Tuesday, January 26, 2010
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 [...]
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A guest post by Dr. Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh.
Hsieh teaches military history at the U.S. Naval Academy. He is the author of West Pointers and the Civil War: The Old Army in War and Peace.
Sometimes I think military historians fret too much about our relationship with academic colleagues uninterested and unsympathetic to the sorts of issues [...]
Monday, November 30, 2009
The November issue of Historically Speaking, the bulletin of The Historical Society, has a forum on “Military History: The State of the Field,” featuring short essays by several eminent military historians. The Historical Society blog reprints one by Brian M. Linn, a professor of history at Texas A&M and president of the Society for Military [...]
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I’ve already pointed out Claire Potter’s critique of the recent New York Times article arguing that traditional history fields, such as diplomatic and military history, are on their way out. Here are excerpts from two more.
First, David Silbey in Edge of the American West:
The “traditional forms of history are dying” meme is strong within conservative [...]
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From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed:
Empty Chair No More
by Scott Jaschick
When conservative critics look at the field of history, one much repeated charge is that departments have obliterated fields like military history in favor of multiculturalism. And for those who have questioned the academy’s commitment to military history in recent years, no institution has been [...]
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Claire Bond Potter at Tenured Radical has a wonderful demolition of the New York Times story, “Great Caesars Ghost! Are Traditional History Courses Vanishing?” (June 10). An excerpt:
Aside from what you have already noticed — that “tradition”=”quality”=”what you really need to know to live in the world” — the association of “tradition” with “male” [...]
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Today’s New York Times has another meditation on the intellectual world we have allegedly lost. This one focuses more on diplomatic than military history, but the thrust is familiar. The appraisal is rather more thoughtful than most.
Great Caesar’s Ghost! Are Traditional History Courses Vanishing?
By PATRICIA COHEN
To the pessimists evidence that the field of diplomatic history [...]
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Below are the remarks I made at a Presidential Session of the the recent SMH in Ogden, Utah. Thanks to Carol Reardon for inviting me to speak, and to Mark for inviting me to post.
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These are good times, aren’t they? Military history has rarely been on such a roll, and certainly not in [...]
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Justin Ewers in U.S. News and World Report asks that question and arrives at pretty much the same answer as have others, though gratifyingly, his article shows little sign of an ideological agenda. It also incorporates some of the more nuanced responses from military historians; e.g., Wayne Lee of UNC-Chapel. And I think [...]
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Thursday, February 14, 2008
Rock-ribbed, old school military historians have long chafed at admonitions to incorporate into the field such novelties as gender. To them, a recent Times Higher Education article suggested — tacitly — that their days of chafing may be nearing an end.
In the past two decades, [women's studies] departments across Britain have been forced to integrate [...]
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Dear Rebecca,
I thought you’d find this lecture by Jeremy Black of interest, because it’s intended as an argument for the teaching of military history as a component of general history courses (actually, given his audience, most soclial studies course). It’s reprinted here by permission of of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Jeremy Black is a [...]
Cross-posted from Civil Warriors
Back in January I wrote a post about the issue of libraries culling their collections in problematic ways. That issue has arisen here at Ohio State, and the librarian in charge of the History and Political Science collections has requested our advice about how to decide which books to retain in [...]
The American Interest has a must-read brace of articles addressing the wisdom of professional officers pursuing graduate study in civilian institutions (Hat tip to Prof. Reina Pennington at Norwich University). GEN David H. Petraeus (who holds a Princeton Ph.D.) argues this is an unalloyed good. LTC Ralph Peters, USA (Retired) argues [...]
Michael Robbins, editor of Military History magazine, has kindly given me permission to reprint this article, which appeared in the May 2007 issue.
Of all fields of history, military history is among the most popular. In most bookstores it is not uncommon for half the history section to be devoted to books about great commanders, [...]
I cross-posted the previous entry over on Cliopatria. It drew six comments, including this one from Rebecca Goetz:
Mark, when did military history become a “conservative” discipline? There seems to be this assumption floating around that the only people interested in military history are political conservatives…do you have an idea of when that association started? [...]
Tuesday’s Cincinnati Enquirer featured a column entitled, “‘Locomotive of history’ Derailed by PC Professors.” It’s basically a re-hash of John Miller’s “Sounding Taps” and a New York Sun article about historian Mark Moyar’s lack of success in securing an academic position, allegedly because he’s a military historian with a revisionist perspective on the Vietnam [...]
Patrick Porter, a Lecturer in the Defence Studies Department at Kings College London and a contributor to OxBlog, assesses the good, the bad, and the ugly (mostly the latter two) in what he terms the “cultural turn” in military history and strategic studies. It’s in the current issue of Parameters, the journal of the [...]
Sorry to be away from the blog so long. My hard drive crashed soon after my last post (no data was lost, but it was still inconvenient), and the final weeks of spring quarter here at Ohio State were one frenzied blur of motion. Plus I had a lot of yard work to [...]
