Outside academia, military history appears alive and well. The shelves of Barnes and Noble and Borders are lined with books about wars. Military movies, television channels, and documentaries are immensely popular. Even on college campuses, students snatch up military history courses soon as they become available.
But until recently, the field was marching into scholarly obscurity. In 2006, John J. Miller wrote in National Review that military history was nearly “dead.” Other publications echoed that sentiment.
Military history is a sub-discipline of history that focuses on the strategy, tactics, methods, and operations of combatants in armed conflicts throughout human history. To Miller and other conservative writers, the decline of military history reflects the rise of “tenured radicals” in universities. Student rebels of the 1960s became professors and found the study of war objectionable.
An alternate view is that military history’s popularity simply waned in favor of other topics. Beginning in the 1970s, historians became more interested in social history, such as African-American history, women’s history, and immigrant history — all of which had been largely neglected.
Data from the American Historical Review support the idea that a shift occurred. In 1975, 2.4 percent of college history departments listed a military history specialist while only 1.1 percent had a specialist in women’s studies. By 2005, 8.9 percent of history departments listed a women’s studies specialist while the percentage of departments that had a military history expert shrank to 1.9 percent.
And military history itself changed, encompassing topics tangential to the battlefield. “Military history,” explains Andrew Weist, a military historian at the University of Southern Mississippi, “began to include examining conflicts from new perspectives and historiographies.”
But the decline of military history may at last be ending.
One change can be found in leading historical journals, where over the past 30 years military history largely has been absent. John Lynn, a military historian at Northwestern University, says that during that period the American Historical Review “did not publish a single article focused on the conduct of the Hundred Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War, the War of Louis XIV, the War of American Independence, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic War, or World War II.” It did print a handful of articles about the atrocities of the Civil War and the Vietnam War, however.
But in March 2007, the Review published a 50-page roundtable discussion of American military history that dealt with war in the context of its society. It has since published articles directly and indirectly related to war, and other journals such as the Journal of American History are also including more articles on the subject.
Other trends, too, hint that a corner has been turned.
In April, the long-empty professorial chair in military history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison was finally filled. Stephen E. Ambrose, the late historian and best-selling author, had donated $250,000 to his alma mater to commemorate his mentor, William Hesseltine. Before he died in 2002, Ambrose had doubled his initial contribution and pressured others, too, to support that professorship. Ambrose was one of the most popular military historians of his generation. But the chair he supported sat vacant for years.
Now the University of Wisconsin has hired the respected West Point graduate and professor John W. Hall, a specialist in unconventional warfare — wars that involve forces other than governmental armies. (Hall received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina.) The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Peace, War, and Defense program, or PWAD, as it’s known on campus, has also hired new faculty over the past three years and experienced enormous enrollment growth.
Duke University, Cornell University, Notre Dame University, and Sam Houston State University are also searching for military specialists. By and large, however, lesser-known universities such as the University of Southern Mississippi and the University of North Texas are filling the vacuum left by Ivy League and elite schools.
Why is military history more popular? “The past decade has been a decade of war,” says Frederick Schneid, a military historian at High Point University. “Historians are products of their environment, so the war has helped the profession.” In a similar vein, John Lynn points out that “the world has simply gotten nastier.” Terrorism, three wars, and international violence are all “staring you in the face” and “even humanists have to pay attention.”
This violence has translated into increased interest in military history. That and the success of a few universities that have jumped into the breach may allow military history to regain the field.
David J. Koon is a research associate with the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy (popecenter.org).