THE RUSSIAN FRONT

About this time last year, The Journal of the Historical Society published an essay of mine devoted to recent trends in the field of Russian history. Although the article (”Scholarship at the Crossroads: The Past, Present, and Possible Future of Russian History in America”) was commissioned by the Journal’s editor, George Huppert, for the purpose of introducing non-Russian historians and general readers to developments in the field, I believe that many of the issues raised in the piece may be of interest to specialists as well.

Beginning late tomorrow and continuing over the course of the next ten days or so, I will post a series of installments containing the main text of the JHS essay. I welcome TRF readers to comment on the points made in the article or, at least, to think about the developments that the article addresses.

The TRF version of “Scholarship at the Crossroads” does differ from the original in several respects. For example, I have eliminated many of the footnotes appearing in the journal article by providing direct links to works mentioned in the text. In other cases I have updated (or added) information to reflect more recent events.

[Note: The definitive version of this essay is located at: www.blackwell-synergy.com. To access it, click here.]

Following up on David Stone’s “Glass Half-Full” piece of 30 August, I submit the following conclusion to a commentary that will appear in a special January 2008 issue of The Russian Review devoted to the Russo-Japanese War. My piece is one of three commentaries written in response to three articles on the conflict, two of which are in the realm of cultural history. The other is by a social historian. As you can see, I had the same thought as David when I read Robert Townsend’s piece in Perspectives last January. I would be interested to know if there are any military historians in our field who do feel beleaguered.

LET A HUNDRED FLOWERS BLOOM
None of the three essays directly addresses military history. This fact might well confirm the worst fears of its practitioners, who periodically lament their field’s decline. In a recent editorial, the Classics scholar Victor David Hanson lamented “the loneliness of the military historian,” a sentiment shared by Frederick Kagan in his essay, “Why Military History Matters.” The discipline incontestably suffered in North America as a result of Vietnam War-era distaste for armed conflict. However, a recent American Historical Association study demonstrates that between 1975 and 2005 the number of history departments on U.S. campuses with at least one specialist in the field has risen from 29.9 percent to 36.2 percent. The study of war has also benefited from the growing awareness among scholars that social, cultural, intellectual, and other disciplinary approaches not commonly associated with the former both enrich the former and enhances its legitimacy. In this regard, the three essays should encourage the military historian in the knowledge that she or he is not so lonely after all.

-from David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, “Rewriting the Russo-Japanese War: A Centenary Retrospective” The Russian Review 67 (Forthcoming in January 2008), 87.

[Cross-posted from Dictatorship of the Air]

Like most institutions associated with academia, the academic conference is a curious thing. It’s a combination of educational seminar, professional retreat, class reunion, and subsidized junket. It’s also an integral (and unavoidable) part of being professional scholar.

I attended my first conference as an undergraduate in the spring of 1988. It was a meeting held by a regional affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS). Since the early 1990s I’ve averaged at least one a year. Typically I present at the AAASS national gathering, but I’ve been to others, too: AATSEEL, SAH, AHA — as well as the occasional thematic conference dedicated to aviation or some aspect of Russian culture or history.

Regardless of the specific association or venue, scholarly conferences typically share a common structure and rituals: dozens of individual panels spread out over three or four days interspersed with official side trips to sites of (professional) interest; informal evening gatherings; the requisite banquet/keynote/awards ceremony and, of course, a book display. They also come with a common cast of characters: earnest young graduate students learning the ropes; arrogant Young Turks trying to “change the dominant paradigm,” jaded senior scholars looking forward to retirement; and workaday faculty enjoying their lone opportunity to escape from their teaching (only!) institutions — plus a slew of recent (and soon-to-be) Ph.D.s willing to sell their souls for their first tenure-track jobs.

After you’ve been around for a while and attended a handful or so, it becomes pretty obvious that if you’ve been to one academic conference, you’ve been to them all. You always know what to expect, until you encounter the unexpected.

I did just that this past weekend.
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David French has just applauded Victor Davis Hanson’s lament over the state of military history. I’ve already taken issue with Hanson’s condemnation of the current state of the field. In French’s posting, he refers to “the shrinking pool of true military historians.”

This is simply not the case.

Forgive me for rehashing a couple of posts I made to H-War several months ago.

The American Historical Association has actually produced some data. Using its guide to history departments, which lists faculty by specialization, the Association has tracked changes in the geographic and thematic interests of historians from 1975 to 2005. For those not familiar with the guide, faculty may choose three geographic and thematic areas of interest / specialization. I, for example, am listed as “Russia/ USSR, military, South Asia.”

In online tables provided by the AHA, more detailed than the information on offer in the January 2007 issue of Perspectives, we do not find a clear decline in military history. In fact, the absolute number of historians claiming expertise in military history has grown substantially. The table can be referenced here.

In 1975, 2.4% of the 4,367 faculty (hence, just over 100) identified as military historians. 29.9% of departments had a military historian on the faculty. Those Percentages fluctuated over the next 30 years, and in 2005 hit 1.9% of 15,487 faculty. That implies an absolute increase in the number of military historians to nearly 300. The proportion of departments with a military historian on staff increased to 35.2%.

Those figures aren’t perfect (they don’t include many small and community colleges, for example), but they’re the best we have, and they do not show military history in decline.

Now perhaps French meant to emphasize the “true” in his “true military historians,” i.e. operational history as opposed to the various permutations of war & society. If so, there is still no evidence to substantiate that claim. We have anecdotes about people studying, say, gay legionnaires, but neither one bit of data to suggest that there is more or less of this than there used to be, nor any figures to show that race / class / gender military history has displaced operational military history. The increase from 100 to 300 military historians in history departments tracked by the AHA makes for an awfully big tent.

A Glass Still Half Full . . .

Victor Davis Hanson, classicist and pundit, has added to the chorus of voices bemoaning the decline of military history. (And Mark Bauerlein pointed me to it.)

I certainly agree with Hanson’s point that people ought to know more military history than they do. They ought to know a lot more of a lot of history, but that’s another story.

What I question is his contention about the state of the field. To quote,

“The academic neglect of war is even more acute today [compared to when Hanson did his Ph.D] Military history as a discipline has atrophied, with very few professorships, journal articles, or degree programs.”

What’s the actual evidence Hanson offers for this claim of atrophy?

“In 2004, Edward Coffman, a retired military history professor who taught at the University of Wisconsin, reviewed the faculties of the top 25 history departments, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report. He found that of over 1,000 professors, only 21 identified war as a specialty.”

As a good classicist, Hanson should know a logical fallacy when he commits one: a measurement at one point in time cannot show decline. Certainly I think there ought to be more military historians than there are, particularly at top universities. But until someone goes back and counts for 1984, or 1964, we simply have no evidence of decline. Indeed, as I suggested in my last post, the actual figures suggest the number of military historians in American academia has tripled over the last thirty years.

And very few journal articles? Well, there’s War in History, now on volume 14 (meaning it did not exist in the alleged good old days). And War and Society, first published in 1983. And, of course, the Journal of Military History, which back in the good old days was, as Military Affairs, exactly the kind of thing military historians didn’t want their non-military history colleagues to see. In its present incarnation, it’s a top-notch scholarly journal. In our own field, there’s the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, which (to beat a dead horse) did not exist in the good old days. And, of course, the intelligence history and diplomatic history journals that have an awful lot of interest to the military historian.

And degree programs? I can name five serious programs in military history by reflex: Duke / UNC, Kansas State, Ohio State, Temple, Texas A & M. North Texas is building one. That certainly does not exhaust the places where one can get good training. Take the ten members of this website’s frontoviki. How many came from the big five? One.

Let me repeat: I do think more people should know about military history. But we do not help our cause by making clearly fallacious arguments about how the field is on its last legs.