Response to Linn and Showalter

Back in 2005 the American Historical Review approached me and, to my astonishment, asked me to write an article for the journal on the current state of military history. In the course of the next few months, when my colleagues found out about my assignment, there was no lack of advice about how to proceed. This was the time to “let them have it,” to tell “our story,” to rescue military history from the obscurity to which the academy had exiled it. I tried to resist that approach, explaining to my friends that I felt like a man who had finally been invited to a very exclusive party and who did not want to complain about the ambience or the silverware the first moment that he walked into the room. I simply tried to put our best foot forward, arguing that military history is serious history, and that military historians are serious scholars who are doing work as important as those in any other historical subfield. The resulting article may have lacked fireworks, but I thought—and still think—that the approach had merit.

West Point, ca. 1889. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-62092].

That is why the analyses and recommendations of my friends Dennis Showalter and Brian Linn had me nodding in agreement. Neither one is especially disgruntled. Neither spent a great deal of time whining about the plight of military history, grinding axes about the leftward lean of the profession, or asking “Why do they hate us?” Neither fired salvoes in the culture wars or complained about their colleagues’ politics. Best of all, both seem to view the current situation in military history more in terms of opportunity than of crisis.

Showalter, for example, argues that military historians who are marginalized within the academy need to reach out to different constituencies. His tour d’horizon takes us to readers of popular magazines like those published by the Weider Group, to “nontraditional students” whom he describes as the “occupationally retired but intellectually alert,” and finally to the “thousands of students enrolled in online MA programs in military history,” especially those at the American Military University (AMU) and Norwich University. Indeed, it is hard to argue with this. Showalter’s own impressive publishing career has followed a trajectory from the strictly scholarly (Railroads and Rifles) to the increasingly popular (Patton and Rommel), all without the sacrifice of a single jot of scholarly rigor. Indeed, as one who has followed his writings passionately and obsessively, I can say that there is no difference at all between the “early Dennis” and the “later.” He has proved that there is an enormous appetite among the general reading population for hard thinking and good writing about war. Likewise, there is no arguing with the success of AMU—seventy on-line programs, 40,000 students—or Norwich’s impressive reconception of the traditional MA for the digital age.

Nor does Linn see this as a time for tears. Despite the relegation of military history to the margins of academe—a marginalization he is not all that unhappy about, given the current state of the profession!—he notes that opportunities abound, opportunities far greater than those found in any other historical subfield. There are fellowships, grants, and programs funded by military and civilian institutes, from the Guggenheim and Verville Fellowships to the West Point Summer Seminar to the Harold K. Johnson Visiting Professorship at the U.S. Army War College; there are real possibilities of wielding influence on government policy (with the “surge” in Iraq being the best example and with military historians Eliot Cohen and Fred Kagan as the exemplars); there are the fellowship and networking that come with membership in the Society for Military History, perhaps the best specialized organization of professional historians in the world; and finally, there is a huge number of job opportunities for civilian historians within the military itself.

In evaluating the truth of what Showalter and Linn have written, I need only look to my own career. I’ve written the usual scholarly books...