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 that exercise us (for some good meditations on the issue, I would direct readers to look at a recent issue of Historically Speaking), but more of us could follow Mark Grimsley’s lead in trying to engage with our colleagues in different sub-disciplines, who might sometimes be skeptical of the value of military historians carving out their own intellectual and professional space. Otherwise, there is a risk that military history becomes the exclusive domain of either scholars affiliated with the national security state (including myself) or those reliant on the financial support of the broader reading public. Academics too frequently sneer at these alternative means of support, but the university remains the most intellectually coherent arena for historical scholarship, and military historians should at least attempt to maintain a presence in the ivory tower.
Those unsympathetic to military history sometimes grumble that military historians simply posit the importance of military history as its own sub-discipline, with its own internal standards of scholarly value, depending in part on a mastery of distinct forms of military knowledge — defined around “operational” issues (i.e. historical topics that focus either directly on the fighting and violence that occurs in war, or issues closely related to that violence, as opposed to other topics such as the social composition of armies, gender views among combatants, etc.). First off, military historians have in the past made attempts to argue for the importance of events such as battles — for example, James McPherson’s argument for important turning points during the American Civil War, which argue that certain battles could have turned out differently, leading to significantly different historical outcomes. This is a classic counterfactual argument, and one also used by allied (and increasingly scarce) practitioners of political and diplomatic history.
While sympathetic to this argument, I would like to add another one to the mix. Military history must by necessity remain a distinct sub-field, with its own distinctive body of knowledge and methods to master, because war itself represents a peculiar and distinctive form of human activity, focused above all else on a socially abnormal use of violence that larger societies both glorify and condemn. The presence of substantial social backing makes war different from criminal activity, but the presence of multiple combatants with differing views of whose war is more legitimate requires a resolution that in large part depends on which party can better mobilize the violent tools of coercion. Furthermore, the strengths and weaknesses of both the human body and psyche adds a material basis to war, which in turn requires military historians to have at least some familiarity with the technical qualities of weapons systems and the most efficient methods and organizations for using those tools of war, with methods and organization usually being the more important (and difficult to understand) issue.
Just as we expect historians of science and technology to know something about fields of intellectual inquiry that produce and use knowledge grounded in distinctive professions, and whose knowledge is grounded to some degree in fixed material realities, military historians must know something about the peculiar profession of war in their respective historical eras. Whatever the cultural peculiarities of a specific historical era, or the social demographics of an army operating in that milieu, that army remains bound to certain material necessities—an edged weapon slashing a throat or a bullet entering the heart will take a soldier out of the fight, whatever his (or her) place in the classic trinity of academic Americanists—race, class, and gender. Take too many soldiers out of the fight and an army collapses, which in turn has effects on larger cultures and societies. And never mind the important issues of military administration and logistics.
Even the most powerful extra-military forces find themselves distended and shaped by the peculiar logic of wartime organizations and the more material forms of military necessity. All sorts of factors will bring two contending military forces into the field, some which have nothing to do with the distinctly military issues I’m concerning myself with, but once those forces take the field, military dynamics begin to make themselves felt in profound ways.
In my own work, I argue that Civil War Era Americans would rather have fought the Civil War with armies led by citizen-soldier politicians, but found themselves reliant on West Point trained veterans of the antebellum regular army due to questions of professional competence. Furthermore, the same example shows that military organizations can create their own peculiar social and cultural systems, and cannot be reduced to the larger societies from which they come. This in turn affected all sorts of important historical phenomena of interest to non-military historians, such as the length of the war (which helped lead to emancipation) and the absence of a coordinated Confederate reliance on insurgent tactics.
In short, should military historians dominate the larger profession? Of course not. But there does need to be some sort of distinctive and separate intellectual space for military historians to operate in, where practitioners can acquire a sufficient familiarity with the peculiarities of the military experience, and it would be preferable if that space included a presence in civilian academe, as opposed to an exclusive presence in the national security state and the world of commercial publishing. For me at least, it’s a point of concern that in a recent 2005 survey, only 1.9 percent of historians at four-year post-secondary institutions self-identified as “military historians.”
10 Comments
I think academia currently looks down on military historians. My brother told me that some schools have endowed chairs that go unfilled, because of larger political stances. I think this does the military a disservice.
I’m not aware of an endowed chair in military history that is currently unfilled. The poster child for this issue was the Ambrose Hesseltine Chair at Wisconsin, which has been filled. And an important reason the A-H Chair went unfilled for several years was that its endowment — $1 million — was less than half the amount required to adequately endow a chair.
If you browse the posts filed under the category “The Future of Academic Military History,” you’ll find quite a few that address this subject.
Eric:
I really do think it’s a mistake to think that the marginal status of military history in American universities comes mostly from academic historians’ generally left-liberal politics. I think it’s at times a contributing factor, but is most certainly *not* the most important one (by far). Things may be different among historians who came of age professionally in the early 70s, but at least among US Civil War historians much of that radicalism is by now a spent force, and it’s really negligible among those scholars now entering their prime. And I say this as someone whose *never* voted for a Democrat, and whose politics I’m sure most of my progressive colleague would find *appalling*.
I do think left-liberal groupthink has distended scholarly treatments of American history to some degree, but this is a separate issue from military history’s place in the university. I think the most negative things that can be said about academic historians’ distaste for military history is that it comes from some degree of scholarly elitism (the view any type of history that has a mass market must be disreputable) mixed with simple ignorance. But in academic historians’ defense, a lot of what separates academic from popular history is a more rigorous sense of historical causation, including examinations of “deep” underlying causes rooted in social structure and culture. None of this is inherently incompatible with military history, but military history in its “classic” or “operational” sense either puts a great deal of stock in contingency (i.e. blind luck) or the agency of individuals (“battles and leaders” history to use a term from my field). I think the former is in some profound sense in conflict with historians’ predilections to *explain* things (which can be both our virtue and vice), while the latter poses genuine problems on the merits, and also causes discomfiture amongst historians who do not generally wish to highlight the importance of individual elites–and what can be more elitist than the commander of an army, who sits at the top of a hierarchy characterized in large part by discipline and subordination. But anti-elitism is hardly a left-wing phenomenon in American society and life.
Anyhow, in summary, while most academic historians are vaguely pacifist leftists, I don’t think this is really one of the main *causes* of military history’s marginal place in the academy. I think those outside the academy a lot of times don’t realize that academic “politics” frequently center on things that aren’t really *political* in the usual sense of the term–i.e. voting Republican or Democratic, supporting or opposing the surge in Afghanistan, etc.–they instead center on intra-professional questions of personality and patronage (reflecting the profession’s guild-like structure), perceptions of whether or not an idea or interpretation is *new* (our own obeisance to the intellectual dominance of the sciences, even in non-scientific disciplines), and the ideas on their merits. I’d actually be *more* optimistic about military history’s future in the university if the issue was simply one of straightforward ideological bias–because I actually think the issues are more deeply embedded in the structure of American academe, I see them as probably unsolvable–although, in the end, I think that between a few strong academic institutions (like Mark Grimsley’s Ohio State) and alternative funding streams from the American national security state, academic military history will retain enough critical mass to survive and replicate itself. However, I doubt it will ever thrive in the academy in my professional lifetime.
Considering the impact of the economy on higher education and the trend toward hiring more adjuncts, lecturers and instructors as opposed to tenure-track faculty, I doubt if any field is really going to thrive in our collective professional lifetimes.
I myself chose to forgo an offer to enroll in the Ohio State military history doctoral program in 2006. Of prime concern was what I saw as the precarious position of military history in academia. Ideological bias was one of a number of factors that originated this concern, but it was not necessarily political in nature. As an undergraduate, I studied the use of intelligence in decision-making (e.g. old-fashioned). But I focused my analysis on the early modern era and incorporated intellectual, cultural, and social influences of that period into my analysis (maybe a bit old fashioned to some, but certainly not what is generally called “classic” military history). Even so, I had misgivings of how this would play out if I were to pursue a long-term scholarly career in history.
This is not to deny that other factors influenced my decision, including concerns about academic job growth, funding, etc. that applicants in all fields of history have to consider. But there was one factor in my decision calculus that really nagged at me. I believe that undergraduates who in an ideal world would choose to study military history in graduate school (the “life of the mind” at its pinnacle) choose not to for a reason that differentiates them from the other sub-fields of history – the abundant presence of viable alternatives that are still intellectually stimulating (if not as much as being a full-time scholar of history).
One option is the alternative post-graduate degree that is more “realistic” – strategic studies, area studies, etc. Those who pursue degrees in these areas can pursue quasi-intellectual careers in think tanks, institutes, etc. that focus on military and national strategic issues. This is not the scholarly study of history as in the academy, but elements of that intellectual pursuit still exist (combined with the sometimes nauseating push for relevance, viability, etc. that academics disdain). Another path is the one I eventually took – entering government service as an analyst. It offered the prospect of being able to use history, along with all the other economic benefits and job security. It also didn’t preclude future graduate study in academic military history, though my undergraduate mentor told me that it was unlikely I would return (simple reason – life happens).
Was I happy with the decision? Yes – I enjoyed being an analyst. Was it my dream job? No – I still believe being a professor would be my ideal (though maybe I’m kidding myself). And I certainly do not undertake the level of scholarly acitivity that I wish I could, and would have in an acadmeic career.
Choosing to pursue a career in academia is a risky bet at best. For those who study cultural or social history, of whatever variety, I say that is an easier bet to make. Provided they have the means (a big “if”), there is not much to lose in terms of professional standing. You either make it and live your dream or you do not. But for those with other intellectual alternatives, the decision calculus is not so easy. To put it bluntly – a 20% of being a tenured professor is not as attractive as a 60% chance of being a senior analyst. Pile on financial uncertainty and other outside stresses, and the calculus shifts even more.
[Obviously a successful military history PhD who does not enter academia can still enter these careers listed above, but their "return on investment" in a purely numbers form would not be that great]
I know that some would say that “if you want it enough, you will pursue your dream” – but reality is often quite different, especially when one has multiple good options to choose from. I think the presence of these good options for those who are interested in the study of military history is something one needs to consider when talking about the status of military history in the academy.
Well, with the exception of the explosion in higher education hiring during the 60s, I think things have always been pretty bad in the academic job market–but there’s bad, and then there’s *really* bad. Indeed, some fields in Asian history actually seem to be plussing up (or at least holding steady), although I certainly feel for an early Modern British historian on the market, or anyone in English (I have friends in both fields). I think higher education may indeed be reaching a crisis point, but the humanities will survive–it may come in different institutional forms (who knows what will happen to tenure in the long view, for example), but there’s a reason why universities are probably the oldest institutions in western culture. Indeed, because history can offer in-demand knowledge of other parts of the world–knowledge that will be in demand in a globalized economy, I think history as a *discipline* will be in a better shape than other disciplines in the humanities–but there will be of course winners and losers. Military historians in a macro sense will probably be in a better shape, because of the national security state, but some kind of self-sustaining beach-head needs to be maintained in the “pure” research university, whatever new forms it takes.
BTW, Mark, thanks for the links, but if any undergraduate reading this sees them–I’d like to say this–there’s a lot of truth to those articles about why folks *shouldn’t* go to grad school, and I’ve heard my share of stories of regret and the like–BUT academia really is a calling. When I told the late Henry Turner, Jr. at Yale I wanted to go to grad school, he used exactly that term, and likened it to the ministry, and then gave the example of Wyoming, saying that if the profession called me to Wyoming, I should be at peace with that. In the end, I really may end up moving on to other things, but I think a sharp new PhD from a good school with a good dissertation will still eventually get a job at a “decent” university. That doesn’t mean that misfortune or injustice doesn’t occur, but every profession has its share of negatives–and there are a lot of positives to being an academic historian. I can be as harsh as anyone else in mocking the vanities and pettiness of academic life, and doing a State Dept. tour in Iraq really let me see the other side of the hill so-to-speak, but there is still a nobility and grandeur to the calling, which is why it’ll always be around in some way, shape, or form.
Mark,
Thank you for this thoughtful post. I’ve done my share of eye-rolling at my WWII-crazy students, but I’ve also suspected that military history *must* be more than the History Channel version that my students show up with. Your post helps clarify things a great deal. But I wonder if you could suggest one or two review articles on the aims & methodologies of the new military history? It would be a great help to those of us who want to encourage our students with interests in these areas, but don’t know where to begin.
(Appropriately enough, my word captcha is “to foxholes”!)
There are two factors that argue against entering academia in general and military history in particular. First, to earn a Ph.d is to invest years of work and incur massive debt, with minimal prospects that it will lead to anything better than temporary adjunct postings. Second, even within academia, military history as a legitimate area of study is looked down on to a large degree.
One might do better as an author, or even better to use the knowledge gained to actually make policy, rather than study the history of how others made policy.
Dear Notorious Ph.D,
Here are some recent essays that address your request:
Robert M. Citino, “Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction,” American Historical Review 112:4 (October 2007), 1070-1090.
And in the Journal of American History 93:4 (March 2007),
American Military History: A Round Table
Mind and Matter—Cultural Analysis in American Military History: A Look at the State of the Field
Wayne E. Lee 1116
Military History, Democracy, and the Role of the Academy
Tami Davis Biddle 1143
Mind and Matter: The Practice of Military History with Reference to Britain and Southeast Asia
Brian P. Farrell 1146
In Search of the American Way of War: The Need for a Wider National and International Context
Marc Milner 1151
American Military History: The Need for Comparative Analysis
Brian Holden Reid 1154
Teetering on the Brink of Respectability
Ronald H. Spector 1158
A Final Word
Wayne E. Lee 1161
@ Mark – It is good to hear that chairs do not go unfilled. But are military history programs, in your opinion, as funded as they could be? Are they priorities at universities?
@ WWS – I myself am a liberal and pacifist, but I still see the value of military history. I think you nailed it on the head in your second paragraph, that academic elitism is the culprit. The history channel could be the poster boy for what modern historians hate.