Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

Three weeks ago I asked readers to populate a military history program based on having, notionally, two, three, or four faculty lines available to fill.  I received a number of very thoughtful replies and promised to eventually offer my own solution.  I didn’t realize that “eventually” would be quite so long in coming.  But I wanted time to read and digest your comments and offer a serious response. This is my first opportunity to do so.

My use of the term “school solution” — which in military speak refers to the doctrinally correct answer to a tactical problem — is of course facetious.  There is no one best configuration.  But working from the limited menu of choices offered on my original post, I’d go with the following:

Two faculty members (the minimum needed for a graduate field):

modern US military history (1903-present)
modern European military history (1871-present)

Three faculty members:

Add  Pre-1750 World Military History (I’m following the lead of some of you in rejecting my original formulation, which would have been “pre-1500 world military history, non-specific as to region”; I would also restrict the research focus to East Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, or Southwest Asia.)

Four faculty members:

You don’t need four.

Here’s my rationale…

By way of prologue: I saw a number of very innovative responses arguing that we should move beyond traditional chronological / regional formulations. I agree that these are outmoded. The problem is that, at this point, both entering graduate students and (more importantly) the history departments that will hire them still think primarily in terms of traditional fields.  That is beginning to change.  But until it does, a more conventional group of specializations is probably best.

Two faculty: I selected modern U.S. and modern Europe because most graduate students in military history want to work in the modern era, so given the minimal number, a research focus in that era is probably best.  It’s true that many undergraduate students enjoy the military history of other periods, and one could argue that in purely intellectual terms the strongest graduate preparation may be done by scholars of earlier periods, on the theory that they tend to have a better grasp of modern history than modern historians have of earlier periods.  But my question would be:  Do they have the ability to direct dissertations in the modern period?

Three faculty: This is of course the critical hire needed to make the program competitive, and for that purpose it is imperative to have a non-western historian so that the program is able to place military history in global perspective.  I don’t think anyone seriously doubts that this is the direction that the field as a whole is taking. I chose to add pre-1750 Asian history because although it overlaps with European rise to hegemony (1500- ), until 1750 one can reasonably argue that the Asian experience was not dominated by the struggle with Europeans and that parts of Asia, especially China and the Ottoman Empire, were the premier world powers.  I might have gone with a specifically Ottoman, China, or South Asia historian except that the aperture needed to be wide enough to ensure an adequate pool of qualified applicants.

The above is the “default” mode.  As a number of you noted, one surely needs to bear in mind the strengths of a given department and build upon or complement them.  This is true not just from chronological / regional standpoint but also in terms of conceptual approach: political, social, cultural, gender, etc.

I concur with the point made by at least one commenter that it is entirely reasonable to dispense with early and modern American specializations and expect American military historians to be able to cover American history from colonial times to the present.  If historians of other regions can be expected to be competent over several hundred years of history, then surely one can expect the same of Americanists.  Moreover, the archival holdings for American history are sufficiently well organized and accessible that it is less necessary than might otherwise be the case for a dissertation adviser to have personal familiarity with a given set of archives.  Doctoral candidates should be able to figure these out independently.  The real work of the adviser would be in terms of question framing, conceptualization, and constructive critique.

Four faculty: You don’t need four because while four would not exhaust the number of historians required to cover the field comprehensively, it holds the danger of creating an insular program even if the department were otherwise large enough to accommodate four. It would be best to do as a number of you suggested: place the program in conversation with other fields and draw upon the interest of other historians in collective violence.  So much societal change occurs through violence that this should not be hard to do.

By way of example:  The OSU history department is in the process of creating six to eight “constellations” of faculty interested in broadly similar questions that cross traditional field boundaries.   The military history program initiated a proposal for a constellation dealing with war, collective violence, and diplomacy.  (It’s interesting, by the way, that although the body of the proposal has been worked out for several weeks, we have yet to come up with a final title.  There just aren’t succinct, accessible phrases that fully capture what we have in mind.) There are at present 19 constellation members on the main campus (and several more from our regional campuses; I’m restricting myself to the main campus merely for purposes of illustration).  Of these, seven are military or diplomatic/international historians, which might be considered “the usual suspects.”  The remaining twelve are from other fields:  e.g., Ottoman, African American, and sub-Saharan African history.

This, by the way, suggests a core competency that we as military historians ought to develop. The apology for a thematic field is the ability to place its subject in longitudinal and comparative perspective.  To maximize this requires faculty with the skill set needed to generate and sustain conversations with other fields, and this is something we need to instill in our graduate students as a normal part of their training.

The one thing that gave me serious pause in the course of this exercise was the implication that by choosing some specializations over others I was blatantly excluding some of the ablest practitioners of military history.  So here is another possibility:  to move beyond departmentally based programs and to create conditions in which historians from outside one’s own department can involve themselves formally in graduate training; e.g., team teaching courses and serving on graduate examination committees.  More on that in a future post.