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? I’m asking this as a political liberal cultural historian who is interested in and supports military history.
Chris Levesque added:
I’m interested in this particular question myself. While I’m definitely not a conservative, I will be pursuing a PhD in Military and Naval History starting in August. I also don’t self-identify as a liberal, so the whole thing doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, other than as some sort of wedge issue.
I appreciate Rebecca’s support for the field and I think Chris basically has it right about the wedge issue thing. I’ve never done a study of this, but in my experience military historians are not, by and large, on the Right. True, some of us — Dennis Showalter, for instance — are self-described conservatives. Others — John Lynn, for instance — are self-described liberals. Most seem to be rather like myself. I usually say that I’m a moderate Democrat who could easily be a moderate Republican if such a thing existed.
In my years on the Ohio State faculty, we’ve had six military historians (two of them now emeritus). Of the six, two have been Republicans and four have been Democrats. I suspect that’s pretty much the ratio within the field as a whole. That is to say, it’s less overwhelmingly liberal than most faculty in the humanities, but not by a lot.
If that is the case, how did military history acquire a reputation as a politically conservative field? I think there are three basic answers.
First, just as women’s historians by and large approach their work from a feminist perspective, there’s a tendency to believe that military historians must approach their own work from some similarly well-defined political perspective. And since there’s an assumption that those in the military are politically conservative, the same is assumed to be true of those who specialize in military history. When I lived in Great Britain, for instance, I discovered that a few students in other fields recoiled when they heard I was in the War Studies program at Kings College London. I soon learned to say instead that I was studying International Relations. Which was basically true, albeit international relations of a particularly nasty kind.
Second, although academic military history is a relatively young field (it emerged circa 1970), it was long subsumed within political history and diplomatic history. These were mainstays of the historical profession until the 1960s, when the new social history emerged in the academy, soon followed by specializations suffused with “identity politics”: women’s history, African American history, Latino/Latina history, gay and lesbian history, and so on. Since the number of academic positions contracted sharply in the 1970s and has never recovered, the emergence and expansion of these specializations came at the expense of the “traditional” fields — even when these traditional fields adopted some of the questions, methodologies, and conceptual frameworks of the new fields. If anyone has cause to complain about being shoved aside in the academy, it’s the political and diplomatic historians. Military history per se has actually expanded since 1970 (it could hardly do otherwise).
Third, because the Right is antipathetic toward “identity politics,” which they correctly associate with the Left, it has adopted military history as the poster child for the ills of the academy: Look at poor little military history, so beloved by the general public, so scorned by the effete intellectual elite. Like most clichés, this one has an element of truth to it, but the Right — aided and abetted by a number of aggrieved military historians — takes that element and magnifies it out of all proportion.
Occasionally I’m told that if I were not cocooned within the thriving military history program at Ohio State, I would feel aggrieved, too. Perhaps. But what I mainly notice is that nobody in my department feels as if their field is in the catbird seat. Every one of them perceives a major gap in the coverage that their field ought properly to have. Even Early Modern Europe, which in the last decade has gained enormous strength, laments the fact that it has no Reformation specialist. But this is nothing compared to how those in non-western fields feel: an immensely important civilization like China covered by two historians; ditto for an entire continent like South America; and ditto for a crucially important region like the Middle East.
In short, military history is seemingly conservative because some left leaning academics perceive the field as conservative (and traditional, and intellectually impoverished, etc.) and because the Right needs the field to be conservative. Neither group knows a hell of a lot about the field itself.
28 Comments
Dr. Grimsley,
I generally agree with your first point and your statement that “neither group knows a hell of a lot about the field itself.” It seems the general perception (no pun intended) is that military history is ancient and traditional, not new and progressive. For a variety of complex reasons the notions of traditional and progressive have become welded to the terms conservative and liberal, then to Republican and Democrat. Add this initial public inclination to categorize the field as conservative with the recurring cultural theme that the American Left is anti-war while the Right is militaristic and it is an easy jump to the conclusion that military historians are Republicans. The reaction you experienced at King’s College was a completely understandable reaction from the Left. Since many on the Left ARE anti-war, they would no more study war than a Klansman would major in ethnic studies. The similarly flawed corollaries of that perspective are that only warmongers would study military history and only racists would critique ethnic studies. I’m not sure the Right needs the field to be anything more than the Left needs it to be. Your accusation on this point implies that the misinformed on the Left could be educated to see the reality of the field while those on the Right are not equally capable of arriving at a new conclusion given new information. The confusion seems more a rational misunderstanding that flows from the dominant language of the culture than a ploy designed to garner political advantage, especially since both “sides” believe the basic facts of the assertion.
I’d add a few factors:
1) The perception of popular military history with its focus on guns and great captains and campaign/battle narratives. This audience is undoubtedly more politically conservative than those interested in other types of history. And it’s obvious to any historians when they go into a bookstore.
2) Tying in with Mark’s first point, the significant amount of ‘military professional’ military history (using Millett’s terminology) means that a fair amount of modern (19C-20C) military history is done by serving military men (and a very few women) – just look at OSU’s military history PhDs or go the SMH conference. As you say, American military servicemen tend to be more conservative politically as well.
3) Academic historians (humanities generally) tend to be much more liberal than American society at large, so it may be conservative relative to other academic historians. Ah the problem of binary oppositions….
Another thought:
Instead of us speculating, why doesn’t your new foundation sponsor a survey of academic historians on their views of military history (academic and otherwise)? Then there’d be something specific to focus on/work at.
Hi Professor Grimsley!
Excellent points by Jamel and Skip. I’d also maybe add a couple more:
1) though (as you argue) there are very important exceptions in the states and elsewhere, by and large history departments just don’t do much military history, for various reasons. I was lucky enough to go to an excellent university in Australia, but its history department had an overload of gender historians and an aggressive shortage of any academics who could even discuss military history. Ideology and culture wars aside, war history was a very unfamiliar thing for people in that department.
Its much easier to depict military history as an eccentric exercise for archaic minds when it is in fact a marginal activity and more visible on the airport bookshop shelves in the form of popular machismo;
2) This is more speculative, but the failure and collapse of the Soviet Union may have an important result: being reflexively ‘anti-war’ and hostile to anything that might be accused of militarism has become much more important to being ‘on the left’ as a form of negative identity.
Without the great alternative of Marxism-Leninism, being opposed to things has become even more important to the left. Hence the wa y both Gulf Wars energised the left to rally around a banner with great energy and almost festive anger – moments of affirmation as well as outrage!
This doesn’t mean that one must be illiberal to be a military historian (I agree with Rebecca!) But it does mean that left-wing academics do seem to be too quickly suspicious of anyone venturing near the area.
when I say ‘the left’, I mean mostly the tertiary-educated and academic parts of the left, not the left as a whole. Sorry!
Skip: In general I agree with your comment. But re my “accusation,” I do not believe that academics with strong left wing agendas are likely to revisit their view of military history, and I would extend that assessment to many academics in general. I do think a portion of the academic community is educable, however. I have seen this occur with some of my colleagues, and historians like Rebecca G. underscore the point.
Those with strong right wing agendas are apt to be more receptive to learning what we military historians actually do. But I cannot imagine the ideologues on the Right revising their basic stance on military history; i.e., that it’s being run out of the academy. It makes too good a talking point. I also think that those on the Right would regard some kinds of military history as dangerously contaminated by the Left: for example, military history that drew heavily upon analytical categories like race, class, and gender; military history that supported the “quagmire” theory of Vietnam; military history that portrayed the United States as having been, in many instances, an aggressor nation; and so on.
Jamel and Patrick: I’ll get to your comments after lunch.
To some extent, I think that the conservative “support” for military history also has to do with the belief that “history teaches values” and there is a strong desire for a more martial culture which they seem to feel would benefit from military history.
I think you can’t discount the pre-professionalized history of military history in the conservative attachment to it. The field was dominated by fans, buffs, hero-worshippers and actual military. I suspect that the conservatives who valorize the field believe that the tone of it remains largely the same (as you point out, it hasn’t but they probably haven’t tumbled to that yet, since they probably don’t distinguish between popular and academic publications)
Jamel and Jonathan make good points about the conflation of academic military history (which tends to be “civilian-utilitarian, to use Allan Millett’s taxonomy of the types of military history) with popular military history (which tends to be of the “inspirational” variety).
Re Patrick’s speculation about the source of the Left’s antipathy toward military history, would that it only went back a couple of decades. Most military historians in the United States trace it to the Vietnam War.
Re Jamel’s point about the involvement of military historians in Professional Military Education (PME), this has the effect of underscoring the perception that we function (volitionally or unintentionally) as “court historians” or “servants of power.”
He and Jonathan both note, in different ways, the pre-professional origins of academic military history. Our flagship organization, the Society for Military History, began as the American Military Institute and was composed chiefly of retired officers and interested lay persons. As academic military history emerged, it “piggy-backed” on the AMI. The focus of the organization has become more academic in the past two decades — hence the name change and the creation of the Journal of Military History — but it remains a hybrid that combines academic historians, public historians, and serving officers. It’s not so much that the last two groups are more politically conservative as that their work tends to focus on “military-utilitarian” subjects.
There’s a difference between popular and academic military history? Shocked, Shocked, I am…
Seriously, though, I think that the difference between the two is an important issue in this particular context – you don’t see much popular military history dealing with atrocities committed by troops on civilians or opponents unless those troops are defined as a “barbaric” enemy. How many popular military history books about My Lai or No Gun Ri are there on the shelves of Borders or Barnes and Noble? Of course, you could argue that those books wouldn’t sell well due to their subject matter, which might be summarily dismissed as “liberal”, “conspiracies”, or “just part of war”.
The question of patriotism and military history was present in the Bronson article that spawned this particular conversation, which means that it also addresses the question of what is the purpose of history? On the one hand is the social agenda of teaching students what it is to be an American, while on the other is the search for Truth about what happened in the past. Some of the conservatives arguing this issue seem to be saying that even at the post-secondary level the job of Historians is to further the social agenda of creating “good” Americans at the expense of the agenda of discovering and teaching what actually happened (and why).
It is undeniable that there is a desire on the part of many undergrads to take a class in military history. I don’t think it has anything to do with right/left rather it connects to the romanticism that comes with a certain sort of history.
As a historian who leans right, I perceive students desire to learn about military history but when it comes to lecturing about strictly military history (which I think is what they want) and making room in the syllabus, I have a hard time making it work.
Part of that probably flows from my own focus on urban history, which as a social history descendant doesn’t provide a whole lot of training in any sort of close-in military history.
The other challenging aspect that I run up against is that military history can fit in a survey in a sort of longue duree mode, where one traces change over a long period or it pushes you into a very small period of time, such as the description of a series of battles. The first fits in, but doesn’t really get at the inclusion of military history of the Bronsonite-type, while the second one can grind a survey to a halt.
I’m not sure this advanced the conversation but I hope so.
Are you talking mainly about incorporating military history into a US history survey (which most Americanists of any specialization are bound to teach), or into a course on urban history? Either way I can think of some suggestions, and I imagine so can several others.
Or just possibly you’re thinking of developing a military history course outright? That’s a more difficult challenge (if, as you say, you lack training in the subject), but it can be managed.
A conversation of this sort would need its own post and comment thread, but I thought I’d get a start by making these inquiries.
Thanks for answering my question, Mark! I would hope that historians would realize that all sub-disciplines have something to teach ourselves and our students. That goes for those “liberals” who dislike military history and those “conservatives” who dislike ethnic histories and social histories.
I’m now eager for another post on incorporating military history into general US history courses.
I have question for Prof. Grimsley and the readers here. There seems to be a great deal of anecdotal evidence about pointing in various directions. Have there been any empirical studies done of the political views held by mainly military historians compared to the rest of the field?
Rebecca – I have one in the works.
Jaron – I’m not aware of any such studies, though Jamel suggested that one should be done (see comment 3).
David, I know that when I were an undergrad, the second year military history course(s? I think there were two at the time) were always full. It was a very popular elective among CS and Engineering students, most of whom were male. Most seemed disappointed to learn that it wasn’t about guns and tactics, but rather (the one I took) about the history of how units and armies moved about the battlefields, both tactically and strategically. It was as much logistics as anything else.
There was a fair bit of interest in upper-year courses too, but those were mostly people who were already majoring in history. Not a few had ties to the military – a large army base essentially right next door helped with that, and there were at least four of us reservists as well as an ex-US Marine in a class of ~30 in the honours program.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but there’s mine.
Do most people who go on to teach military history tend to have majored in it as undergraduates?
I understand, and sympathise, with many of the views being expressed here. I don’t want to suggest that military history is disgustingly healthy elsewhere (though I’m not sure that Mark would get the same reaction in the UK now that he did as grad student — look at the creation of half a dozen centres across the country in military history, such as the new unergrad and postgrad programs in War Studies at Birmingham). But the fact is, at least from this end of Nelson’s telescope, that you Americans get far more hung up about labels, especially the dread ‘liberal’, than anyone else at least in the Anglophone world. In Australia, Liberal is the name of a (conservative) political party, and doesn’t carry the baggage it does for you guys. I strongly suspect that the debate over military history’s health/status/future etc would be greatly advanced if you could separate the discussion from the 2008 election campaign and the Congress-centred dimensions of the Culture Wars more generally. We all have our culture wars as well, but they aren’t as closely tied into the formal political process as yours, and I think that makes a difference.
My antipodean two cents worth (and yes, we have decimal currency in the outer spiral arm of the galaxy, too).
“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?”
I guess true progressives would be involved in “peace studies.”
Such is just speculation of course.
John,
Peace studies does exist as a program. I suggest that true progressives would be better off with some good understanding of military dynamics. A physician may hate cancer, but (s)he isn’t going to cure it by then assiduously avoiding contact with cancer cells in a research lab.
Jeffrey’s correct, I think, to see this issue as being peculiarly American. But it does have a long history. I’ve been aware of it since I began my PhD work in 1987, and (to repeat a point in my post) I’m told it dates back to the Vietnam War.
That said, it tends to take a myopic view of the humanities. Specialists in military history who find it difficult or impossible to get jobs in the academy are part of a larger phenomenon: the contraction of tenure-track positions and the increasing “use” — exploitation would be a better word — of adjunct faculty of one stripe or another. I have been reading, belatedly, the archived posts of Invisible Adjunct, whose blog was famous for its eloquent, measured, and ultimately devastating critique of this practice.
As for war studies and peace studies, they are really two sides of the same coin. At KCL we had an informal relationship of sorts with the peace studies program at Bradford, and I think the relationship may still exist. In the United States the two approaches are sometimes combined under the rubric of conflict studies.
Yes, Yes! I should have been clearer in my initial post that I believe the tie-in between liberal/conservative and political partisanship is strongest in American cultural. The Vietnam War also strikes me as a sensible beginning to the period. I can’t recall an earlier era in US history when a single political party “owned” national defense as a political strength for any substantial length of time. Despite that particular dimension of the issue even the “international” Left seems more willing to engage in the aforementioned peace studies than the other side of the coin. Several of my Scandinavian and religious Left colleagues (not the same people) in graduate school were more comfortable asking how to prevent and/or end wars than how to conduct them more efficiently, which they correctly saw as enhanced lethality or enhanced lethal capability.
I add my vote to those who have already called for a more rigorous analysis of the perceptions about the field and its academic practitioners. At the very least such empirical data could form the basis for either a marketing strategy or a public (as it were)-awareness campaign to help improve the image of the field. The topic is far too important to leave to any particular band on the political spectrum.
MikeP – I plan to use your comment “the plural of anecdote is not data” very liberally. Please let me know where to send your royalty checks!
I think military history is ready for the kind of florescence experienced by a similar field Western US. Western US was on life support into the 80s and early 90s when it then experienced a boom in job growth. The big 4 put out a bunch of books (and more importantly graduate students) that built the field into a second and third generation who went out and conquered. Western still has its buffs and the tension is palpable at their annual meeting. But, from an academic perspective, the ingredients appear to be there. What the field needs is a) a provocative book like The Legacy of Conquest to gain mainstream academic attention, the type of thing that would be on somebody’s prelim list no matter what their field. b) a steady stream of editorial page entries in the New York Times et. al. c) a decent sense of self-promotion within the academy – go forth and proclaim one’s importance and have the ability to back it up. d) create institutional permanence. Western US had the ability to come back from the dead because it had great archives with money to support graduate students. Military history needs to do the same so that it can colonize other fields.
Hi Western Dave,
Thanks for the comment. . . .Works of military history are routinely reviewed in the NYT Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, etc., if that’s what you mean. Op/ed pieces are also a frequent occurrence. There are books that certainly ought to be on anyone’s prelim list — Fred Anderson’s The Crucible of War for the early American field, Geoffrey Parker’s The Military Revolution for the early modern European field, to name but two — but I can’t say whether or not they actually are on those lists.
As for thinking strategically about how to advance the field, I completely agree, and it’s something I frequently discuss on this blog. I do see signs that other military historians have begun to take steps in this direction.
Military history has superb archives and I can think of several reservoirs from which grad students can draw funds to support research.
Thus, in most respects, military history has in place the template you’ve laid out for Western history. I suspect that Western history has benefited from at least three emerging currents in academe: Native American history, Latino/a History, and environmental history. Offhand I can’t think of similar counterparts for military history.
Western Dave and Dr. Grimsley,
The example of “New” Western History as what could happen, or even might be needed to revitalize (or create to begin with) Military History’s academic street cred is an interesting one. Just like the “new” western historians like Prof Limerick had to defend themselves against those who preferred a triumphant narrative of the settlers moving into open spaces following Manifest Destiny, scholars who focus on cultural, ethnic, gender, economic, legal, or environmental aspects of war face challenges posed by those who want a strictly operational, trumpets and guns, or even solely triumphant version of military history (see Patrick Porter’s critique of the cultural approach from last week). To borrow a line from politics, I would argue for a “Big Tent” approach to military history, as all of these items are important for different people and different uses.
To return the discussion much further up, I was mostly speaking to the survey. Obviously to each historian their own survey, mine run toward big themes so big military fits well. As such, war tends be treated as a unit rather than something to be focused in on. Changes in the actual military itself fit well, but on the ground (the kind engineers want) seems to slow things down and bores half the class. Would love to hear as well how to slot it better.
Within the context of an urban history course, the military history perspective fits in quite well, especially in terms of logistics and its overall effect on the structure of urban life. As an example, the Civil War as a military history has all kinds of fascinating effects on Cincinnati. You could probably spend a couple days on it at least.
When did military history become conservative? I think the answer to this is not as simple as some might think. First, when did the rise of official history happen in the West, written by officers or scholars in the employ of the state to help improve the quality of their military? I would argue that this takes fullblown shape in the 19th century, especialy when militaries aaaround the world were grappling with the success of Napoleon and the proficiency of the Prussian General Staff. I once saw a listing of official military histories issued around the world one at the old and now gone MILITARY BOOKMAN store in NYC. I was struck by the sharp rise after the 1866-1870 period around the world of Official Military history writing. It was mind boggling.
When you read some of this literature it is devoid of what we would consider after World War two to be a wholistic approach to warfare…integrating political,social,economic,cultural…
the whole shebang..perspectives…it is only focused on technical implementation of war itself.
So any attachment with military history today always carries that perception by some that all you are concerned about is how to make your military either fight better or be glorified.
Second, the question of popular military history, the shaping of national consciousness that this represents and how th main conveyors of our popular consciousness mold this(TV,Hollywood,etc.) is never really considered by some. I was brought a close female friend into a book store in NYC called Sky Books that was exclusively devoted to military history, with everything else thrown in. It hits vital chords in the buying audience and we have all seen it go through waves….after World War Two it was first hand accounts in the forties through the sixties, then great synthesis pieces on it like Cornelius Ryan and then finally the wave of more sceptical and analytic works that we have seen go through many different transformations.
I think the idea of seriously studying war either through reading it popularly or understanding it as a scholar strikes some as odd because it means you are not questioning the policies that lead to war…
No I know many people do not approach it that way but that is how I have heard some people act surprised that somebody self-identifies themselves as a military historian.
And let us look at how some leading military historians identify themselves…Victor David Hanson, John Keegan, Fred Kagan, Donald Kagan and others certainly fall into a defined conservative identification. Fred Kagan tirelessly has supported the surge strategy and so have other non- military historian types but also influential national security analysts like Kenneth Pollack/Michael O’Hanlon in their recent OPED in the NYT recently after they returned from Iraq.
I do think that this issue should not be oversimplified and I look with a tad bit of a grain of salt when I see the conservative media beat up on this issue. But, I also know that sometimes the issue can be regarded simplistically by some in academe.
But mark’s points about the rigid attitudes of some to newer perspective is right on point. I often hear snide comments on social and cultural history which are entirely unwarranted and just feed bad blood…and the people who make those comments indentify themselves as military historians and work in the academic profession….those attitudes simply reinforce the perception of some that military history is a haven for brilliant Atilla the Hun types.
\
Jim Dingeman
It is early in the morning so I must apologize.
The comment above regarding my female friend being brought into Sky Books…a now defunct military history bookstore in NYC was this. She is a very bright attorney whose father was a Army surgeon in the ETO. When she saw all the books on various wars, weapons,combat,etc sprad out everywhere she whispered to me, “Jim, this is a weird form of male pornography”. I burst out into laughter but I always felt there is something to that phrase. I should add all the guys in the store were friends of mine and we all shared and agreed with her comments while she was in the store.
Jim
I realize this comment is well past the thread’s prime, but noteworthy nonetheless. I was just rereading Tallet’s “War and Society in Early-Modern Europe” and he notes (on p 1) that both Delbrück and Charles Oman also had to defensively justify their studying of the art of war to those ‘liberal’ historians like von Ranke!
I wonder what von Ranke’s beef would have been. Certainly Treitschke (a Liberal), Ranke’s contemporary, would have found the study of war valid, given his conviction that “Again and again, it has been proved that it is war which turns a people into a nation.”
Of course, it’s possible to believe that war can be a major engine of historical change and at the same time believe that the process of war is of little interest. Rather like people who drive cars every day but neither know nor care what goes on under the hood.