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 is on the decline is everywhere. Job openings on the nation’s college campuses are scarce, while bread-and-butter courses like the Origins of War and American Foreign Policy are dropping from history department postings. And now, in what seems an almost gratuitous insult, Diplomatic History, the sole journal devoted to the subject, has proposed changing its title.
For many in the field this latest suggestion is emblematic of a broader problem: the shrinking importance not only of diplomatic history but also of traditional specialties like economic, military and constitutional history.
The future of the history profession (as well as the journal’s title) are the subject of a roundtable discussion to be held this month at the annual convention of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Many historians “are on the defensive,” said Thomas W. Zeiler, the executive editor of Diplomatic History and the moderator of the panel. (Mr. Zeiler, who floated the name change, said he did not have a particular replacement in mind.)
To Mr. Zeiler there is no doubt that the days when diplomatic history dominated the profession are gone. Fewer traditional courses in the subject are taught, fewer articles are published in refereed journals, and graduate student training has changed. Nonetheless Mr. Zeiler is not as worried as some of his colleagues. The shift does not necessarily mean students aren’t learning the material, he noted, but rather that a new approach to teaching it has developed.
The shift in focus began in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when a generation of academics began looking into the roles of people generally missing from history books — women, minorities, immigrants, workers. Social and cultural history, often referred to as bottom-up history, offered fresh subjects. Diplomatic historians, by contrast, generally work from the top down, diving into official archives and concentrating on people in power, an approach often tagged as elitist and old-fashioned.
Over the last three decades the number of history faculty members at four-year institutions has more than doubled to 20,000-plus, said Robert B. Townsend, assistant director for research at the American Historical Association. Yet the growth has been predominantly in the newer specializations, spurring those in diplomatic, military, legal and economic history to complain they are being squeezed out.
5 Comments
Sigh. 1. Job openings in history are scarce, full stop, regardless of field. 2. In ‘foreign relations? Well, yes and no. The past two years have been “good” ones for foreign relations types, but they are less “foreign relations” than ‘America in the world,’ a fancy way of asking for a broader idea of U.S. relationships with other countries (including cultural or intellectual relationship, not just politics and military matters). 3. ‘Diplomatic History’ is not the “sole” journal devoted to the subject. It is the premiere journal on the subject in the United States. There is a difference. 4. There is a lot else to quibble with here; the author is trying condence several complex shifts into potted one-line accounts. From inside of the story, I can say that this doesn’t really work as an explanation of what’s going on. For more quibbling: I can name at least three people at Madison many in SHAFR would identify as “diplomatic historians” or at least people with whom they could talk about U.S. foreign relations, not just the 1 and a bit that the reporter suggests. Finally, the reporter ought to have noted that Ohio University settled on the replacement for military history–on a fine historian who can do both diplomatic and military. The real question, in the end, is this: what is it about the past that students really ought to understand? That is increasingly an uncomfortable question for department faculty to answer.
I agree with Jonathan, and of course if you read my blog you know I’ve been arguing the point for years. Articles like this compare the present to a golden age of academic military and diplomatic history that never existed in the first place.
Until about 1970, there was really no such thing as graduate training in military history supervised by scholars who were themselves specialists in the field. Measured by the number of graduate programs that now exist, military history has never been in better shape. Only as of about 1990 did military historians begin to hold an annual conference in a manner like other fields.
The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations is a similar case. The organization did not exist at all until 1967 and was incorporated only in 1972. Its journal, Diplomatic History, began publication only in 1977.
Also, many departments accused of killing their military history programs never created them in the first place. Instead they supported the interest in military history of faculty members whom they had hired to teach something else. The availability of graduate training in those departments was therefore tied to the professional interests of individual faculty members, not to an institutional commitment to the field of military history. (I don’t know to what extent this observation would be applicable to diplomatic history.)
You would think that academic military history in this age of market driven courses would be an easy sell to those making the hiring decisions. Offer a good course on the second world war and you will fill the room with people who aren’t even history majors. Offer a course on more obscure topics and far less people will sign up. This is especially true if you use the “new” more holistic approach to military history to convince skeptics that it is far more than just operational history.
Secondly, who says military history has to be taught by white men in tweed? An Indian scholar teaching South Asian military history would be a huge draw. Imagine courses on the rise and fall of the Raj. Or a class on Indian-Chinese-Pakistani relations since 1948. Or a womans’ studies historian teaching about the impact war has on gender roles in society. Heck, even a course taught by a certain white guy about the US civil rights movement from the Civil War to the 1970’s through the lens of military history (laughs). These would be tasty classes attractive to a broad audience, all partially involving aspects of the military historian’s toolbox and lenses.
Note also that the chart accompanying the article shows that military history has *increased* over the past thirty years.