Aug 17 2007
A Glass Half Full
Scott’s introductory post talked about the recent tempest over the place of military history in academia. As an historian, I like to think historically, and two things struck me about this latest dispute when it broke out last winter.
The first is that it isn’t anything new. Ron Spector’s able survey of military-historical navel-gazing, itself a response to Wayne Lee’s history of military history, gives a number of examples of predictions of the imminent destruction of the field. One that I personally remember quite well is John Lynn’s article “The Embattled Future of Academic Military History,” coming out as it did just as I finished my Ph.D and tried to find a faculty job.
And the second thing that struck me about the decline of military history? It’s wrong. We’re ten years past Lynn’s article and military history isn’t dead yet. While I would never say that all is well and all good grad students get jobs, and I’ll talk about the problems I see in a later post, the field of military history is remarkably healthy. Quality research gets published by a number of presses and in a range of rigorous journals. Bright young scholars continue to enter the field. Students flock to military history courses. The reading public gobbles up serious military history unlike almost any other field. Also unlike other fields of history, military history enjoys a wide range of practitioners. As Jeremy Black observed in Rethinking Military History, the military history community is a unique blend of academics, practitioners, and enthusiastic lay people, all of whom enrich the whole.
And the numbers aren’t bad. As I argued on H-War several months ago (also picked up on Mark Grimsley’s War Historian), data from the American Historical Association suggests that the number of military historians in American academia grew from about 100 in 1975 to 300 today. That does not include the large number of military historians employed throughout the Defense Department.
Much of the supposed decline of military history is simply a matter of perception. The greats retire, and their replacements are nowhere to be seen. Retirees are by definition people with long careers, and they can’t help but be replaced by those less distinguished. But everyone has to start somewhere–even John Erickson was a nobody once, hard as that may be to imagine.
And the military history of Russia and the Soviet Union in particular? It seems to me that things are even better. While I am naturally convinced that as a group we are both smarter and better-looking than the average, there are more objective considerations in our favor. No field of military history has ever enjoyed the bonanza of sources that we have enjoyed since the fall of communism. Access is still far from perfect (another future post), but it would take decades for a much larger cohort of scholars to exhaust what the new archival materials can tell us.
Another point in our favor–few of those interested in Russian military history come out of a program devoted to military history. Relatively speaking, the big military history programs like Ohio State have produced relatively few of the people represented by this blog. I don’t mean to disparage the quality of those military history programs–I work in one–but I see the benefit of being trained in a program where I had to justify the relevance and important of military history to those who were quite skeptical.
So what does that mean for this blog? As I see it, there is a enormous amount of interesting work being done on Russian / Soviet military and international history, and an even bigger range of work that ought to be done. What I’d like to see this blog do is bring that work to a wider audience, and talk about where that new research changes our understanding and where it doesn’t. I’m looking forward to the conversation.