Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

Dear Rebecca,

In a previous comment, you said you’d like to see a post about incorporating military history into general US history courses. I don’t think this is a job for a single post, so this morning I’m beginning a series of posts (categorized under “Letters to Rebecca”) in hopes of sparking a dialogue on the subject.

When I think about how to go about it, my first instinct is to turn the issue around: What approach would best assist me if I were trying to learn a subject area in which I had no graduate training? This has actually happened more than once, and it’s invariably been a source of some anxiety. What is the cognitive landscape? Do I understand the main conceptual frameworks that define the area? Am I finding the best books and articles on the subject? Are there opportunities and/or mine fields of which I’m unaware? All these questions occur to me well before the crucial one: just how exactly will a knowledge of field X assist me in my own professional work?

Of course, in my case, the issues have centered around incorporating field X into my scholarship. Your question focuses on how to incorporate military history into your teaching. That’s a different matter and one, I think, that is somewhat easier to address.

So far I’ve seen two basic approaches to this challenge. The first approach is to bring together a group of teachers (in this case, high school teachers) and expose them to blocks of material on U.S. military history. This was pretty much the template used for a two-day workshop, Teaching About the Military in American History, held at the First Infantry Division Museum on the Cantigny estate outside Chicago. It consisted of six main presentations: Teaching About the Military: Some Basics (Paul Herbert); Teaching the Classics: What Americans Can Learn From Herodotus (Paul Rahe); Understanding the Creation of the Armed Forces (Pete Maslowski); The Social Dimensions of the Civil War myself); The US and Unconventional War (Brian Linn); and War and the Military in American History (Walter McDougall). [Most of the links are to published versions of the talks. Brian Linn's is to an a/v link to his presentation -- and there are similar a/v links to all the other presentations as well.]

The other template is the one used by the West Point Summer Seminar and the Merrill/SAIS workshop just held as Basin Harbor. These have their own lecture component, but the hallmark is the use of staff rides and other “hands on” events.

In both cases, however, the curriculum is sort of one-size-fits-all: it’s pre-determined before the specific participants are selected, and to some degree they are selected because they’re a good fit for the pre-determined curriculum. The Cantigny, West Point, and Basin Harbor events are excellent, and I’ve learned a great deal from them. But I suspect the best way to educate professsors like yourself is a bit different. I suspect it ought to be tailored, as closely as possible, to your specific needs.

So the first question has to be: In what courses do you expect to utilize military history? The U.S. history survey is a gimme, but what about upper division classes?

The second question is, What is the optimum way to learn the material? My initial thought would be to create a workshop of a week or more, but not one oriented toward a general overview of the subject. Rather, I think the best workshops would be organized around the same periods into which we conventionally divide the historical field: early modern Europe, modern Europe, early US, modern US, etc. Since your own area of specialization is early US history, let’s start with that.

A final question: What would you like to take away from exposure to military history? Do you have some specific ideas, or is this pretty much terra incognita and you’d like a fairly general approach, albeit within the context of early US history?