Confessions of a Military Historian

About a dozen years ago I was invited to a formal dinner at the Australian National University in Canberra. Before the meal, sherry was served, and the guests mingled. I happened to meet a botany professor from the Midwest, and we chatted, as academics do, about our research. She told me that she was traveling throughout Australia examining its unique plants. “And what do you do?” she asked. I explained that I was a visitor at the Australian Defence Forces Academy studying war in early modern Britain. “And are you in favor of it?” she inquired.

At this point I have to make a confession. Ignoring the prods from my wife to mingle elsewhere, I replied, “That, if I may say so, is a silly question. If I had said that I was studying the Holocaust would you ask if I were in favor of murdering six million Jews?” From then on the evening became distinctly chilly.

Military historians suffer from a Rodney Dangerfield problem—we don’t get no respect.

We don’t even get it from our colleagues. According to Sir Michael Howard (who won the Military Cross as an infantry captain in the Second World War, before becoming the Chichele professor of the history of war at Oxford) most British academic historians deem military history, “an arcane and disagreeable specialty, like the history of pornography, not to be encouraged in a decent university.” After years of debate the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill agreed to adopt a curriculum in military history by including it with peace and defense studies: peace being used to make the bitter medicine of war go down. Yet, as far as I am aware, labor history at Chapel Hill has not been yoked with the history of capitalism. The head of the distinguished American University history department once told John Shy, professor emeritus, Michigan University, that classes in military history were “of interest only to hormone-driven fraternity boys.” Dartmouth University turned down a million-and-a-half-dollar gift from an alumnus to found a chair in military history, while it took the University of Wisconsin, Madison, several years and much acrimony to fill the Ambrose-Hesseltine chair in that field.

Prejudice against military history, however, has not prevented most history departments from teaching the subject, if only because such courses attract many students, adding to the department’s funding. The United States Reserve Officer Training programs require cadets to take American military history, but all too often these are taught by serving officers with limited academic training, or by adjuncts.

The leading historical journals also spurn military history. Take, for instance, the American Historical Review, which in a hundred and fifty issues published between 1976 and 2007 had only one article on military history, a study of atrocities committed during the English Civil War. A majority of the articles in this journal, which is committed to diversity, contained at least one of the words race, class, or gender in its title. Leading centers for research show similar patterns of discrimination. In its thirtyfive- year history, the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, which funds between thirty and forty residential fellows a year, has never awarded a fellowship in military history. This is surprising in view of the fact that each year its fellowship usually does include four or five academics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, the two largest Ph.D. granting departments in the country in military history, and the region boasts the outstanding Triangle Institute for Strategic Studies.

Even more surprising is the fact that the last time the Folger Shakespeare Library had a visiting fellow in military history was a quarter of a century ago, and it has never offered a seminar on the topic. War is a central theme in Shakespeare’s’s plays: no playwright ever portrayed war and its dilemmas better than he. Take, for example, the guilt men have over killing: “We know enough if we know we are the king’s men,” explains Private Bates on the eve...