The February 24, 1865 edition of the Augusta County, Virginia Vindicator poured out vitriol over the defeatists who claimed that Confederate armies were doing poorly in their war against the North. Warning that the "croakers" were causing more damage to the Confederacy than the enemy could, the newspaper argued that victory was just a matter of continued firmness in its pursuit: "Our military condition is really better now than it has been at various periods in the past...The spirit of our soldiers is unshaken...They only ask the people to be firm. The women are ready to make every sacrifice -- the very children show fight. The concentration of our troops is inevitable -- the success of our arms certain, if we will only put ourselves (we mean those of us out of the army) under the lead of our women."

Six weeks later, facing reality, Lee surrendered at Appomattox.

[M]ilitary history is regarded with suspicion by a segment of the public and by some academics. Certainly, it reveals man at his worst, with much blood and brutality, and despite the 'new military history' that emphasizes non-combat aspects, military history is still basically about wars and battles. To make matters worse, the good guys do not always win. Nevertheless, military history continues to be of interest to the public. As the English writer Thomas Hardy put it so well, "War makes rattling good history; but peace is poor reading."

If the content of military history is a problem, so, too, is its writing. Unlike other fields of history, it is written mainly by journalists, who tend to sensationalize, and by former military men, who tend to justify. Most academics shy away from it, since they are uncomfortable with the content, unfamiliar with the technology, and unsympathetic with the military ethos. To be perfectly honest, academia's intellectual bias is not only against war, but also against the warriors and the study of war. As a consequence, a lower percentage of books in the field of history are written by academics, and myth-making, hero worship, romance, and glory are more the stuff of this branch of history than of any other.

Estimadisimas/os:

I'm a fish out of water . . . help! I am teaching my historiography seminar, and two of my 8 students want to work on Military History. My knee-jerk reaction, of course, was to object, but I want the students to work on topics that are close and dear to their hearts . . . any suggestions for germinal works on military history?

V.

Victor M. Macias-Gonzalez, Ph.D. Associate Professor of History and
Director, UW-La Crosse Institute for Latino and Latin American Studies
The University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

What I would like is a historiographical article on US military history, as in, moving beyond strategy, guns, uniforms, and the like. Dare I think there may be something in U.S. military history similar to what we have witnessed in our own field over the last 15-20 years with the influence of cultural history and gender?

Common wisdom holds that people have a set standard of morality that never wavers. Yet studies of people who do unpalatable things, whether by choice, or for reasons of duty or economic necessity, find that people's moral codes are more flexible than generally understood. To buffer themselves from their own consciences, people often adjust their moral judgments in a process some psychologists call moral disengagement, or moral distancing.

In recent years, researchers have determined the psychological techniques most often used to disengage, and for the first time they have tested them in people working in perhaps the most morally challenging job short of soldiering, staffing a prison execution team.

In a 2004 study, professors at Iowa State University and the University of Arkansas tested the moral judgment of 47 college students who had cheated on a take-home exam, a complex accounting problem.

Many of the students found a solution to the problem online — posted by another professor who was unaware it was part of an exam — and reproduced the solution as their own, though it used techniques they had not yet learned. Others had clearly collaborated, which their professor had explicitly forbidden. Another 17 students had not cheated, as far as their teacher could determine.

The professor threw out the test scores and got permission from the students to ask about their behavior. The cheaters' scores on a standard test of moral judgment did not correlate at all with their level of plagiarism or collaboration. On the contrary, it was the most dishonest male students who scored highest on the morals test.

"Clearly, this is not what you want to find in a test of moral judgment," said Dr. Ravenscroft, a co-author of the study, with Charles Shrader of Iowa State and Tim West of the University of Arkansas.

Only by conducting in-depth interviews with students about their behavior did the researchers begin to see clear, familiar patterns. One was displacing the blame: "I think it's hard for people not to look at the answer manual if it's available," said one student. "Maybe you should have taken the problem off so people wouldn't be tempted."

Another was justifying the behavior by comparison: "I really don't consider working with another person that unethical," one student commented. "Taking and copying answers from the key was highly unethical." Many students "rationalized cheating behavior as a necessary defense to the cheating of others," the researchers concluded in their analysis, to appear this year in the Business and Professional Ethics Journal.

This course analyzes a number of key military encounters between "the West and the Rest;" i.e., between Europe with its settler societies and the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It begins with the encounter between Persia and Classical Greece and concludes with Desert Storm and 9/11. We will examine each of these encounters from a counterfactual (as well as from a factual) point of view. We will therefore consider what might have happened, as well as what did happen, at key points on the rise of the West to global dominance.