Home : News : Display
Nov. 21, 2024

The American Way of Studying War: What Is It Good For?

Michael P. Ferguson
©2024 Michael P. Ferguson

ABSTRACT: Academic military historians, government institutions, and defense practitioners have unique purposes for advancing the study of war that influence the way they consume and produce history. Although there is substantial scholarship covering how the discipline of military history has changed since the late nineteenth century, the literature surrounding why it changes and how it is used is less plentiful. Using primary and secondary sources to contextualize debates between historians, this study traces major developments in military historiography, considers the US Army’s relationship with its history, and explores potential connections between a history’s purpose and its use for military professionals.

Keywords: Whig history, New History, American Historical Association, US military history, Society for Military History

 

What qualifies as military history, and what purpose should that history serve? Although the answers to these questions may seem obvious, American military historians have wrestled with them since at least the late nineteenth century when Herbert Spencer declared their work useless. “Read them, if you like, for amusement,” he wrote, “but do not flatter yourself they are instructive.” Since then, conceptual frameworks such as Whig history, social history, and new military history have shaped the conversation around what military history is, what it should be, who should write it, and why and how it should be written.1

Significant changes appeared in the mid-twentieth century when compulsory military service disappeared from much of the Western world. Scholars began pondering why soldiers served voluntarily in peaceful democracies, how war impacted them once they returned to civilian life, and what gave shape to the relationship between a society and its military. These forms of inquiry became known as social or cultural military history, which can be useful for defense practitioners seeking to nurture strong leaders and improve organizational health. Despite these intriguing topics, by the 1990s, some military historians believed they were in a struggle to adapt to “recent historical trends” or perish.2

Contributors to this debate since the 1950s are plentiful, each offering original thought on the direction of military history and the historian’s role in charting the course. Yet, except for articles from Leonard Krieger and Ronald H. Spector regarding the Vietnam War, the literature pays insufficient attention to the complicated relationship between military historians, the US military, and the notion of purpose. The title of Russell F. Weigley’s 1973 classic, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy, only addresses what historians study, not how or why. Rather than examining the application of military force, this article focuses on those who chronicle its application to untangle the modes of thought regarding purpose in the profession. Although history’s utility is subjective, it can be separated into two categories:

  1. Deeper knowledge of the past for scholars.
  2. Tools for practitioners to contextualize the present and imagine the future.

Understanding how academic historians approach military history can make their products more useful to practitioners and more accessible to those in other fields of study.3

Before continuing, it is necessary to explain some terms. Academic military historians are formally trained faculty members specializing in subject matter related to the preparation for and conduct of war. These historians may teach at civilian universities, defense academies, or within the professional military education system. The way they publish their work—through academic publishers, popular trade presses, or government institutions, which cater to different audiences—can affect the work’s content and purpose. Historians who produce the latter “official” histories are subject to government policies and editorial processes. Authors without advanced degrees in history produce valuable military literature as well, such as political scientists, journalists, and even enthusiasts who might employ methodologies and sources that differ from those of academic military historians.

Regarding scope, this article begins by describing the concept of new military history before clarifying terminology and offering background on the idea of purpose. Next, I analyze military history’s intellectual development to argue that change is inevitable but contains the risk of descending into generalizations about military affairs rooted in the author’s intended purpose. After situating military history within the context of the Whig controversy, this study concludes by exploring the US Army’s latest challenge with interpreting its past before making recommendations for further research.

A Complicated History

The New History renaissance traces its roots to former president of the American Historical Association Edward Eggleston (1837–1902). Eggleston believed history’s purpose was to educate upright citizens, not soldiers. In 1900, he began his address to the association by critiquing Thucydides and Herodotus and calling on historians to “brush aside once and for all the domination of the classic tradition.” He cited sixteenth-century explorer Sir Walter Raleigh as a pioneer of this new approach for his “interest in the little details of life.” The term new military history began appearing in military literature by the mid-twentieth century. Initially, new military history was seen as a way of redirecting the historian’s gaze from war to its underlying social conditions.4 As Edward M. Coffman explains:

The growth of this new military history is the most significant recent development in the field. This shift in focus from the battlefields to military institutions, society, and thought, and how they fit in the currents of their times, together with the willingness to use social scientific techniques, has given us not only a more balanced image of the military but also, in some instances, new perspectives in the civilian areas.5

Throughout the twenty-first century, the elbowing aside of battlefield analysis in military history has drawn the attention of other fields of research and amplified the academic pedigree of military scholarship. Resulting from what Coffman describes as a peculiar combination of the academic community’s disinterest in militarism and the American public’s fascination with it, some of the most popular military histories are not written by historians. The works of political scientists, journalists, practitioners, American studies scholars, and government bureaucrats line the shelves of bookstores. Further complicating the matter are official histories produced by historians in the US Government Publishing Office or the US Army Center of Military History, which faced pressure to conform to US policy, especially after the Vietnam War.6

Roger J. Spiller described this wedge between official and academic history in 1988, paying special attention to historians who write institutional accounts while still employed by the federal government:

What had been for nearly a generation a wary relationship between the two camps had by 1968 been thoroughly poisoned by the war itself. Krieger, in particular, questioned whether those in government service, having bound themselves to the government’s flawed policies and strategic miscalculations, had surrendered any hope of scholarly independence—a suspicion that is still very much alive today. But it was the intersection of past and present that most disturbed Krieger, that dangerous point where one left fact for the fictions of the present.7

Potential conflicts of interest aside, the expansion of military studies into other historical disciplines has also drawn the attention of scholars who specialize in topics adjacent to war. The result of this tension is a paradox unique to military history. Volumes of its literature are produced by historians who lack expertise in military affairs, technical experts who lack formal pedagogical training, or even non-historians with an extracurricular interest in war (the buffs). Framed in such a light, an air of unseriousness toward the field became unavoidable and the sovereignty of its purpose assailable. Indeed, the latest version of American History Now, an authoritative academic source on the state of the art, contains no mention of military history.8

Terms and Conditions

As New History grows increasingly popular and the lines between war and peace continue to blur this century, the question of what constitutes a military history deserves greater attention. Before considering the usefulness of military history, however, it is necessary to define history writ large. Perhaps it is a representation of truth, given careful consideration of available primary sources. This definition echoes that of Allan Nevins in 1962: “History is any integrated narrative, description or analysis of past events or facts written in a spirit of critical inquiry for the whole truth.” If this description is what history is, then what it is for is another, perhaps more contentious, question. American historians Albert Bushnell Hart and Frederick Jackson Turner dissected this inquiry in the early twentieth century.9

Turner believes historians must keep one eye on the present while writing because history for its own sake is like collecting trinkets, whereas Hart objects to scientific history that is factual but unreadable for its bland narrative. Both agree history should appeal to more than those who write it because it shapes how society interprets its shared experiences and how people navigate the world around them. The Progressive Era in American history (roughly 1890–1920) was defined by “a rapid and sometimes turbulent transition from the conditions of an agrarian society to those of modern urban life.” Turner and Hart were products of this era in which many historians felt obligated to use history as a mechanism not simply for admiring the past but rather for moving civilization forward in what high society deemed the right direction. Historians thus felt compelled to take artistic liberty in their prose.10

Herman Ausubel writes that Hart’s “final purpose” for history was to find a “universally guiding principle” that could “explain the whole framework of the universe.” The search for principles drives structural histories, such as Weigley’s, which intend to reveal an American way of war that transcends the mere recording of events. In Ausubel’s eyes, this approach requires balance: “Indeed, many an author who wrote with an eye to the public suffered from an overactive imagination—one which was not to be constrained by the facts of history.” Motive, therefore, matters. If the purpose of a historian’s work is defined only by the virtues or inadequacies of the present, it is far easier to allow present conditions to color one’s conclusions about the past.11

Odd Arne Westad opens his global Cold War saga with Jasper Griffin’s thoughts on the dueling motives of historians: “There is curiosity about the past, what happened, and who did what, and why; and there is the hope to understand the present, how to place and interpret our own times, experiences, and hopes for the future.” Military history’s purpose springs from these two functions: utility in the present or a clearer window into the past. For military professionals, the study of war is an inescapably utilitarian process that can lead to the abuse of history if not treated carefully. Conversely, historians hoping to advance research within their field might also use topics adjacent to war as a vehicle for academic progress. Weigley argues persuasively that cultural factors influence the way individuals and institutions act and why. The same is true for historians. This duality between military and academic culture encompasses the complementary, but sometimes competing, purposes of military history.12

Academic historians write useful histories of war but, for the most part, without the intent to improve military practice, whereas federal institutions produce official military histories as government records. These latter histories are immensely valuable to scholars and practitioners, but they rely heavily, if not entirely, on sources government agencies and their employees produced that usually omit the perspectives of enemy forces, their governments, and the local population. As Wayne E. Lee has argued, this diversity of sources is essential to crafting military history because it allows historians to account for “mind and matter” in their causal analysis. The degree to which a manuscript emphasizes one or the other—the cultural or the materiel—is a product of the historian as much as the history. Purpose is, therefore, subject to the institutional conditions under which the history is created, making some new scholarship less useful to the military because it focuses on social conditions beyond practitioners’ control while giving superficial treatment to the tactical and material factors. Other forces—such as societal pressure, the intended audience, and the assumptions cultural or political power structures impose—also shape these conditions.13

Whiggish Residue

Military historians acknowledge the risk of intertwining their methods with contemporary social disciplines. For example, in 1975, the late Dennis E. Showalter pleaded with his colleagues to avoid straying too far from their “roots” on the battlefield. Showalter likened military historians who shy from these roots to scientists who “disregard Newton’s laws.” His argument renewed the emphasis on the corrupting influence of Whig history on his field.14

Coined by Cambridge University scholar Herbert Butterfield in 1931, the term Whig history rose to prominence by the mid-twentieth century. In 1968, Hugh Trevor-Roper referred to nineteenth-century British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay as the father of Whig history. Roper describes Macaulay’s style as “essentially English” and driven by the need for Protestant historians in sixteenth-century Europe to extol a “national history” after their break from Catholic Rome. Butterfield describes the Whig approach as “the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs . . . and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.” Whig authors were not defined by what they wrote but rather why they wrote. Their assumptions about the present, their personal values, and their beliefs gave their histories purpose. Eggleston held Macaulay’s work in high esteem.15

Despite Butterfield’s critique, admiration for the Whig approach endured. In 2012, American Historical Association President William Cronon praised Whig history, citing its contributions to progressive methods of historical inquiry. In Cronon’s eyes, Butterfield unfairly portrays Whig historians as incapable of divorcing their histories from “the lens of their own politics.” Butterfield believes Whig interpretations are wed to the narrative that Protestants and Whigs represent progress while Roman Catholics and Tories embody outdated forms of political power. Cronon, however, misreads Butterfield’s pejorative use of the term Whig as a crusade against progressive history.16

Butterfield takes exception not to progress but to teleological prose, or when a narrative’s purpose becomes more important than an accurate representation of the evidence. Rather than simply informing readers about the past, these works persuade them to think or act differently in the present. Whiggish history was designed to promote a “right” way of thinking, much like Eggleston’s dream of using New History to shape the conduct of a more civilized society. This ulterior motive is a sin for any historian but is especially germane to those who comb through the past to gain a better understanding of the present or imagine the future, such as military leaders. These errors still appear when writers edit in favor of their institutions or politics, inject anachronisms into their work that champion novel ideas as inherently superior means of historical inquiry, or judge past events by standards that did not exist at the time. This precarious act of balancing Turner’s eye to the present informs the evolution of the military historian’s profession and its relationship with the US officer corps.17

New Histories and Old Wounds

In 1991, Peter Paret wrote that the new military history emerged from conditions imposed upon historians by external forces as much as the inadequacies of military historians themselves. A decade prior, Richard Kohn penned an essay on the social history of the American soldier, identifying similar challenges in operational military histories. Chief among these issues was the tendency to depict events only in terms of battlefield exploits.18

Although the causes of such perspectives are many, one of the least-examined ones concerns the apolitical nature of the American military tradition. Aversion to war’s politics is baked into US military culture, rendering such topics taboo in the eyes of uniformed historians, a practice their civilian colleagues considered irresponsible. For centuries, historians have struggled to reconcile institutional or ideological loyalty with their interpretation of sources, making the challenge more an aspect of the human condition than something unique to modern Western armies. Islamic scholar and pioneer of academic history Ibn Khaldûn (1332–1406) identified “school” loyalty as a symptom of flawed history 600 years ago:

Untruth naturally afflicts historical information. There are various reasons that make this unavoidable. One of them is partisanship for opinions and schools. If the soul is impartial in receiving information, it devotes to that information the share of critical investigation the information deserves. . . . However, if the soul is infected with partisanship for a particular opinion or sect, it accepts without a moment’s hesitation the information that is agreeable to it.19

For better or worse, military service comes with partisan baggage related to national identity, service branch, and personal experience, which can distort views of the past and promote lofty assumptions about the future.

Throughout the twentieth century, the divide between American military institutions and the academy opened wounds from which the former are still recovering. Academic military historians John W. Shy, Robert M. Citino, Roger J. Spiller, and Lee have more recently shown how incorporating social, cultural, economic, and political lines of inquiry can help mend these wounds by approaching military history from avenues other than combat. In Citino’s view, these approaches welcomed a broader array of scholars under military history’s “big tent” by extending its appeal to other academic fields. A concern related to this development, however, is abridgment, which possesses Whiggish characteristics.20

Abridgment of history is unavoidable, but it implies that the authors possess the historiographical depth and technical expertise to determine what can be abbreviated without sacrificing meaning or substance. Jeremy Black observed that this trend can lead “those working on a part of the subject to feel that they understand the rest of it and thereby can readily contextualise their own contribution.” Under such circumstances, technical matters can bow to theory, thus creating histories that are less useful to defense professionals because they reflect the authors’ assumptions about military culture, tactics, and customs. If historians are not careful, the purpose of their work—the point—can become more important than the veracity of evidence. Nonetheless, other forms of abridgment can be equally problematic even if the historian possesses a depth of military experience.21

History and the Military Professional

Anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes that the closer one is to an event, the less holistic one’s appreciation of its complexity will be. Indeed, some of the best military historians never wore a uniform. It can be challenging, then, for military officers to write academic history because of their physical and emotional proximity to the topics they study. As of this writing, there is a significant catalog of scholarly defense journals to which military historians may contribute. In the past, however, students of war had fewer options.22

As Carol Reardon has documented, professional history writing in the US Army during the late nineteenth century was a hazardous duty:

The army’s writers, like its educators, represented a trend toward intellectualism that many traditionalists or practical soldiers resisted and resented. To complicate matters considerably, the War Department did not know quite how, or even whether, it should encourage its writers-in-uniform. . . . Military writers had to overcome strong institutional and personal biases for their literary plans to succeed. Often thrown back on their own resources, the army’s first writers had to be a tenacious lot.23

In addition to these barriers, writing good history required a dedication to neutrality that disagreed with the rigid service loyalties in the armed forces. This process of patriotism corrupting history is not unique to the United States. British historian David Reynolds saw Winston Churchill, for instance, as a spiritual descendant of the Whig tradition because he wrote “with an eye to his place in history” and a desire to spread a unique form of parliamentary freedom. The conflict of interest between telling what is most true and softening the negative impact it might have on one’s school, as Ibn Khaldûn puts it, has obstructed the relationship between uniformed military historians and their academic colleagues in the United States since at least the American Civil War. Again, the notion of purpose enters the fray as historians must consider what their histories are for: to understand the past or to inform the present and plan for the future.24

Despite its many triumphs and failures between 1775 and the dawn of the twentieth century, the US Army did not have a military history textbook in its postgraduate professional education system until Major Matthew Forney Steele authored one in 1909.25

Although American Campaigns was a welcome addition to the Army’s schooling system, the literature was somewhat of a paradox, as Reardon explains:

Steele’s project helped to overturn the conservative War Department publication policies that had discouraged many army authors from trying their hand at writing about the art of war. But in its tendency to use American military history to illustrate predetermined principles of warfare, Steele’s book helped to perpetuate the deductive applicatory methods of teaching the art of war.26

Reardon’s conclusion should come as no surprise, considering Steele admitted he had yet to master any of the campaigns covered, much less all of them. The struggle to translate American military history into a useful academic platform continued to face institutional resistance. American Army Captain Arthur L. Conger gave what was likely the first series of military history lectures by a servicemember at an American civilian institution when he spent a summer teaching at Harvard University in 1915. The War Department discouraged the plan but reluctantly allowed Conger to attend at his own expense. While on active service there, Conger founded and coedited The Military Historian and Economist for its short run. Still, three years after the 1937 launch of the Journal of the American Military History Foundation (now known as the Journal of Military History), and Adolf Hitler’s invasion of France, Harvey A. DeWeerd wrote that “the objective study of warfare has not been a recognized branch of knowledge in this country.”27

Scholars viewed military historians as conduits of militarism or propagandists for their favorite general, service branch, or pet theory. Some soldier historians thus flirted with Whig interpretation by using history to advance a personal or institutional agenda. Others simply could not avoid viewing the past through a service-conscious filter. Some of the best military minds fell victim to this practice, such as Alfred Thayer Mahan and Giulio Douhet. Despite their valuable contributions to military thought, they used history to paint a picture in which their domain of warfare eclipsed all past and future domains.28

These developments reflect Showalter’s more recent concern that new military history is transforming the field into a mechanism for glorifying the present instead of understanding the past. The selective plucking of historical lessons to validate new operational concepts is as much a Whiggish crime as historians using old wars to promote the virtue of social or political progress in the Western world. Increased awareness of these shortfalls has since given rise to programs designed to fill the Army’s ranks with formally trained academic historians who can build upon the foundations Steele and Conger established. Initiatives such as Advanced Civil Schooling enroute to teaching history at the United States Military Academy or the US Army War College and the Advanced Strategic Planning and Policy Program allow officers to obtain graduate degrees from civilian institutions and put them to use. Despite this progress, the Army’s official histories can still provoke timeworn tensions.29

“Sacred Cows” in Official History—Still a Protected Species?

Official military histories generally focus on the tactical and operational levels of war, carefully avoiding political indictments. They trade in the facts of the battlefield, whereas academic histories, unburdened by the need for government approval to publish, can be unflattering for politicians or senior national security officials. Reconciling these contradictions can sow disharmony in civil-military relations, as evidenced by Douglas Kinnard’s 1977 book The War Managers, H. R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam in 1997, and Daniel P. Bolger’s Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars in 2014. Kinnard and McMaster faced professional backlash for their toils, though they were not writing official histories.30

More recently, the US Army has enlisted some bright scholars to record its wars, but even here the historian wins costly victories. One example is the two-volume, 1,300-page U.S. Army in the Iraq War, published in 2019, and edited by US Army Colonels Frank K. Sobchack and Joel D. Rayburn. Sobchak was a career Special Forces officer and Rayburn a Middle East historian. Chief of Staff of the Army Raymond T. Odierno commissioned the study in 2013, and the authors completed a reviewed proof by 2016, but it took three more years to publish. Odierno reportedly directed Rayburn and Sobchak to “kill sacred cows” in the history—or avoid mincing words for political reasons—so the nation could learn from the Army’s mistakes in Iraq. The history had a clear purpose. Like Hart, Odierno wanted the account to be interesting, not some bland narration that would sit on a shelf somewhere because it “reads like a refrigerator repair manual.”31

Elements of the book portraying civil-military friction, potential soldier misconduct, and the flawed assumptions of leaders in Washington, however, held up publication. By 2017, along with a change in Pentagon leadership came fresh priorities in the nation’s renewed focus on strategic competition and a reluctance to dwell on America’s unpopular wars in the Middle East. The new Chief of Staff of the Army as of 2015, General Mark A. Milley, seemed more inclined to spare the “cows” of which Odierno spoke. Correspondent Michael R. Gordon’s October 2018 column in The Wall Street Journal put the study’s gridlock under a public microscope, and it finally published in 2019. Kohn wrote in 1981 that it “is time for historians to take a fresh look at the American soldier; for too long, political and policy concerns have dictated the very categories of inquiry.” In some instances, it seems, those concerns still give military history its purpose.32

Conclusion

History is powerful. Were it not, the Army’s chronicle of the Iraq War would have avoided such paralyzing scrutiny. Yet, if Paul Kennedy was too optimistic about the future of military history in 1991, perhaps John A. Lynn II was too pessimistic about the same in 1997, considering the healthy appetite for it now. The new American way of studying war is increasingly cultural. This progress is good for the profession and for civil-military relations. Military history cannot be told through battlefields alone because the diverse and pervasive influence of war on society will not tolerate such parochialism. Historians such as Citino, Lee, Shy, and Spiller have shown how weaving cultural elements into military history can improve our understanding of topics that concern practitioners, such as how the Army has navigated periods of radical social change or treated prisoners of war. Much as Butterfield’s Whig argument came to define classic military history, modern historians will continue grappling with new influences on their field. This debate should be welcomed as long as scholars recognize their biases and are willing to question them in their research.33

Change is an indelible mark of the arts and sciences, yet not all progress is appropriate, especially if it has Whiggish characteristics that glorify purpose over practice or promote the norms of one culture, era, or institution as superior. What is gained in a process of change can be as valuable as what is lost, and it is here that new military historians must proceed with caution, lest their histories become esoteric novelties to generations beyond that in which they were conceived. Historians and military institutions have roles to play in moving the field forward with a clear purpose of understanding the past, negotiating the present, and imagining the future. They can start by exploring the following questions:

  1. Which aspects of the American military tradition have impeded or even discouraged serious historical scholarship from US servicemembers?
  2. Does objective civilian control of the military, in which servicemembers treat politics as anathema, prevent the military from conducting honest historical inquiry of its past wars?
  3. How have US officials and planners misread history to fit predetermined conclusions, sooth political tensions, or draft policies and doctrine that inspired flawed training practices or war plans?
  4. How have the rifts between military and civilian historians hampered progress or research in the field of military history, and how can these rifts be mended?34

Reardon’s work underscores the need to examine in greater detail the purpose of military history from different angles, to question historical assumptions that underpin military thinking, and to expand academic interest in military affairs as much as intellectual curiosity in the Defense establishment. Once presumed to be insulated bubbles of groupthink, the US military’s more recent official histories challenge this notion with their intellectual rigor, transparency, and completeness, despite the administrative obstacles mentioned herein. Generating further support for such work could lead to fresh perspectives on military history’s purpose and a richer understanding of the soldier’s place in the American way of studying war.

 
 

Michael P. Ferguson
Major Michael P. Ferguson (US Army) is a PhD student and Advanced Civil Schooling participant in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ferguson’s military experience includes assignments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Europe, and Africa. He is coauthor of The Military Legacy of Alexander the Great: Lessons for the Information Age (Routledge, 2024).

 
 

Disclaimer: Articles, reviews and replies, review essays, and book reviews published in Parameters are unofficial expressions of opinion. The views and opinions expressed in Parameters are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of Defense, the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. The appearance of external hyperlinks does not constitute endorsement by the Department of Defense of the linked websites or the information, products, or services contained therein. The Department of Defense does not exercise any editorial, security, or other control over the information you may find at these locations.

 
 

Endnotes

  1. Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (D. Appleton, 1860), 67. Herman Ausubel later challenged Spencer’s claim. He also wrote that this “new history” focused on small things, such as culture and manners, aimed to “weed the savagery and brutality out of man.” Herman Ausubel, Historians and Their Craft: A Study of the Presidential Addresses of the American Historical Association, 1884–1945 (Columbia University Press, 1950), 300–301, 310–15; Edward M. Coffman, “The New American Military History,” Military Affairs 48, no. 1 ( January 1984): 1–5, https://doi.org/10.2307/1988340. Eggleston was the father of new history. Edward Eggleston, A History of the United States and Its People: For Use of Schools (D. Appleton, 1888). His final work published posthumously and continued his focus on everyday life. Edward Eggleston and George Cary Eggleston, The New Century History of the United States (American Book, 1904). Return to text.
  2. Richard Kohn was one of the first to ask the question (of why soldiers served voluntarily in peaceful democracies, how war impacted them once they returned to civilian life, and what gave shape to the relationship between a society and its military). Richard H. Kohn, “The Social History of the American Soldier: A Review and Prospectus for Research,” The American Historical Review 86, no. 3 ( June 1981): 564–66, https://doi.org/10.2307/1860370; and John A. Lynn, “The Embattled Future of Academic Military History,” The Journal of Military History 61, no. 4 (October 1997): 777–89, https://doi.org/10.2307/2954086. Return to text.
  3. Dennis E. Showalter, “A Modest Plea for Drums and Trumpets,” Military Affairs 39, no. 2 (April 1975): 71–74, https://doi.org/10.2307/1986931; Peter Paret, “The New Military History,” Parameters 21, no. 1 (1991): 10–18, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol21/iss1/25/; Jeremy Black, “Determinisms and Other Issues,” The Journal of Military History 68, no. 4 (October 2004): 1,217–32, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3396968; Wayne E. Lee, “Mind and Matter – Cultural Analysis in American Military History: A Look at the State of the Field,” The Journal of American History 93, no. 4 (March 2007): 1,116–42, https://doi.org/10.2307/25094598; Robert M. Citino, “Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction,” The American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (October 2007): 1,070–90, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.112.4.1070; Leonard Krieger, “Official History and the War in Vietnam: Comment,” Military Affairs 32, no. 1 (Spring 1968): 16–19, https://doi.org/10.2307/1983587; Ronald Spector, “Getting Down to the Nitty-Gritty: Military History, Official History and the American Experience in Vietnam,” Military Affairs 38, no. 1 (February 1974): 11–12, https://doi.org/10.2307/1987324; Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Macmillan, 1973). An updated treatment included a response from Weigley: Brian M. Linn and Russel F. Weigley, “ ‘The American Way of War’ Revisited,” The Journal of Military History 66, no. 2 (April 2002): 501–30, http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3093069. If there is a distinctive “American way of war,” then there might also be an American way of studying war. Cultural and social history is one angle, but that does not mean these angles alone are superior or even sufficient methods of inquiry. John Shy, “The Cultural Approach to the History of War,” The Journal of Military History 57, no. 5 (October 1993): 12–26, https://doi.org/10.2307/2951799.” Return to text.
  4. Eggleston fell ill and could not deliver his speech, located here: Edward Eggleston, “The New History,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1900, vol. 1 (United States Government Printing Office, 1901), 35–37; and Edward Eggleston “The New History,” American Historical Association (website), n.d., accessed August 15, 2024, https://www.historians.org/presidential-address/edward-eggleston/. Return to text.
  5. Coffman, “New American Military History,” 1. Return to text.
  6. John Lynn made a strong argument in 1997 that military historians must expand their research apertures to survive. Lynn, “Embattled Future,” 782–84; Coffman, “New American Military History,” 1. Ronald Spector found that some of the “most important work in the field was, in fact, done by persons without formal historical training.” Ronald H. Spector, “Military History and the Academic World,” in A Guide to the Study and Use of Military History, ed. John E. Jessup Jr. and Robert W. Coakley (Center of Military History, 1988), 432; and Roger J. Spiller, “Military History and Its Fictions,” The Journal of Military History 70, no. 4 (October 2006): 1,087–88, https://doi.org/10.1353/jmh.2006.0280. Return to text.
  7. Spiller, “History and Its Fictions,” 1,087. Return to text.
  8. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, eds., American History Now (Temple University Press, 2011). Return to text.
  9. Hans-Georg Ehrhart, “Postmodern Warfare and the Blurred Boundaries Between War and Peace,” Defense & Security Analysis 33, no. 3 (2017): 263–75, https://doi.org/10.1080/14751798.2017.1351156; N. W. Collins, Grey Wars: A Contemporary History of U.S. Special Operations (Yale University Press, 2021); Andrzej Jacuch, “The Blurred Lines of Peace and War – An Analysis of Information Operations Used by the Russian Federation in CEE,” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 35, no. 2 (2022): 157–80, https://doi.org/10.1080/13518046.2022.2139071; and Allan Nevins, The Gateway to History, rev. ed. (Doubleday, 1962), 39. Return to text.
  10. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (Knopf, 1956), 7. See also Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 1917–1933, 2nd ed. (St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 13; and Hart et al., Guide to the Study and Reading of American History (Ginn and Company, 1912). Return to text.
  11. Ausubel, Historians and Their Craft, 46, 129, 159, 210–11. Return to text.
  12. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1; Michael Howard, “The Use and Abuse of Military History,” Parameters 11, no. 1 ( July 1981): 9–14, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol11/iss1/16/, originally published by RUSI, 1961; Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (Modern Library, 2008); and Linn, “Way of War Revisited,” 529–30. Return to text.
  13. The suspicion of official military history peaked after the My Lai Massacre cover-up but has since improved its reputation. Goldstein et al., The My Lai Massacre and its Cover-Up: Beyond the Reach of Law? (Free Press, 1976). Robert Futrell portrayed the application of US airpower in Korea favorably in his 1956 history. Revisionist historians with broader access to Korean archives and declassified documents later challenged this interpretation. Robert F. Futrell, United States Air Force Operations in the Korean Conflict, vol. 2, 1 July 1952–27 July 1953 (Department of the Air Force, 1983). For a revision of the efficacy of the US bombing campaign in Korea, see Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (Modern Library, 2010). Lee, “Mind and Matter,” 1,140–42. Return to text.
  14. Showalter, “Drums and Trumpets,” 71–73. Return to text.
  15. Butterfield’s more popular works, such as Lord Acton (G. Philip & Son, 1948) and Liberty in the Modern World (Ryerson Press, 1952), grew his reputation mid-century. Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Lord Macaulay: The History of England,” in History and the Enlightenment, ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper (Penguin Books, 1968), 7–8; Herbert Butterfield, preface, The Whig Interpretation of History (G. Bell and Sons, 1931); and James A. Rawley, “Edward Eggleston: Historian,” Indiana Magazine of History 40, no. 4 (December 1944): 341–52. Return to text.
  16. William Cronon, “Two Cheers for the Whig Interpretation of History,” Perspectives on History 50, no. 6 (September 2012), https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/september-2012/two-cheers-for-the-whig-interpretation-of-history. Citino’s 2007 article broke this barrier. Citino, “Histories Old and New.” For a summary of earlier shortages, see Lynn, “Embattled Future,” 780. Return to text.
  17. Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal, ed. N. J. Dawood (Princeton University Press, 2005), 26. For background on “placement theory,” see Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (Free Press, 1986). Return to text.
  18. Paret, “New Military History,” 10–18. The American Military Institute selected “The New Military History” as the theme for its 58th annual meeting held in North Carolina from March 22 to 23, 1991. An output from that conference was this article: John Whiteclay Chambers II, “The New Military History: Myth and Reality,” The Journal of Military History 55, no. 3 ( July 1991): 395–406; and Kohn, “Social History,” 553–67. Return to text.
  19. Ibn Khaldûn, Muqaddimah, 35. Return to text.
  20. Carol Reardon, Soldiers and Scholars: The U.S. Army and the Uses of Military History, 1865–1920 (University Press of Kansas, 1990); Carol Ann Reardon, “The Study of Military History and the Growth of Professionalism in the U.S. Army Before World War I” (PhD diss., University of Kentucky, 1987); Shy, “Cultural Approach”; Lee, “Mind and Matter”; Spiller, “History and its Fictions”; and Citino, “Histories Old and New,” 1,070. Return to text.
  21. Jeremy Black, “Military History and the Whig Interpretation: A Tribute to Dennis Showalter,” U.S. Military History Review 6, no. 1 (December 2019): 3; John Lynn, review of The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revolutions and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000, by Yuval Noah Harari, American Historical Review 114, no. 3 (June 2009): 709, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.114.3.708. See also claims made in Simeon Man, Soldiering Through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific (University of California Press, 2018). Return to text.
  22. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995), 70–71. Ibn Khaldûn, Showalter, John Keegan, Brian McAllister Linn, and Michael S. Neiberg are prominent examples of military historians who have not served in the military. Keegan’s The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme (Penguin Books, 1976) remains a landmark work of social military history. Parameters, Joint Force Quarterly, PRISM, Military Review, Proceedings, Æther (formerly Strategic Studies Quarterly), the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, the Journal of Advanced Military Studies, and Expeditions with MCUP (the Marine Corps University Press) are examples of peer-reviewed journals. See also the Harding Project: Zachary Griffiths and Theo Lipsky, “Introducing the Harding Project: Renewing Professional Military Writing,” Modern War Institute (website), September 5, 2023, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/introducing-the-harding-project-renewing-professional-military-writing/. Return to text.
  23. Reardon, Soldiers and Scholars, 89. Return to text.
  24. David Reynolds, “Churchill the Historian,” History Today 55, no. 2 (February 2005): 16–17. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote “[t]here is no such thing as patriotic art and patriotic science.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe, rev. ed., trans. T. Bailey Saunders (Macmillan, 1908), 163. Goethe, as quoted in Richard Cohen, Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2022), 570; Eggleston, “New History,” 36–40; and Ibn Khaldûn, Muqaddimah, 35. Return to text.
  25. Matthew Forney Steele, American Campaigns (Byron S. Adams, 1909). Return to text.
  26. Reardon, Soldiers and Scholars, 109. Return to text.
  27. Steele, American Campaigns, iii. Conger benefited from a Harvard education and from Harvard Professor Robert Matteson Johnston, who developed a close relationship with the US Army War College. Reardon, “Study of Military History,” 158, 393–406, 413. The Military Historian and the Economist journal, coedited by Johnston, ran from 1916 to 1918. Alexander Baltzly, “Robert Matteson Johnston and the Study of Military History,” Military Affairs 21, no. 2 (Spring 1957): 28. The Journal of the American Military History Foundation became The Journal of the American Military Institute in 1939 before being renamed Military Affairs in 1941. The periodical became The Journal of Military History in 1989. Harvey DeWeerd, “Intellectual Preparedness,” The Journal of the American Military Institute 4, no. 2 (Summer 1940): 65. For an early history of the journal, see Victor Gondos Jr., “Goal Accomplished, Goal to Go,” Military Affairs 17 (1953): 55–56. Return to text.
  28. Hart challenged this disparaging outlook toward military history’s usefulness in educating the armed forces. He leveraged his relationship with the American Historical Association to improve military studies in the United States. Reardon, Soldiers and Scholars, 147–63, 167. Still, the perception of a corrupted or inherently biased officer class remained. Arthur A. Ekirch Jr., “Military History: A Civilian Caveat,” Military Affairs 21, no. 2 (Summer 1957): 49–54, https://doi.org/10.2307/1984524; A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, 14th ed. (Little, Brown, 1890); and Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrari (Coward-McCann, 1942). Return to text.
  29. Showalter, “Drums and Trumpets,” 72; and Black, “Whig Interpretation,” 2–3. Return to text.
  30. Kinnard’s book was an indictment of Vietnam War policy that displeased General William Westmoreland. Douglas Kinnard, The War Managers (University Press of New England, 1977); H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam (HarperCollins, 1997); and Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). Return to text.
  31. Joel D. Rayburn and Frank K. Sobchack, eds., The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, vol. 1, Invasion – Insurgency – Civil War, 2003–2006 (US Army War College Press, 2019), https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/386/; and Joel D. Rayburn and Frank K. Sobchack, eds., The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, vol. 2, Surge and Withdrawal, 2007–2011 (US Army War College Press, 2019), https://press.armywarcollege.edu/articles_editorials/454/. Readers of the draft took issue with everything from prisoner detentions to tense exchanges with allies or civilian leaders. The delay forced a change in publisher from the US Army Center of Military History (CMH) to the US Army War College Press, even though the manuscript had passed review, copy edit, and indexing with CMH. The study went through the publication process again at the war college. Interview with Colonel Frank Sobchak (US Army Special Forces, ret., and chair, Irregular Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute), October 19, 2023. Return to text.
  32. The 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States (White House, 2017) and the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States (Department of Defense, 2018) shifted focus from fighting terrorism in the Middle East to strategic competition with China and Russia. This shift influenced perceptions of the Iraq study’s urgency. Sobchak, interview; Michael; Michael R. Gordon, “The Army Stymied Its Own Study of the Iraq War,” The Wall Street Journal (website), October 22, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-army-ordered-an-unvarnished-iraq-war-historythen-let-it-languish-1540220153; and Kohn, “Social History,” 563. Return to text.
  33. Paul Kennedy, “The Fall and Rise of Military History,” MHQ 3, no. 2 (Winter 1991); Lynn, “Embattled Future,” 778; Citino, “Military Histories,” 1,074–75; and Hobsbawm, as cited in Cohen, Making History, 7. Return to text.
  34. Samuel Phillips Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957); and Samuel P. Huntington, “Civilian Control and the Constitution,” American Political Science Review 50, no. 3 (September 1956): 676–78, https://doi.org/10.2307/1951551. Return to text.