The New Republic has yet another lament about the dearth of military history in college and universities, but this one is more nuanced and thoughtful than usual. It’s by David A. Bell, a contributing editor at TNR and the author of The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It:
. . . the discipline of history, as it exists in major U.S. universities, seems to have forgotten [the importance of military history]. At Harvard this spring, for instance, only two of 85 history courses focus mainly on war. This is not surprising, because Harvard does not have a single specialist in military history among the 58 members of its history department. Neither does my own history department at Johns Hopkins; just two of our 61 spring courses are principally concerned with war. And so it goes across the country. The current issue of the American Historical Review, the flagship journal of the profession, includes reviews of no less than 194 new history books, only 15 of which, by my count, qualify as military history.
The subject does remain entrenched in some small corners of the university world — notably at the service academies and in publications like the Journal of Military History. At major research universities, a few specialists, such as Omer Bartov of Brown or Geoffrey Parker of Ohio State, have continued to do marvelous work integrating the study of armies and military operations with such topics as the Holocaust or the “world crisis” of the seventeenth century.
Yet most historians pay scant attention to military history, particularly the part that concerns actual military operations. And so, even in the midst of the Iraq war — the fifth major U.S. deployment since 1990 — professors are teaching undergraduates surprisingly little about this historical subject of rather obvious relevance. To take just one example, the problem of how societies have historically evaluated their adversaries’ intentions and capabilities remains understudied and rarely taught at a university level.
How can we explain the academy’s odd neglect?
Complete article (free registration required; hat tip to Wayne Lee at UNC-Chapel Hill)
3 Comments
Military history follows the trajectory of Latin: A must-have evolves to nice-to-have to specialized knowledge for a few experts.
Military history used to be mental training for university graduates expected to fulfill their conscription military service as reserve officers.
Demand for this training has declined due to (1) the decrease of war among affluent nations, (2) the professionalization of officership.
I feel that the trend of universities ignoring military history is reflective of the elitist attitude held in many institutions. The subject of military history sells literally thousands of books each year.
If people are prepared to pay for books on the subject, they will be willing to pay to learn about the subject. So why are these fee paying historians being ignored?
It’s a shame that more people don’t study military history. They would find many answers to today’s problems by examining how people dealt with them in the past. For example, my blog deals with Naval Warfare and if you look at this week’s posting, you will see how Americans dealt with Islamic terrorism over 200 years ago during the Jefferson administration. You can read all of it at: navalwarfare.blogspot.com