Readings in American Military History (review)

The essays in this reader, all of them previously published, span American military history from the siege of Louisbourg in 1745 to the early twenty-first century war on terrorism. A few were originally book chapters, but the majority originally appeared in journals such as the Journal of Military History, Journal of American History, and Military History Quarterly. Although some of the articles are more than forty years old—John K. Mahon's 1961 rumination on Civil War assault tactics is an example—most embody comparatively recent scholarship. As might be expected of essays spanning the last forty years, they represent different types of military history. With their focus on battles and leaders, Gerard T. Altoff's account of the Battle of Lake Erie and Stephen W. Sears's discussion of Antietam are "old-fashioned," descriptive military history; many other selections, such as William B. Skelton's depiction of pre-Civil War Army politics and Paul A. C. Koistinen's investigation of the interwar military-industrial complex, are analytical and deal only tangentially with the battlefield.

Morris compiled this book because military historians "have been aware of the lack of a suitable collateral reader to supplement their lectures, texts, and journal and monograph assignments" (p. viii). This assertion is not altogether accurate. In 1999 John W. Chambers II and G. Kurt Piehler published Major Problems in American Military History: Documents and Essays, which is still in print.

The two readers have several similarities, and some crucial differences. By their nature, readers are eclectic; every historian will wonder why an editor emphasized certain topics and not others. Chambers and Piehler slighted naval affairs and ignored nuclear weapons, and Morris followed suit; out of his twenty-eight essays, only two deal directly with the Navy and none with nuclear weaponry.

More significant are the differences. Chambers and Piehler offered an array of primary documents for students to ponder, but Morris includes only one primary source (the "Dorn Report" resulting from the mid-1990s investigation as to whether Major General Walter C. Short and Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel should be posthumously advanced in rank), and it seems oddly out of place. While Major Problems was richly diverse, including Indians, African Americans, and women either in the primary sources or as authors of secondary essays, Morris's reader is almost exclusively white and male—the exceptions include Diane T. Putney's study of the planning for the Gulf War's air campaign and Xiaoming Zhang's essay demonstrating the validity of President Lyndon B. Johnson's fear of China during the Vietnam War. Finally, each chapter in Major Problems revolved around a thought-provoking interpretive debate. The only such "debate" in Morris's book appears inadvertent. Immediately following Zhang's well-researched contribution is an essay by Lieutenant General Philip B. Davidson that skewers President Johnson for raising what the general (erroneously) considered the "bogeyman of Chinese intervention" (p. 351).

Depending on what a professor hopes to accomplish in the classroom, he or she will undoubtedly consider one of these readers superior to the other. But both warrant consideration.