That's Prof. Reina Rennington of Norwich University on the left, looking radiant; I'm on the right, looking like an Idaho potato. The pic was taken last month when Reina gave a presentation at the Mershon Center on the state of military history. I've been meaning to write a post about her talk and hope to get around to it in a few days. But my immediate need for the photo is different. And simpler.

Note that here we have two military historians, one female, one male, which happens to be the exact ratio of women to men on the planet. And war, I think no one interested in war would deny, has powerfully shaped the history of that planet and so, willy nilly, the entire population of that planet, in pretty much equal measure. Yet few historical subjects are more heavily skewed in terms of gender than ours. Military historians tend overwhelmingly to be male. So do students who take courses in military history.

This evening I put the Winter 2006 History 380: The History of War course roster on a spreadsheet to explore the composition of the 158 students currently enrolled. Of these, 71 (45 percent) are history majors; the other 87 (55 percent) are majoring in everything from Accounting to Zoology. After History the largest cohort of majors is in Political Science (15 students, 10 percent), closely followed by International Studies (14 students, 9 percent), and Criminology (6 students, 4 percent). The remaining 52 students (33 percent) are distributed over a broad range of majors: essentially they comprise a representative sample of the undergraduate population.

The number of female students is another story. Students are not formally identified by gender so I had to guess at one or two of the names, but as nearly as I could figure only 22 female students (14 percent) are enrolled in the course. The good news is that in absolute numbers History 380 has enrolled at least half the number of female students as one would find in a 300-level course in women's history, and fifteen of the 22 are non-history majors. The bad news--or rather the challenge--is that I don't have a ratio closer to a fifty-fifty split between women and men.

And right now I don't have the slightest idea how to achieve it. While it's not unreasonable to suppose that giving more attention to women and war would help--and to advertise the fact--that's far from a sure bet, and anyway a bit patronizing to suppose that women are interested only in women. Is it simply the stereotypes concerning military history that account for the disproportion? Or is it something deeper?

Cowboys take up AK47s to combat drug runners on Mexican frontier
From the London Daily Telegraph

As he careered along the rock-strewn gulley towards his silver mine deep in the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona, Roger McCaslin first checked his bowie knife, then his pistol, and finally his Kalashnikov. From the road, he had already noticed that something was wrong.

"The gate's broken and the door on the trailer's open. They've been here, I know it," he said ominously. "I just hope they've moved on - for their sake."

Full Story (Hat tip to John Maass)

Autumn Quarter still has three weeks to go (including finals week), but Winter Quarter begins in just 44 days. And although I'm teaching just a single course, it's the one that requires most of my time and attention: History 380: The History of War. This will be my third time teaching it, but in many ways I still think of it as a new prep. The books change, the lectures change, to some extent even the conceptualization changes. That's because I'm dealing with, well, the history of war--everything from cavemen to Al-Qaeda--and I have over 150 students, many of whom are non-history majors. To craft an introduction to the subject that is both coherent and intellectually challenging takes a lot of thought and effort. (Admittedly, it's quite stimulating as well.)

On top of that, for the first time I'll be using an online course management system. The system here at Ohio State is known as Carmen, after "Carmen, Ohio," the university's alma mater. It's based on the Desire2Learn platform, but the university decided to give it a distinctive name, partly for sentimental reasons and partly because Carmen may in the future incorporate additional software systems. (A Flash presentation tour of Carmen is available here.)

Although it's taken several hours of labor, things have been streamlined considerably by the fact that I have so much material already online, so that it's been largely a matter of creating hyperlinks to this page or that. This blog has also helped a lot. Several Carmen modules simply link to existing posts. For instance, for the course discussion concerning definitions of war, I have links to Clausewitz , my colleague Joe Guilmartin's working definition of war, another working definition by Robert L. O'Connell, and my own 4GW, Southern Style posts. And to set up a discussion of the warrior ethos in both military and daily life, I linked to the paired series, Shadow Warriors and A Good Day to Die. Both are deliberately impressionistic, and I'll now have to augment them with a more conventional essay. But I knew that all along, and as I worked on those posts I took notes for just such an essay.

It's the case I've been making all year: properly employed, an academic blog is a professional asset. I say this not to the Tribbles of the world, who can safely ignore this advice, but rather to the rising generation of historians, who may think they can but can't.

UPDATE, November 20, 7:31 p.m.: On this last point, see Matrix of Some Uses of Blogs in Education, published in EdTechPost over two years ago. (Hat tip to Stephen Odgen, whose Rats, Gas, and Shell Shock supports his British Literature course at Simon Fraser University. "I recommend it highly," he writes, "as an excellent introduction to the ways in which blogging will, to a virtual certainty, become integrated into university practice to the same degree as e-mail, on-line registration, and digitised databases are now.")

Even without the explanatory text, the matrix is eloquent (click for full-size image):

.

It's interesting to try and place my own blogging efforts within the matrix. I would guess they fit most closely in the upper right quadrant: "Discipline-specific blog as professional practice/networking/personal knowledge sharing." But as I imagine the matrix creator, Scott Leslie, recognized full well, blogs are a flexible medium. Properly organized, a single blog can serve a number of these uses.

Annie making herself at home in my office; inset: Annie's webshot on the "adoptable dogs" section of the Franklin County (Ohio) Dog Shelter.
__________

For some years now, I've had two dogs as my most constant companions: Gypsy, an Australian cattle dog; and Jethro, a beagle-basset mix. Gypsy I rescued; she's about twelve years old, but that's just a guess. Jethro I raised from a pup; he just turned eight.

Yesterday my Significant Other and I added a third dog to the family: Annie, a beagle mix who is roughly eighteen months old. We got her from the local dog shelter. I dreaded going down there, for reasons I'll explain a bit later, but actually it wasn't too bad. The dogs seemed well-cared for and a steady stream of potential adoptive owners kept coming through the doors.

Even so, for much of the time a snatch of poetry--well, high-grade doggerel, no pun intended--kept running through my head: "We called him Rags. He was just a cur, but twice on the Western line . . ."

When we came home with Annie and got her properly introduced to her new surroundings (and to Gypsy and Jethro, who still aren't quite sure what to make of her), I looked up the poem. As ever, Google made it effortless:

We called him "Rags." He was just a cur,
But twice, on the Western Line,
That little old bunch of faithful fur
Had offered his life for mine.

And all that he got was bones and bread,
Or the leavings of soldier grub,
But he'd give his heart for a pat on the head,
Or a friendly tickle and rub.

And Rags got home with the regiment,
And then, in the breaking away --
Well, whether they stole him, or whether he went,
I'm not prepared to say.

But we mustered out, some to beer and gruel,
And some to sherry and shad,
And I went back to the Sawbones School,
Where I still was an undergrad.

One day they took us budding M.D.'s
To one of those institutes
Where they demonstrate every new disease
By means of bisected brutes.

They had one animal tacked and tied
And slit like a full-dresses fish,
With his vitals pumping away inside
As pleasant as one might wish.

I stopped to look like the rest, of course,
And the beast's eyes levelled mine;
His short tale thumped with a feeble force,
And he uttered a tender whine.

It was Rags, yes, Rags! who was martyred there,
Who was quartered and crucified,
And he whined that whine which is doggish prayer
And he licked my hand--and died.

And I was no better in part nor whole
Than the gang I was found among,
And his innocent blood was on the soul
Which he blessed with his dying tongue.

Well! I've seen man go to courageous death
In the air, on sea, on land!
But only a dog would spend his breath
In a kiss for his murderer's hand.

And if there's no heaven for love like that,
For such four-legged fealty-well!
If I have any choice, I tell you flat,
I'll take my chance in hell.

The poem was by Edward Vance Cooke, and contrary to my expectations, he was not a veteran of the First World War--in fact, by the time Armistice Day came he was on the high side of sixty. "Rags" isn't considered his best poem, either. That distinction, such as it is, goes to "How Did You Die?," which reads like a collaboration between Rudyard Kipling and Pollyanna. But I'll bet "Rags" is better known. It figures prominently on any number of animal rescue and anti-vivisectionist web sites.

Though Cooke spent 1914-1918 in Canada and the United States, "Rags" does capture an authentic dimension of the First World War experience, at least on the Western Front. Offhand I can't think of a conflict in which dogs played a more extensive, varied role. Rags was a mascot, of course, but thousands of other canines were working animals, used, among other things, to carry messages, search for the wounded, and pull heavy machine guns. (You can learn more than you may care to know about this at K-9 History: The Great War, 1914-1918.) At least one intrepid pooch is credited with capturing an enemy spy: That would be Stubby, The Military Dog, pride of the 102nd Infantry.

"Rags" also has a more personal resonance for me, and this gets at why I had to nerve myself to make a visit to the dog shelter. Just over twenty-one years ago I was accepted into the War Studies program at Kings College London. I was thrilled to be going abroad, of course, but at the same time I had to find a home for Lady, a cocker-springer spaniel who had been my family's pet since I was thirteen. At first I didn't think this would be a problem. But neither of my siblings were interested in or well-positioned to take care of Lady and my father, who had recently remarried, flatly refused to consider it. A couple of families from my church tried to board Lady but she was eleven years old and confused by being passed around several times in the wake of my parents' divorce and my mother's death not long thereafter. Unsurprisingly, she wet the floor or whimpered too much during her brief stay with these families, and within a day or two each one reported that things just weren't working out. I went to my father a second time, but he didn't unbend in the least. To him, Lady was just an animal, and he was not going to let himself be inconvenienced. To me, Lady was a member of the family. I could scarcely understand his attitude until suddenly I understood it all too well.

Well, there was no help for it. Faced with a choice between abandoning Lady and abandoning my plans to attend Kings College London, I abandoned Lady. I took her to the Humane Society, nuzzled her one last time, and gave her leash to one of the attendants. The last I saw of her she was trotting away from me, gentle as ever, hopelessly confused but obedient and trusting.

I'd like to think she somehow found a home the way Annie has done. But I know better. Once I'd actually given Lady up, my sister, who had previously been as indifferent to the matter as my father, suddenly reappraised the situation and tried to get Lady back. She called the Humane Society, but of course only one thing happens to eleven-year old dogs in a place where the needs are so great and funds so lacking. And it already had.


Lady (1973-1984)

After I wrote the preceding entry, someone noted that I hadn't explained all that clearly what 4GW was. I agreed. The seeming defect didn't bother me, though, for two reasons. First and most obviously, I didn't feel as if I had to explain the concept in detail: I'd provided links to several short introductions to the subject, and a clearer explanation was just a mouse click away. But secondly, I didn't see much point in doing so. Even once you do understand 4GW, you haven't learned much that isn't more or less obvious to anyone who reads the newspapers. To my mind, 4GW is mainly a way to sell the American officer corps on the need to recognize this type of conflict as “real war.”

That doesn't mean, however, that the form of war loosely denominated under the heading of 4GW is unworthy of serious study, nor that it is valueless to try and place it within a larger historical context. I just think it's more useful to approach the issue from a different starting point.

The starting point I would choose are the intellectual boundaries of the subject matter we usually call military history, but which might more properly be called the history of armed coercion or the history of war.

In a previous post, I noted that one of my colleagues, John L. Brooke, had suggested to me that the proper concern of military history might well be described as "political crisis." John made the remark over hors d'oeuvres before dinner one evening last spring. He outlined what he meant and pointed me toward Edward Countryman's A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society, 1760-1790 (1981), a co-winner of the Bancroft Prize and one of the most influential studies of its subject to appear in the last generation.

I picked up a copy of the book and, in the fullness of time, actually began reading it. It didn't take long to see what John was driving at. Trouble was, Countryman doesn't use the term "political crisis" except in passing. The core concept of the book, so far as I could see, was "revolutionary crisis," and for anyone who might be interested, this is explicated most closely on pp. 132-135 of the book. None of it is exactly original. What Countryman does is to pick and choose intelligently among a number of theorists of political and social revolution to create a model suited to explain his own case study, the province/state of New York during the late eighteenth century.

But there was no doubt in my mind that John had distinctly said "political crisis," not "revolutionary crisis," and after flipping through the whole book I dropped him a quick email "to check to be sure I haven't somehow missed something important; for instance that revolutionary crisis might be a subset of political crisis. If you could reassure me (or correct me) on this point, I'd appreciate it."

I assumed that John would write back merely to say, "Yes, that's what I meant," or "No: look on page thus-and-such." What he did instead was more thoughtful.

Mark:

An interesting question. I guess that this reflects my Early Americanist focus on internal wars....

So, I would parse it this way:

All wars are dimensions or extensions of "political crises" [as in Von Clausewitz], and involved the breakdown of political routines governed by constitutions or rules.

Wars are either external/international or internal/civil.

External/international wars follow the breakdown of diplomatic [international political] routines

Internal/civil wars follow the breakdown of constitutional routines.

If they leading to constitutional reformulations internal wars are revolutionary wars [aka Am Rev and Civil War].

If they lead to/are directed at fundamental regime changes in conquered countries, external wars are revolutionary wars.

Work for you? Let me know what you think.

I wrote back:

Hi John,

Thanks for the response. Yes, that's pretty much what I understood you to be driving at in our previous conversation.

I think the basic line of demarcation is exactly right. There's such a thing as "normal" domestic political and international routines. As long as everyone observes these norms (whether they like them or not), we're not in the realm of war. But when one or more sides seeks to change the status quo, finds it impossible to do so within the normal framework, and steps outside the normal framework to gain additional leverage, then we are dealing with war. I don't think outright violence needs to be involved, though it often is. General strikes, nonviolent resistance, economic boycotts, social ostracism/intimidation, etc. are just as much instruments of war. This is easy to miss if one thinks only in terms of violence, but if one reframes the question to focus on effective strategy and tactics, it leaps into focus. The First and Second Reconstructions fit this definition of war, and it's always been striking to me how closely the Redeemers' insurgency adhered to the concepts the Vietnamese would later codify as their doctrine of dau tranh (literally "struggle" but more accurately translated as "people's war.")

I think I'd modify the external/internal division a bit in favor of state and non-state actors. An external war could be waged by a state against another state; it could also be waged against a non-state community or communities (e.g., the wars between the US and Indian nations). An internal war could be waged between the state and insurgents, usually for capture of the state (the First Reconstruction); but it could also be waged principally between non-state actors (e.g., major clashes between management and labor, the Second Reconstruction). Where two non-state antagonists are concerned, the state is seldom neutral, but it isn't necessarily fore-ordained to be on one particular side. A key dimension of the struggle can be to bid for the state's intervention on one side or the other. . . .

Let me know if this makes sense to you.

Evidently it did. "These are very good refinements of my rough outline. I would just add that some internal wars produce two states in contest for sovereignty. . ."

Placed in this context, 4GW emerges not as a new development in war, albeit with limited historical antecedents, but rather as a type of war that has been waged for literally hundreds of years. It is asymmetrical, in the sense that it is usually a contest between a non-state actor and an established state with a strong advantage in, if not a complete monopoly upon, the instruments of conventional violence: armed forces, police, etc. Or you could put it a bit differently and call it a contest between an aspiring political order and an entrenched political order that more or less controls the state and therefore the levers of violent coercion. But the established political order has lost its presumptive legitimacy. Those outside that order seek to alter the status quo, and finding they cannot do so within the realm of normal politics, step outside that realm, as I said before, and adopt tactics designed to gain additional leverage.

These tactics can amount to terrorism as classically understood: bombings, assassinations, etc., designed to show that resistance to the established order is in fact possible. They can take the form of guerrilla warfare. In either case, the object is to gain popular support, either though attraction or fear, and over time to build a movement strong enough to defeat the established order on its own terms. That's pretty much classic Maoist people's war.

But as John and I agreed, it can also take any number of forms that are not violent but are nevertheless forms of war. Economic boycotts, for instance, were a common feature of the American Revolution during the decade preceding the outbreak of what we call the War for American Independence. General strikes were used in colonial India and Algeria. Symbolic acts designed to attract the sympathy and intervention of bystanders are another effective, non-lethal tactic. The non-violent component of the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, was carefully calibrated to produce over-reactions on the part of Southern state and local governments that would attract the support of (mostly northern) white liberals and the attention of the non-aligned world. This in turn put pressure on the federal government to intervene.

But as scholars of the Civil Rights era are increasingly willing to acknowledge, the studied non-violence of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, and Congress on Racial Equality was tacitly augmented by black organizations ready, willing and able to use violence in self-defense. The differences in philosophy created real tensions between these two types of groups, yet each needed the other. Militant groups would not have been able to make much if any headway among the average white liberal. Nonviolent groups alone would not have been able to survive the unyielding hostility of Southern white supremacists. In other words, an orchestration of tactics took place, and while in conventional military terms we expect this orchestration to be somehow centrally directed, it does not need to be and I suspect, usually isn't.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the 4GW era, to those who have written about it, is the ability of modern revolutionaries to gain "unprecedented" access to the media--via the web, satellite cable news, etc. Certainly some of the specific technologies are new, but the phenomenon itself would be familiar to anyone who watched the nightly television news during the 1960s. The reason this gets overlooked is that Islamic terrorists are loathed and hated while Civil Rights activists are admired. I have no problem with the moral distinction--though it is worth bearing in mind that millions of people view Islamic resistance fighters in a favorable moral light--but in tactical terms the phenomenon is the same.

In short, Americans have fought a 4GW campaign, right here at home, within living memory. And won it. Or lost it, depending on your sympathies, point of view, and assessment of the post-Civil Rights era.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 (link not yet active)

"4GW" stands for Fourth Generation Warfare. A buzz word current in the defense community, it attempts to define the sort of conflict the United States is currently facing, and is likely to face in the future.

The term was coined in a 1989 article, The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation, that appeared in the Marine Corps Gazette. But perhaps the best short introduction to the subject is a 1994 piece, also published in the Marine Corps Gazette, entitled The Evolution of War: The Fourth Generation. It was written by LTC Thomas X. Hammes, who more recently authored The Sling and the Stone: On War in the Twenty-first Century (2004). I've not yet read it--to my surprise, the OSU library doesn't even own a copy--but as far as I can tell The Sling and the Stone the most detailed explication of Fourth Generation Warfare yet to appear.

In purely academic terms, Fourth Generation Warfare is laughable. The master metaphor--"generations"--is incoherent, since it implies that one form of war eventually generates the next. In the sense of operational or tactical response this might be correct, but as proponents of 4GW themselves point out, the factors that transform war invariably come from outside; e.g., political, technological, and cultural change. Even if you jettison "generation" for "age," "era," or "phase," the taxonomy of the earlier history of warfare is crude. Take my word for it, or read the articles for yourself.

But academic military historians ought to refrain from derision. Colonels and military analysts have to reach for phrases like "Fourth Generation Warfare," and guess at its antecedents, because people like us have signally failed to put our intellectual house in order. Had we done so--had we systematically mapped a cognitive landscape of our subject area during the thirty-odd years in which we crowed about the "new military history"--present-day soldiers and decision-makers would not have to scramble quite so wildly to make sense of the "new" strategic environment.

Because it isn't new.

It happens, in fact, to be a form of warfare we have already fought on several occasions. We just didn't call it war or choose to remember it as war.

Let me suggest two examples from U.S. history; each will be followed by a quote from some of the literature on Fourth Generation Warfare. I hope that at least some readers will be able to see the aptness of the quote based on their knowledge of the event; if not, I'll elaborate on this myself in future posts.

Reconstruction (1865-1877, especially 1866-1876)

Fourth generation warfare seems likely to be widely dispersed and largely undefined; the distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point. It will be nonlinear, possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts. The distinction between "civilian" and "military" may disappear. Actions will occur concurrently throughout all participants' depth, including their society as a cultural, not just a physical, entity. -- William S. Lind et al, "The Changing Face of War"

Second Reconstruction (1954-1968, especially 1956-1965)

Strategically, [4GW] attempts to directly change the minds of enemy policymakers. This change is not to be achieved through the traditional method of superiority on the battlefield. Rather it is to be accomplished through the superior use of all the networks available in the information age. These networks are employed to carry specific messages to enemy policymakers. A sophisticated opponent can even tailor the message to a specific audience and a specific strategic situation.

Tactically, fourth generation war will:

* Be fought in a complex arena of low-intensity conflict.
* Include tactics/techniques from earlier generations.
* Be fought across the spectrum of political, social, economic, and military networks.
* Be fought worldwide through these networks.
* Involve a mix of national, international, transnational, and subnational actors. -- Thomas X. Hamme, "The Evolution of Warfare"

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 (link not yet active)

Blueprint For Action: A Future Worth Creating, Thomas P.M. Barnett's sequel to The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century (2004)
is now out in hardback. I just picked up a copy from the library but have not yet had time to read it, nor have I seen many print reviews. (Indeed, Barnett's web site, which keeps careful track of such things, lists only two--from Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus--though doubtless a steady rain of them is coming.) But you can already find several in the blogosphere. Just conduct a search at Technorati.com using the keywords "barnett" and "blueprint for action."

Meanwhile, The Washington Post has a recent profile of Barnett headlined A Brain Pentagon Wants to Pick (registration required). Here's an excerpt:

Despite Controversy, Strategist Is Tapped as Valuable Resource

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 19, 2005; Page A19

Global security guru Thomas P.M. Barnett is in the unique position of being embraced by Pentagon officials and top U.S. military commanders as a visionary strategist -- even as he openly blames the defense establishment for botching post-invasion operations in Iraq.

Barnett's best-selling 2004 book, "The Pentagon's New Map," offered a thesis on the American military's future global role that the Defense Department found so compelling and easy to grasp that it has invited him to advise and brief hundreds of senior appointees and officers on strategy. His book sold as many as 85,000 copies, and his prolific blog entries -- which mix humor with often cutting insights on Pentagon strategy -- are closely read in military and intelligence circles.

The article then goes on to note that "Barnett is back in Washington to unveil his sequel work, "Blueprint for Action," in a closed-door speech this morning to a select group of about 500 up-and-coming military officers and defense officials at the National Defense University."

Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, recently spoke at The Mershon Center here at Ohio State. His presentation, Shiite Politics and the Future of Iraq, is now available on streaming video--just follow the link. Cole, who maintains Informed Comment, a well-known blog on Middle Eastern affairs, is the subject of a typically thoughtful post by Timothy Burke, who holds up Cole as "a model of how scholars could and should engage the world. You want the Ivan Tribbles of academia to understand how blogging helps academia, then Cole is a perfect one-stop shopping trip. What he does isn’t a substitute for his scholarship, but it makes his scholarly knowledge useful, even if you disagree with it." Take some time to view (or listen to) the talk. You'll see what Tim means.

Brett Holman at Air-Minded has an interesting post tracking down the origins and permutations of the famous tale of the Germans who constructed a fake airfield to deceive the British and the British who, undeceived, responded by striking it with a fake bomb.

Military historians have one privilege that many historians don't: a general readership eager to read about their subject. True, historians in other fields can and do occasionally reach a broad audience, but it is easier for us than for most. For that reason alone I think military historians ought to think seriously about how to write effectively for the non-specialist.

But there are other, better reasons, among them the fact that writing "popular history" is an excellent school for learning the techniques of good writing--techniques that readily transfer to the realm of academic prose. I don't think I've ever encountered a referee's report or book review that complained, "This work was too well written." On the contrary, lucid prose is something everyone appreciates. And aside from the purely aesthetic appeal, it nearly always leads to improved clarity of thought.

So my current graduate readings course doubles as a workshop on writing "popular history." We started out discussing the professional historian and popular history, especially the jaundiced view that some academic historians have toward the latter. Then my colleague Kevin Boyle came in and talked about his own happy experience with Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age. It was a charming informal presentation that really captured the enthusiasm of my students, and it underscored the fact that this jaundiced view is by no means universal--that many in our professional actively value writing that engages the general reader.

Since then we've moved on to the specifics of cracking the market--how to write an effective query letter, for instance, which is a skill that readily transfers to writing an effective introduction to a grant proposal. In both cases you're trying to capture the imagination of an editor or committee--to make the see the merit and appropriateness of your article idea or grant proposal--and at the same time to convince them that you're the right person to execute the article or project.

Today's workshop deals with effective article introductions. I asked my students to locate a non-academic history article that they particularly liked and to bring it in ahead of time so we could photocopy and distribute it to the class. Today we'll go through some of those articles, focusing on the way in which the author used the first few paragraphs to "hook" the reader.

Over the years I've acquired a substantial library of books on writing, and for insight into how to write a good introduction I like The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile, by Noah Lukeman, a literary agent based in New York. It has a chapter devoted to hooks, and among many good observation is this one:

Most writers think hooks need to be intense, eye catching. This is a common misconception and often what results is overcompensation. On the contrary, the job of the hook is to set the tone for the book [or article]; if your opening line is intense, you set yourself up for a hard act to follow. What's impressive to the professional reader is not initial intensity but maintained intensity, which indicates endurance and patience. It shows a manuscript that is well thought out, instead of unfolding off the top of the writer's head. Ironically, I often find that manuscripts with more subdued openings end up being the best; the opening line may be less shocking, but I am also not set up then disappointed by what follows. These writers don't write an opening for the sake of an opening, but for the sake of the story that follows. There is a world of difference between the two.

I had this problem in some of my own early published articles--though I honestly think some of them had introductions that were among the best I have ever produced--and I see it frequently in graduate student writing. A number of papers have intros that are overwrought relative to what follows. A few have great intros to a different paper: a compelling anecdote but not the right one to set up the argument they are trying to make. Still, it shows they're trying. The most depressing thing to read is a paper that is lifeless from one end to the other.

But with a little sustained attention to the issue, most graduate students are capable of writing an introduction that makes the reader want to read more. That's an essential skill in writing popular history. And it's a valuable skill in writing academic history as well.