There is ungodly amount of garbage history military history out there, because people want to read it. However, that does not mean there is not a huge amount of great work done in that field.
Its quite simply the case that for 1000s of years states major spending was on military and military matters, and the greatest transformation of society and economics happen during conflicts. Trying cut out military history from other fields is a fundamental mistake of the modern historians and more importantly universities.
I often listen to lectures from military historians and they quite often have a 'black sheep' feel around them, making self-depreciating jokes about how they still exist, this often leads to good lectures because they are already not inhibited by the conventions and trends other historians tend to follow.
> I often listen to lectures from military historians and they quite often have a 'black sheep' feel around them, making self-depreciating jokes about how they still exist, this often leads to good lectures because they are already not inhibited by the conventions and trends other historians tend to follow.
Sort of.
My wife is a historian, so I am friends with an unusually large number of history faculty. There is good military history that is widely respected by the community. The problem is that there are a lot of very old academics who refuse to acknowledge new ideas and methods, leading to a lot of continued publication of bad work.
It isn't military historians being free from conventions that trap other historians. The available analysis methods of modern history are very wide and there isn't a trend trapping the field. If anybody is stubborn and stuck in conventions, it is the aging group of military historians who refuse to integrate new ideas.
There are some older military historians who do great work and don't get respect, because just doing military history is considered old fashioned. And some of the old methods are not necessary bad, just considered bad but I don't always agree with that assessment.
And somewhat younger historians who are military historians but feel like they are kind of outsiders from their peers.
Many old methods are great! The point is that not all old methods are great. Fields move forward one funeral at a time, and there do remain a lot of aging researchers who are stuck in the past. This is not to say that every old researcher is doing a bad job or that every military historian is doing a bad job... it just seems to be the field that has resisted progress the most.
I obviously don't have a full view of the field, but I do know a few military history faculty in their 30s and they don't view themselves as pariahs. They also scream at their laptops when terrible scholarship ends up flying off the bookshelves because bad military history sells like hotcakes.
Being a professional technologist (which is probably as far away as one could get from being a historian), it baffles me that the academic military history discipline is treated as said in the article —- war is still
being waged daily in the modern world, and in the very foreseeable future it will not end. Surely at least the military academies around the world would do serious studies on the past to predict the future wars, at bare minimum?
Serious studies are being done all the time. The "anti military history" positions expressed in the blog post are not reflective of the position some monolithic "board of academics" who control all the funding and classes. They are opinions that are sometimes held by some individuals in a diverse field, who sometimes are in positions to deny or attempt to deny funding in local situations.
Serious research is being done, serious books and papers published, serious courses and lessons are taught.
If you want a technologist analogy, there are some parallels to what I assume PHP or Perl communities might be like. Whenever you go out into the broader world, you need to acknowledge how everyone else likes to take potshots at your language, and then move on to explain why your language meets certain needs anyways. And in the end, all the pot shots taken at PHP or Perl don't remove any of the immediate needs.
Well that's the thing the article touches, people tend to think that military history is not studied in a serious manner as far as an academic discipline goes. Military academies can do the bare minimum in rigor as far as they need to impart their military tradition and form effective officers, just like the author said about aristocrats learning how other aristocrats did their thing before smashing some peasants.
It’s also plausible that military institutions are less likely to want to share their findings than civilian ones though. If the US military thought it had found a unique predictive insight in history, it really wouldn’t want anyone else to know about it.
Strange. In Chrome this IP address can't be found, whereas it loads just fine in Firefox. This is the second time in a week I've come across a problem with a .mil domain, though the other one wasn't browser-specific.
There is ungodly amount of garbage history military history out there, because people want to read it. However, that does not mean there is not a huge amount of great work done in that field.
Its quite simply the case that for 1000s of years states major spending was on military and military matters, and the greatest transformation of society and economics happen during conflicts. Trying cut out military history from other fields is a fundamental mistake of the modern historians and more importantly universities.
I often listen to lectures from military historians and they quite often have a 'black sheep' feel around them, making self-depreciating jokes about how they still exist, this often leads to good lectures because they are already not inhibited by the conventions and trends other historians tend to follow.