Robert Farley, a post-doctoral fellow at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, University of Kentucky, reflects on one of the key characters in Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (hat tip to Arms and Influence):

The first time I saw Battle of Algiers was during a security studies retreat at Cornell University. In the discussion following the film, one of the political science faculty surprised the room by suggesting that Lieutenant Colonel Mathieu was one of the most evil characters that he had seen portrayed on film. There was considerable disagreement on this point, and I was completely unconvinced. Mathieu appeared to me to be the picture of a professional military officer; on the wrong side of history, perhaps, but concerned primarily with his duty and by no means evil. That Mathieu clearly respected his opponents made him even more appealing. Later, we dismissed the professor’s argument as simply a re-assertion of the banality of evil hypothesis. I've probably seen Battle of Algiers 15 times since then, and each time I've had opportunity to rethink the argument. I have come to believe that the professor (Peter Katzenstein) was correct, that Lieutenant Colonel Mathieu is one of the most vile characters ever portrayed in film, and that it has nothing to do with the banality of evil. . . .

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Historian Richard M. McMurry speaks at the Fairfield Heritage Association's "Sherman Weekend" dinner on Friday evening.


McMurry; event organizer Joyce Harvey; master of ceremonies Lou Varga


John F. Marszalek, author of Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order

This weekend I was involved with an event commemorating the 125th Anniversary of General William T. Sherman's "War is Hell" speech. It was well organized and attended and I hope it generated a lot of funds for the Fairfield Heritage Association, an organization that runs, among other things, The Sherman House. On Friday night I attended the kick-off dinner and on Saturday afternoon talked about "The Civil War as an Interracial War" at a session devoted to "Race in the Civil War." Along the way I got to attend a brunch that featured an exchange on the March to the Sea and Carolinas Campaign between historians John F. Marszalek and Richard McMurry. Early Saturday evening I dropped in a pre-dinner wine reception held at the Sherman House.

All in all, it was a very pleasant couple of days, and really quite energizing, because it was just nice to be around so many people who were unguarded in their love of history. To me it contrasted sharply with the ambience within academic history. There the culture is very serious and even rather censorious.

I got to talking about this with John Marszalek at the Friday evening dinner. I said that while I could seldom pinpoint individuals who embodied this dour attitude toward history, it seemed everywhere in a kind of free-floating way. John agreed, though he added that once in a while you did see explicit manifestations of the attitude. He encountered it at times because of the commercial success of Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order. And he told me of the experience another prominent Civil War historian had early in his career when the History Book Club made the historian's first book one of its selections. The man was thrilled and at a faculty meeting mentioned it to a colleague, the way you do when you have a piece of good news you want to share. The colleague frowned slightly, thought it over a moment, and then said quite seriously that it was OK this time but that he'd better not let it happen again.

It was one more manifestation of an attitude I have already noted elsewhere. My class will be talking about it at today's session--I've asked them to discuss three articles:

James M. McPherson, "What's the Matter with History?" in McPherson, Drawn with the Sword: Rleflections on the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 231-253;

and an exchange between an academic and "popular" historian:

Leon F. Litwack, "Telling the Story: The Historian, The Filmmaker, and the Civil War," in Robert Brent Toplin, ed. Ken Burns's The Civil War: Historians Respond (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 119-140.

Geoffrey C. Ward, "Refighting the Civil War," in Robert Brent Toplin, ed. Ken Burns's The Civil War: Historians Respond (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 141-152.

The McPherson piece addresses the sharp ambivalence of academic historians toward history written for nonspecialists. Litwack's piece, to which Ward's is a rejoinder, implicitly suggests some of the dangers of an historical approach that caters too directly to a mass audience.

Once an Eagle, a novel by Anton Myrer originally published in 1968, has long been required reading for American officers. The edition in my personal library contains a special foreword by Gen. John W. Vessey, Jr., a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The US Army War College Fund underwrote the cost of adding it to the earlier "civilian" edition. The book is on the US Marine Corps Professional Reading list; this excerpt from the list explains its significance:

Thirty years after its initial publication, Once An Eagle has become a touchstone for the military professionals who devise and carry out our nation's defense. According to the New York Times, "Once An Eagle has worked its way over a generation into the mindset and lexicon of the American military." Named to the Marine Commandant's Reading List, it is required reading for all marines, is assigned to West Point cadets, and is featured in the United States Army War College's annual leadership seminar. Soldiers emblazon the protagonist's name--Sam Damon--across their tanks, and military officers at every level make decisions by asking themselves, "What would Sam do?"

Once An Eagle compellingly recounts the making of one special soldier, Sam Damon, and his adversary over a lifetime, fellow officer Courtney Massengale. Damon is a soldier's soldier, the consummate professional, decorated in both world wars for bravery under fire, who puts duty, honor, and the men he commands above self-interest. Massengale, the consummate political animal who disdains the average grunt, brilliantly advances by making the right connections behind the lines and in Washington's corridors of power.

I thought of Sam Damon this morning when I received an email from Maj. Robert Bateman, an Army officer and friend of mine who is posted in Baghdad. Bob periodically sends out circulars to friends and associates commenting on news items he finds striking in light of his current assignment. It would surprise me very little to learn that Bob thought of Sam Damon when he read an item in today's Los Angeles Times online. Here's Bob's preface to the article:

Articles such as the one I’ve pasted below are, obviously, very painful. It hurts when I read something like this, because I love my nation, my Army. I believe in both, and this quite obviously hurts them in an immediate, albeit shallow, way.

But on another level, a more fundamental level, this is a story that demonstrates how good, true, and honorable are my nation and my Army, at the core.

War is an abomination. I happen to fall into the camp which believes that it is sometimes a necessary abomination, but that does not remove the first element. Because, however, I have no blinders about war, because I have some understanding of what is unleashed when men go to war, reports of bad things, such as that below do not surprise me. But how they are revealed in the American Army is almost unique in history.

This story is as much about the success of my Army, in creating good men and true, as it is about the abominations that occur in war. That we, as an institution, contain elements that led to the first event (the abuse), is not just not unique, it is more like the norm in the history of warfare. That we, as an institution, contain elements that do whatever it takes to make the institution adhere to its own stated values, well that is unique.

The article itself is headlined, "Officer's Road Led Him Outside Army." It's by Richard A. Serrano and appears in this morning's Los Angeles Times:

WASHINGTON — When Army Capt. Ian Fishback told his company and battalion commanders that soldiers were abusing Iraqi prisoners in violation of the Geneva Convention, he says, they told him those rules were easily skirted.

When he wrote a memo saying Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was wrong in telling Congress that the Army follows the Geneva dictates, his lieutenant colonel responded only: "I am aware of Fishback's concerns."

And when Fishback found himself in the same room as Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey at Ft. Benning, Ga., he again complained about prisoner abuse. He said Harvey told him that "corrective action was already taken."

At every turn, it seemed, the decorated young West Point graduate, the son of a Vietnam War veteran from Michigan's Upper Peninsula, whose wife is serving with the Army in Iraq, felt that the military had shut him out.

So he turned to those he knows best. He sought guidance from fellow infantry commanders and his West Point classmates, and learned that they agreed with him that abuse of prisoners was widespread and that officers weren't adequately trained in how to handle them.

Then, in a lengthy chronology obtained Saturday by The Times, recounting what he saw in Iraq and his numerous efforts to get the Army's attention, he wrote that "Harvey is wrong." He wrote that Army guidance was "too vague for officers to enforce American values." He concluded that violations of the Geneva Convention were "systematic, and the Army is misleading America."

This summer, after weighing the possible effects on his career, he stepped outside the Army's chain of command and telephoned the Human Rights Watch advocacy group. . . .

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Willful Ignorance: How the Pentagon sent the army to Iraq without a counterinsurgency doctrine

Jason Vest, writing in the July/August 2005 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:

In 1964, the old Asia hand Lucian Pye astutely noted that, despite a long and well-documented history of insurgent warfare in the world, governments that have faced insurgencies--or were once insurgents themselves--tend to be quick at forgetting their roots. For militaries, this loss of memory has not been passive, but rather reflects a conscious effort to marginalize insurgency studies. "They fail to acknowledge and codify their accumulative understanding of how to cope with insurrections," Pye lamented. "Thus each outbreak of insurgency seems to call for relearning old lessons."

Yet they rarely do. And nowhere is this more true than in the United States. Scholars and soldiers alike have often used the phrase "the American way of war" to describe not just a predilection, but a virtual strategic obsession, which holds that wars are fought by gathering the maximum in manpower and materiel, hurling them into the maelstrom, and counting on swift, crushing victory. While this approach may work against a conventional army, it's nothing short of disastrous when fighting insurgents engaging in unconventional guerrilla warfare. Thus far in Iraq, the U.S. effort, though not entirely devoid of successes, has been hallmarked by overwhelmed and underprepared troops effecting heavy-handed, large-scale roundups of civilians (in some cases errantly or overzealously harming them); or the destruction of large swaths of cities and towns. Meanwhile, cycles of insurgent attacks continue to effectively target current and newly recruited Iraqi police, soldiers, and politicians, as well as Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers.

U.S. ground forces are only now beginning to readjust their approach toward counterinsurgency warfare. But to many knowledgeable observers, it's looking like too little, too late. . . .

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Most Americans have seen the work of freelance photojournalist Kevin Sites (shown at left), even if they do not know his name. It was Sites who briefly achieved world fame or infamy in November 2004. While covering the U.S. assault on Falluja, he filmed a U.S. Marine killing a wounded and apparently helpless Iraqi insurgent lying on the floor of a mosque. Sites, who plainly had come to identify with the combat troops he covered, was dismayed by that turn of events and blogged a much reprinted open letter to Devil Dogs of the 3.1

Sites went on to cover the aftermath of the December 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. At the moment he has partnered with Yahoo! News "to provide a unique, multimedia perspective on some of the world's most troubled and dangerous places." The plan is to cover "every armed conflict in the world within one year, and in doing so to provide a clear idea of the combatants, victims, causes, and costs of each of these struggles - and their global impact." This journey will be reported on a new web site: Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone. The site is touted as "a forum for information and involvement. Users will not only learn about the scope of world conflict, but will find ways to be part of the solutions- through dialogue, debate, and avenues for action." The journey begins September 26.

Today begins Autumn Quarter at The Ohio State University. I'm teaching just one class: Readings in Early American History - The Civil War Era. As the syllabus states, "The course has three main purposes: 1. preparation for the PhD general examination; 2. exploration of the issues involved in history written for the specialist and history written for the layperson; 3. a writing workshop in which to practice effective writing for a non-specialist audience."

I've never taught a course like this before. In some ways that scarcely surprises me, because by the norms of the academe, "Purpose 1" is pretty much the first and only purpose in having a graduate readings course. But in other ways I'm surprised I never thought of it before. I was a writer before I was an historian, and a "pop historian" long before I became an academic historian. I started publishing in magazines like Civil War Times Illustrated when I was twenty. I enjoyed it. I researched and wrote it as well as I knew how, and I naively supposed that people in the groves of academe would respect what I had done.

To a considerable degree they did. When I applied to graduate school the writing sample I provided was a 25,000-word special issue on the life of Robert E. Lee. While no one mistook this for a scholarly article, it did convey to the graduate studies committee such useful bits of information as the fact that I could write effectively, that I had the organizational skills and follow-through to complete a manuscript of that length, and that I had a certain amount of savvy in that I'd learned the ropes of publishing.

Even so, I was lucky, because there's an undercurrent of disdain for popular history within the academy and if my application had landed in a different department I would have been far better off turning in the usual undergraduate research paper.

Just now I used the word "undercurrent." It might have been more apt to use a word like "cloud" or "fog," because as with many of the less savory aspects of academic culture, you can rarely point to a faculty member who will explicitly and openly denigrate history written for the non-specialist. And yet the undercurrent/cloud/fog exists, and every graduate student with an ounce of perception learns it very early in her career.

For instance, in 1994 a quartet of graduate students at Indiana University used precisely the term "undercurrent of disdain" when giving their perception of the profession's view of history written for non-specialists.

Despite avowals to the contrary by a profession whose democratizing impulses led to "people's history," our professional culture still contains an undercurrent of disdain for works written by amateurs or for public audiences. There is a hierarchy implicit in our definition of ourselves as professional historians, and it is, not surprisingly, reinforced in our professional training. As graduate students, we hear this in the classroom, where popular works may be credited as "good narratives" but ultimately derided as lacking "sufficient rigor." We absorb it through hallway conversations and professional newsletters, where we find our colleagues more readily acknowledging one another's presence on prestigious conference panels than their infrequent addresses to county historical societies or rare columns in the local newspaper. We rehearse it by learning to write historiographical essays in a style that favors subtle distinction and academic jargon at the expense of accessibility. We read it in the book review sections of scholarly journals, where academic reviewers of popular works so often feel compelled to add the curious disclaimer--"this work is meant for nonspecialists"--as a gesture of forgiveness for some perceived lack.

-- Chad Berry; Patrick Ettinger; Dot McCullough; Meg Meneghel, History
from the Bottom Up: On Reproducing Professional Culture in Graduate Education, Journal of American History Vol. 81, No. 3, The Practice of American History: A Special Issue. (Dec., 1994), pp. 1137-1146. You will need J-STOR to access this article online.)

Despite the baleful way that the academy regards "popular history," however, I have met many historians who do in fact write in order to engage with a general readership. My colleagues in military history do so as a matter of course, because the level of popular interest in our subject area is so great they would have to actively loathe and despise non-academics to avoid it. But the desire is far from rare. My colleague Kevin Boyle, for example, an historian of 20th century America who specializes in issues of labor and race, wrote Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, specifically because he wanted to tell a story. And as legions of readers will tell you, he managed to do it brilliantly. Indeed, Arc of Justice won last year's National Book Award for non-fiction.

I suppose, however, that a prudent graduate student might object that Kevin wrote Arc of Justice only after achieving the safety of tenure. Maybe so. But I remember a discussion in a graduate course I took during my first year as a PhD student. The subject of popular history came up, and the professor and grad students batted it around briefly in exactly the way you might imagine from reading the block quotation above. Finally a student next to me said, with an eagerness balanced by a certain professional smoothness, that he had a real interest in writing for a general readership and after he got tenure someday he would like to try it.

The student never got to try it. He never got tenure. He never even got his degree. He died less than a year later.

The interview in progress.


Frank Bullock, a volunteer at the Sherman House, chats with the film crew.

Lights. Camera. Sherman, a story by Shawn Chollette about yesterday's visit to the Sherman House by a documentary film crew, is in today's Lancaster (Ohio) Eagle-Gazette.

Part 1 - Part 2 (link not yet active)

Shawn Chollette, Lancaster (Ohio) Eagle-Gazette

A side aspect of my job as an historian--particularly a military historian--is to field inquiries from the press. Sometimes they have nothing to do with my field of expertise. For instance, I could tell you the effective range of a .58 caliber Springfield rifled musket but not its current market value. Sometimes though related to my field they are essentially much ado about nothing--like the time I was asked to guess the name that historians would probably attach to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Even when I get a question that is right down my alley, the reporter is usually on such a tight deadline that they want the merest tidbit; in essence, they want someone with a credential to tell them what they already know.

It's rare to be questioned on a subject I really know about, and to be questioned at length, and (last but not least) to be quoted more or less accurately.

But that happy alignment of rarities occurred a couple of weeks ago when Shawn Chollette, a newspaper reporter in Lancaster, Ohio, called me up to ask my opinion about efforts to rehabilitate the image of Lancaster's most famous resident, William T. Sherman. I ran across Shawn today at the Sherman House, the great Civil War general's birthplace and childhood home. I was there to be interviewed for a forthcoming History Channel documentary. Shawn was there to do a story on the documentary itself. He was also gracious enough to bring me a copy of yesterday's newspaper, which carried his story, Lancaster's Favorite Son Still a Controversial Figure. It's well worth a look, and not just because in it I'm quoted accurately.

That's pretty much all I have time for at the moment. The production crew interviewed me this afternoon for about three hours. I'm about to go interview them about how the making of a history documentary looks from their end.

Michael Dolski, a first-year graduate student at Temple University, writes:

Not to toot our own horn too much, but Temple is a great place to study military history. I first picked up this impression of Temple from Profs. Grimsley and Millett as an undergrad at OSU.

I would like to call attention to Strategic Visions, a biannual magazine from the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy (CENFAD) at Temple. This is rather like the Mershon Center at OSU. There are usually a couple of interesting articles in this publication.

From the Temple University Department of History web site:

The program in military and diplomatic history at Temple is among the strongest of any history department in the United States. Students from colleges and universities in all parts of the country, as well as from the service academies, come to study with Richard Immerman, Gregory Urwin, Jay Lockenour, Vladislav Zubok, William Hitchcock, and Petra Goedde. Immerman directs the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy, which is located within the History Department. Regina Gramer is the assistant director. Led by Professor Lockenour, CENFAD has developed a specific concentration in War and Society. In addition to Lockenour, contributing faculty include Professors Zubok, Varon, Bailey, and Rita Krueger.

Dimitri Rotov at Civil War Bookshelf finds echoes of the 19th-century tensions between the professional and volunteer traditions in places as disparate as Afghanistan and New Orleans--and he's decidedly in sympathy with the latter.