Expanding Nontraditional Opportunities for Military Historians

Military history is marginalized in today’s academy. A common reaction among military historians is to blame “political correctness.” An equally common reaction stresses adaptability. “If we adjust our research and syllabi to the currently dominant matrices of class, race, and gender,” says the military historian, “we can regain the respect of our academic colleagues.” This approach was a major impetus for the “new military history” that added important dimensions to the study of war and society in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet incorporating class, race, and gender has ultimately failed to sustain military history’s position in the academy.

That failure reflects a misunderstanding of military history’s current situation. Military history is marginal not because of political correctness, but because history departments have changed. The intellectual expansion—indeed, the metastasizing—of the discipline of history created a corresponding competition for positions. In most departments when a teaching position opens, the question involves choosing among specializations. It is hardly remarkable that fields and approaches seen as cutting-edge should be favored.

While military history’s status within the traditional academy is a matter of concern, there are significant opportunities beyond it. We must appreciate the growing number of nontraditional students of military history. One group consists of those who are occupationally retired and intellectually alert, with the leisure, the interest, and the resources to study the past to make sense of personal experience. Another potential constituency is the thousands of students enrolled in on-line MA degree programs in military history. Both of those groups contribute to a growing body of nontraditional students who are outside the range of brick-and-mortar graduate schools.

There are three potential channels between military historians and these alternative constituencies. The most fundamental is general-audience publication. Here military history has an essential advantage over other kinds of history. No matter how hard it tries to acculturate to academic fashions, no matter how much it adjusts its paradigms, military history never abandons its concern with narrative and its acceptance of “high history”—people and events that shaped the past and influence the present—as a necessary element of the genre. Military history incorporates a personal, human focus, making it friendly to biography. John Keegan’s seminal The Face of Battle inspired a great interest in the experiences of ordinary soldiers. And the new military history has brought families and societies into the mix. What is sometimes called “the new new military history” has reintroduced the operational aspects of war.

That three-way synergy—among the human, the cultural, and the operational—is appealing, especially to publishers concerned with sales. Books on military subjects regularly are at the high end of the list of trade publications marketed to the general public. For the talented and ambitious military historian the gap between the marketplace and the academy is increasingly narrow. Major academic presses—Cambridge, Yale, Oxford, Harvard, and their counterparts—have moved significantly in the direction of general-audience publication. University presses, traditionally indifferent to balance sheets, now make marketability a major aspect of their review processes.

Trade publishers seek new contributors and fresh material. They are willing to take chances on both, and they pay. None of these things makes the process of research, writing, revision, and acceptance easier. A good trade editor can put an author over at least as many jumps as an academic counterpart. The glossy magazines of military history published bimonthly and quarterly by the Weider History Group have notably high editorial standards and are friendly to newcomers. North and South, specializing in the Civil War period, maintains scholarly standards on a level with any academic counterpart.

In addition to its popular appeal, military history establishes war’s central role in the development of societies and in the formation and survival of states. War was certainly a part of prehistoric cultures and remains a dominant form of interaction among peoples and governments to this day. Science, mathematics, and philosophy all have been shaped, at times defined, by their relationships to conflict. To deny this is not merely to rewrite history, but to reject it in favor of a...