THE RUSSIAN FRONT

Over at Airminded, his blog site devoted (mostly) to airpower and British society, Brett Holman has posted the results of his second study of the “state of the military history blogosphere.”

The news, it seems, is pretty good.

Employing the same (necessarily) sketchy methodology that he first used this past March, Brett finds that the number of blogs devoted to military history has grown by 50% in the past six months. (This, he notes, is just slightly slower growth than the blogosphere as a whole). While milhist blogs remain overwhelmingly centered in the United States and focused on American subject matter, this dominance may be gradually receding.

Brett concludes:

the military historioblogosphere is rapidly growing and somewhat more diverse than it was in March 2007; but still dominated by American bloggers writing about the American Civil War. The biggest change, however, has been the increase in institutional group blogs, usually attached to museums but sometimes also to publishers or archaeological projects. No doubt there’ll be a few more of these by March 2008 …

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.

Last October, National Review Online columnist John J. Miller sparked a lively Internet debate with the publication of an article titled “Sounding Taps” in which he decried the allegedly dismal status of military history on American university campuses. Citing such factors as “an ossified tenure system, scholarly navel-gazing, and ideological hostility to all things military,” Miller alleged that military historians have been virtually driven from the field by “tenured radicals” more concerned with “social justice” and the study of “race, sex, and class.”

Miller is hardly the first commentator to raise questions about the status of military history in the academy. Just four months earlier, historian Fred Kagan (Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute) weighed in with a piece on “Why Military History Matters”. Still, Miller’s observations touched some raw nerves…especially those of Ohio State University’s “War Historian” Mark Grimsley. Grimsley took issue with Miller’s description of a field in decline. In a series of testy web and e-mail exchanges, he repeatedly took aim at Miller’s “tendentious” musings as the politically inspired “crocodile tears” of a wingnut who, in fact, “doesn’t give a lusty crap about academic military history.” Respondents at the History News Network’s group blog Cliopatria were similarly reserved in their comments on the matter. Whether one agrees with Miller or Grimsley, neither or both, one thing is certain: “Sounding Taps” got people’s attention. The subsequent publication this past May of another high-profile piece by The New Republic’s David Bell suggests that something more than synchronicity is at work here. People have been talking about academic military history.

This is a good thing. And it’s something we’d like to see continue.

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