September 26, 2006
The State of Military History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:00 PM EST My co-blogger Fred Schwarz e-mailed me, via our editor, a link to a piece on NRO—NationalReview.com—on the decline of military history in the universities. The article, by John J. Miller, asserts that most tenure lines in military history are disappearing as their incumbents retire. This is not news. Seven or so years ago I heard the excellent military historian John Lynn give a seminar at St. John’s College, Cambridge, reporting on the disappearance of his field within the academy. The audience, professional historians and their graduate students, did not seem particularly alarmed about the prospect, although they were civil to their guest. I am not sure American historians would have been as polite.
First, some statistics, which you can skip if you punched up the link, because I have cribbed them from Miller’s article: John Lynn counted articles on military history that have appeared in The American Historical Review, the flagship journal of the profession, over the last 30 years. Over the last thirty years the AHR has apparently printed no articles on the conduct of the Second World War, the American Revolution, or the Napoleonic Wars, only two on the American Civil War, and one on the First World War (on Russian women soldiers). This is less than encouraging for scholars in a very tough job market, where publication is everything, and it is also a good guide to the profession’s ranking of the importance of the field.
The NRO article asserts that Dartmouth turned down a gift of an endowed chair in military history, and that the University of Wisconsin is sitting on a million dollars to endow a chair in military history—and has not been searching for anyone to fill it. This is not because the field is already over-served at Wisconsin; there has been no military historian on the faculty since 1992, when one retired. NRO asserts that people on tenure lines who do study war are decreasingly likely to study it in terms of how and why wars are won and lost, or in terms of operational military history. NRO explains this in terms of ideological hostility to military history within the academy. I have no reason to doubt any of these assertions, and it is worth noting that something similar is happening in the field of diplomatic history. I have the impression that economic history is also is in trouble, and I would not vouch for the health of political history.
With respect to military history, there are at least three paradoxes about this development. First of all, the last 30 years have seen a brilliant expansion in the intellectual and methodological breadth of military history. One could date this development to the publication of John Keegan’s The Face of Battle in the mid-1970s, and the rise of what has been dubbed the Sandhurst School. Keegan wedded military history to social history in an extremely attractive and persuasive fashion, and the field has since gone from strength to strength. So the shrinking number of tenure lines does not reflect intellectual decay. The second paradox: Students flock to courses in military history. Academics in the humanities are supposed to be desperate to keep up enrollments, but they are not so desperate that they will hire appreciable numbers of people teaching this subject. The third paradox: Any chain bookstore has a large section of military history. This is not because the bookstores are in the hands of regressive political elites; it is because readers cannot get enough of the stuff.
Why, then does the academy ignore the field? One reason is because it can. Universities do not respond in rapid fashion to consumer demand, at least when consumer demand runs afoul of professional prejudices. University curricula are set by tenured professors, which means the ones who determine the priorities have jobs for life. I have no bitter objection to this procedure—after all, it has given me a job for life. But sometimes the downside is visible. NRO points out that the number of American casualties incurred to date in Iraq is about the same as the number of American casualties incurred at Antietam in a day. That does not mean that the casualties incurred in Iraq are in any sense less grievous, and it says nothing about whether the war is a just and prudent one. But it cannot be a good idea to be ignorant of the numbers. To put this differently, determining whether civilian casualties constitute a war crime requires reflection on questions of proportionality, which means knowing something about war. Deciding what constitutes indiscriminate violence requires some knowledge of the history of war. Rationally assessing the competence of political and military leadership in time of war requires that same knowledge. It should not be left to NRO to point out that the universities are not rushing to produce and distribute that knowledge.
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