Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

Below are the remarks I made at a Presidential Session of the the recent SMH in Ogden, Utah. Thanks to Carol Reardon for inviting me to speak, and to Mark for inviting me to post.
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These are good times, aren’t they? Military history has rarely been on such a roll, and certainly not in my lifetime. Two thousand seven was our year, with article after article on military history appearing in the major journals: Mark Moyar’s “The Current State of Military History” in The Historical Journal; an entire issue of The Journal of American History, with the centerpiece article by Wayne Lee, “Mind and Matter: Cultural Analysis in American Military History — A Look at the State of the Field”; my own piece in the American Historical Review, “Military Histories Old and New: A Re-introduction”. We also recently hit the U.S. News and World Report in Justin Ewers’s article “Why Don’t More Colleges Teach Military History?” I’ll admit, for someone of my age (Ph.D., Indiana 1984), this is all a bit bewildering. I’m one of those people who read John Lynn’s brilliant piece “The Embattled Future of Academic Military History” back in 1997 and thought “Dear God, this is the story of my life”! But rather than spend time speculating on the meaning of it all, I’d like to talk about my experience in getting the first military history article in the AHR since 1981.

What a marathon! Back in August 2005 I was invited to New York to do a shoot for The History Channel, in the network’s pre-”Ice Road Truckers” era. The topic, I believe, was Operation Barbarossa. My companion on that program was Maria Bucur-Deckard, an assistant editor at the AHR. During a break in the filming (my own memory is that this took place on set, with both of us in full facial makeup), she mentioned to me that the AHR was interested in a “current state of military history” piece, and floored me by asking if I’d like to write it. I said sure. There was some text messaging back and forth between Maria and Rob Schneider (the Editor of the AHR) back in Bloomington, Indiana. The idea that I originally suggested was a kind of “snapshot” of the current literature — I thought it would be interesting to concentrate on literature published since 2000, and that’s the idea we started with.

Well, I wrote the piece and sent it off to the journal in at the end of 2005, and it came back to me SHREDDED in March 2006. I have never been read harder. There were, I think, eight reader’s reports (I’ve only been able to find six in my own files, but I have a memory that there were more). At any rate, it seemed more like 800. With that many readers, the possible permutations were nearly endless — this reader liked parts 1 and 3, but not 2; that one liked part 2, but not parts 1 and 3, etc. No one particularly liked the piece; all of them wanted a larger coverage of the literature; some wanted to junk it altogether as unsalvageable. Part of me responded by crying, “Yes! We should ALL be PROUD of the high standards of our flagship journal!” But another part of me wanted to buy a rocket launcher. I rewrote it, a much bigger piece, with a lot more literature discussed, and sent it off, and it came back to me re-shredded in June 2006, leading to a major crisis of confidence on the author’s part. In general, it seemed to me like scholarly mission creep. It had started as a snapshot of post-2000 literature, but now the readers were telling me that I needed to discuss the work of John Keegan & Paul Fussell and to explain the origins of the debate over the military revolution of the 16th century–all important stuff, but literature that was in many cases decades old. In my more paranoid moments, I thought they might be doing it on purpose: “Let’s overload the military historian until he crashes and burns!” The more I thought it over, however, the more it actually made sense. The AHR and military history really had been out of touch for a long, long time; it really was time to reconnect.

And now, an interlude. In the summer and fall of 2006, I wrote another book, my most recent, called Death of the Wehrmacht, and put the article aside altogether. I didn’t contact Rob for a while, most of 2006, in fact, and we didn’t reconnect until early 2007. He probably thought I’d dropped off the planet, but in reality I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue with this project. He convinced me, and I wrote a third version, much larger than versions 1 and 2. Even now, the readers were giving me advice about discussing more books, but this time I managed to fend them off. A work of this sort would always have its omissions and gaps, I argued — that’s half the fun of reading and arguing about them. At any rate, a snapshot of some of the principal literature had now morphed into a comprehensive analysis of the current state of the field. The AHR accepted the article in April and printed it at the end of 2007 — over two full years since it was offered to me. It took longer to write, in other words, than a book, considerably longer.

From the start I tried to be guided by two related rules in writing this article:

First, I had no intention of apologizing for being a military historian, no intention of downplaying my (or our) interest in actual warfighting or trying to justify it to a queasy field. Indeed, these were issues that I didn’t even want to discuss in the article, and I stuck to that. Some of the readers thought that I should, but my position has always been that historians of, let us say, Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot never seem to have to explain why or apologize for it, and I don’t think we should have to, either.

Second, and in a similar vein, I had no intention of whining, or complaining about our “plight” as military historians, or asking “Why do they hate us?” or pillorying the leftist ideological bent of the profession at large. In other words, I had no intention of using this piece, which, after all, had been commissioned by the AHR, to fight a battle in the culture wars. You can disagree with me, or call me weak-willed, but I think the opportunity to put our scholarly foot forward, to frame the piece as an invitation and not a rebuke to the profession, to stay on the high road, as it were, was the way to go. I felt like a guy who had finally received an invitation to a place I’d long wanted to go, and I thought it would be bad form to enter the room and immediately yell at the host for not inviting me earlier. Looking back on it, I really do think that I made the correct choice. Your mileage may vary.

Finally, I’ll end with a plea: don’t let my article be a one-off. Send your work to the AHR, and keep sending it. Rob Schneider says he wants to see it, and we should take him at his word. If another ten — or god forbid, twenty — years pass and I don’t see any military history in the AHR, well then, to quote a famous Sicilian:

“I’m going to blame some of the people in this room. And that I do not forgive….”