biography that "yeah, I was totally in charge of turning brother against brother and leveraging ideological differences to cause the [pick your nation] war of 19XX."
It's dirty warfare, but in a world where you can't violate a nations sovereignty, annex their castle and force your will upon its people, there really aren't many alternative methods.
Edit: typos
But isn't there a substantial fraction of elite historians that study pre-WW2 history?
Insead, the CIA more or less lead the funded of creation of "mass communications studies" departments across the US in the 50s,60s, and 70s because it was research with applications to improve their abilities to engage in covert warfare.
I don't understand. We're talking about academia. Elite historians study the middle ages and the ancient dynasties of China. Is it obvious that these have more useful lessons than the Civil War?
You still have your collection of purists who study for the sake of study, but the number who do it because they are seeking to apply it to current issues has decreased.
I have no idea if this is true, but it wouldn't answer the question. In the past, a large fraction of elite historians studied military history. Today, nearly zero.
Why did the winnig party win? Why did they use their wictory the way they did? These are the actually interesting questions. Studying individual generals, weapons and tactics gets you only so far. And even then such details average out in the long run. For example long running concentration to logistics at West Point probably explain more about current U.S. military hegemony than battlefield performance of any one general.
You can sort of observe the same phenomenon in philosophy (less interest by non-experts). As science, economics, and other fields "grew up," branched off from philosophy, and became their own fields, the old "broad" field grew less popular.
(and I say this as someone with a philosophy degree, still extremely interested in philosophy, and still a firm believer in its importance)
Having said that, I get tired of military history, and I understand how many people view it as a gun-nut, testosterone-fueled endeavor. It's a bad rap, but it can look that way from the outside.
I think the problem here is drama. So much of human drama revolves around one bunch of people being violent to another. That sucks, but if you want incredible stories that make you question your values and wonder what you would do, most of the time you're listening to some kind of story involving battles.
Assuming no danger, I'd love to have been with Edison at times, or Teller. I would love to have listened to Jefferson giving the first State of the Union speech, in person. Anne Frank still makes me shiver.
But in terms of over-the-top, how-the-hell-would-you-handle-those-emotions, can you imagine being on the first boats ashore on D-Day, as we saw in "Saving Private Ryan"? Watching a fully-equipped Roman legion go into battle, as was in "Gladiator"? Being in Constantinople and seeing the First Crusade approach? Seeing the Mongols raise the flag outside your city? Being part of Pickett's Charge?
In a lot of ways I like the other stories much better. They make for great long-form novels. But the military and battle stories can punch you in the gut without any prep. If you love history, it's extremely difficult to stay away from them.
Might be nice if someone propagated this information to Wikipedia. Seemingly on every military-related article there is an attempt to shoehorn the conflict into a neat table listing "belligerents" and "casualties and losses", complete with little flags as if it's an 1800s-style cavalry battle [0]. As far as I can tell, the purpose of these tables is not really about providing an accurate summary of the conflict; it's about providing material so that war nuts can get their rocks off thinking about the violence.
[0] See, for example, the attempt to condense the Troubles into such a table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles