Military history thrives with the public, not professors
Military history studies armed conflict and its social, cultural, and economic fallout—causes, doctrine, logistics, leadership, technology. Academies teach it to avoid repeating mistakes, yet William McNeill called the field an intellectual ghetto inside university history even while popular books sell.
Officer schools treat the past as a tool. They want commanders who can spot historical parallels mid-battle and avoid old errors, and the US Combat Studies Institute trains its instructors to stress themes and context over memorised detail, under the motto Past is Prologue. The field changes as fast as armies do, driven by industrial, nuclear and information-age technology; the idea of a Revolution in Military Affairs describes bursts of rapid change, such as gunpowder's arrival, followed by long stable stretches. Just war theory sits alongside, probing the ethics of fighting.
McNeill based his ghetto verdict on 144 books published between 1968 and 1978, split between journalists writing for the public and specialists inside the military establishment, and he called academic disdain for the subject one of the profession's strangest prejudices. University courses nonetheless stay popular. At the University of Maine, Eugene Scleh taught a course on modern war entirely through films, and students rated the documentaries above the dramas. The Society for Military History, with 2,300 members, has published its journal quarterly since 1937, and the online forum H-War has drawn more than 4,000 subscribers since 1993.
Sources are treacherous. Commanders tend to shrink failures and inflate victories, and secrecy destroys records, so scholars still cannot say exactly what Greek fire was, and historians of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq face deliberately destroyed files. Jeremy Black lists inherited blind spots: Eurocentrism, technological bias, fixation on great powers and state-to-state war, and treating land, sea and air apart.
Politics colours interpretation too. In the early 1980s Jeffrey Kimball surveyed 109 American diplomatic historians and 54 military historians and found views moderately correlated with their readings of 20th-century wars. Among the military historians, 40 percent called themselves conservative and 35 percent liberal, against 10 and 53 percent among diplomatic historians.
Source: Military history
