Rejoinder

I appreciate the responses of my colleagues and essentially agree with their substance. Specifically, I accept Robert Citino’s position about continuing to pound at the gates of conventional academe but reiterate my own position that we will not be the ones doing the pounding. It will be the succeeding generations of military historians, and the field must be able to offer them a future more promising than as cannon fodder. That ties into Roger Spiller’s point about the relative popularity of courses with a military focus. My experience is that this is a particular red flag to the class, race, and gender microspecialists. Believing their courses to be undercut by a vulgar popularity contest, they perceive the solution to be eliminating the competition. And that leads me to endorse Victor Davis Hanson’s point that history departments strangling in their own arcana might benefit from the kind of reappraisal that is supposed to be the discipline’s stock in trade!