The “traditional forms of history are dying” meme is strong within conservative precincts, and, oddly, the New York Times. “Traditional” in this case usually means one of a choice of political, diplomatic, economic or military history. The regular story is that these important kinds of history are being excluded from academia by (unstated but usually implied) less important forms of history that involve politically correct topics like race and gender. The articles are written from the viewpoint of the traditional forms of history, and those quoted represent those forms. Input from those historians practicing the PC forms are largely ignored.
A canonical example of this came a few years ago, in the National Review. John Miller wrote “Sounding Taps: Why Military History is being retired,” which took as its starting point the inability of the University of Wisconsin to fill the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair in Military History. Miller’s article is typical of the breed. It nodded to the “official reason” why the Chair hasn’t been filled, but then pivoted to the “real” explanation:
The ostensible reason for the delay is that the university wants to raise even more money, so that it can attract a top-notch senior scholar. There may be another factor as well: Wisconsin doesn’t actually want a military historian on its faculty. It hasn’t had one since 1992, when Edward M. Coffman retired. “His survey course on U.S. military history used to overflow with students,” says Richard Zeitlin, one of Coffman’s former graduate teaching assistants. “It was one of the most popular courses on campus.” Since Coffman left, however, it has been taught only a couple of times, and never by a member of the permanent faculty.
And even the military history that some are doing was not acceptable to Miller because their military history took as its main focus social and cultural concerns. Thus had military history been “infiltrated” by social history to the cost of the real kind of military history, operational military history (this ignored–as Mark Grimsley pointed out) that Mac Coffman, Wisconsin’s emeritus military historian, was actually a social historian of the American Army. Never mind the facts, we have a narrative to write.
But this post is not mainly about Miller’s article. That came out a while ago, and others have done a good job of shredding it: Grimsley’s post mentioned above, and a number of others by him, which are gathered here. There was also a useful discussion on H-War.
No, this post is about the way in which the narrative overcomes the reality. This is nowhere in evidence more than in the most recent article of the genre, Patricia Cohen’s piece in the New York Times. The article starts off with the standard lead-in:
To the pessimists evidence that the field of diplomatic history is on the decline is everywhere. Job openings on the nation’s college campuses are scarce, while bread-and-butter courses like the Origins of War and American Foreign Policy are dropping from history department postings. And now, in what seems an almost gratuitous insult, Diplomatic History, the sole journal devoted to the subject, has proposed changing its title.
For many in the field this latest suggestion is emblematic of a broader problem: the shrinking importance not only of diplomatic history but also of traditional specialties like economic, military and constitutional history
It goes on in this vein, quoting senior diplomatic historians and a lone graduate student, mostly commiserating the state of the field. All in all, it’s a pretty standard example of the type. Others have done more extended jobs critiquing the article for its lack of any voices on the other side of the debate, or looking at the assumption that fields can’t evolve and change their approaches. What I want to look at, instead, is the accompanying chart:
The data is courtesy of the American Historical Association, but the thing that struck me was that the number of military history positions has been flat (1975-1990) or growing (1990-2005). This is in contrast to diplomatic and economic history positions, which are declining, but similar to cultural history and gender history positions, which are increasing.
That surely does not fit the accepted wisdom of the declining state of military history within the academy, of the reluctance of politically-correct departments to hire “warmongers,” or of a generation of military historians retiring and not being replaced. (Nor, should I note, does the fact that the University of Wisconsin did actually hire a military historian for the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair, something that John J. Miller does not seem to have acknowledged anywhere). So perhaps the view of what’s going on should be a little more nuanced? Maybe there’s room for an investigation of what’s actually going on? If military history is a traditional field being evicted by trendy historians of society, cultural, race, gender, etc., why are the number of positions increasing recently? Surely, there’s a discussion to be had?
Actually, no. The bizarre thing about the growth in military history revealed by the article is that nobody noticed, not even the author of the article. Close to the end of the article, Cohen put in an anecdote about the problems of military history in the academy:
Simply giving everyone a place at the table is just not affordable in an era of shrinking resources. “I’d love to let a hundred flowers bloom,” said Alonzo L. Hamby, a history professor at Ohio University in Athens, but “it’s hard for all but the largest departments or the richest.” In his own department of about 30 faculty members, a military historian recently retired, triggering a vigorous debate over how to advertise for a replacement. (A handful of faculty members had the view that “military history is evil,” Mr. Hamby said.) The department finally agreed to post a listing for a specialist in “U.S. and the world,” he said, “the sort of mushy description that could allow for a lot of possibilities.”
The conclusion pushed by the anecdote is, of course, that military history is on the way out, a conclusion belied by the chart in the article itself, a contradiction never addressed.
The strangeness continued. Reactions to the article all accepted uncritically the words of the article, and paid no attention to the actual numbers presented. A letter to the editor simply repeated the trinity of “traditional” history courses:
You report that the number of college courses in diplomatic, military, legal and economic history is shrinking, while the number of courses in social and cultural history is increasing
Stan Katz at the Chronicle went even further and erroneously reported that the numbers supported Cohen’s assertions:
She cites figures provided by the ever-reliable Rob Townsend of the American Historical Association showing that, indeed, there has been a substantial decrease in the number of diplomatic historians over the past 30 years — and that the same is true of specialists in military and economic history.
Of all the notes or reactions to this article, only Ralph Luker at Cliopatria picked up on the increase in military history. The received story is evidently so powerful and so assumed that even those who disagreed with it (like Timothy Burke and Claire Potter) still brought its premises, even when presented with clearly contradictory evidence. The tension between “traditional” and “cutting-edge” forms of scholarship is a powerful narrative device. Add to that the perceived tension between “right-wing” military history and “politically-correct” social and gender history, and it seems like military history should be part of the pack of traditional specialties, specialties being marginalized within left-wing history departments. That the evidence is much more ambiguous than that must then be ignored.
Never mind the facts, we have a narrative to write.
37 comments
June 17, 2009 at 9:11 am
Vance
FWIW, the chart shows an increase in the percentage of departments with a military-history specialist. I don’t suppose the number of history departments has actually gone down during this period, or that the distribution of specialties has “clumped” (dozens of diplomatic historians clubbing together at Duke or what have you), so probably the trend is indeed in the direction that chart suggests.
June 17, 2009 at 9:33 am
Mr Punch
I think there’s no doubt that, in American history, the lineup of usual “slots” in a mid-size department has evolved and blurred since (say) 1970. At that time, there was generally a core based on (largely political) periodization (e.g., colonial, 20th century), plus some number of special fields (diplomatic, economic) — confused, of course, by the fact that most historians have both a period and a focus (e.g., political history of the Jacksonian era). I don’t mean to imply that the change is for the worse, but it has happened.
Two side observations on specific fields: US military history used to be available in ROTC courses not involving history faculty (I don’t know if that’s still true); and European diplomatic history appealed to certain students in part because (they said) so many of the diplomats were gay.
June 17, 2009 at 9:39 am
David Carlton
My own beef is with the notion of the decline in economic history. First, economic history has never been especially strong; it’s news to me, a (sorta) economic historian who got involved in the field in the 1970s, that it’s ever been an anchor of the “traditional” curriculum. Second, just about everyone who knows anything about the field knows that it’s been successfully colonized by the economists since the co-called cliometric revolution of the 1960s, and many practitioners reside in economics departments [Whether this is on balance good or bad for the field is another topic]. My own department hasn’t had an explicitly labeled “economic historian” in a number of years, but we’ve had a business historian [and a southern historian--me--with both a teaching and scholarly interest in the subject], while our economics department has one of the most distinguished US economic historians and one of the young comers in the field, along with several other economists with historical teaching and research interests. We even have a joint major in Economics and History, which is enormously popular among undergraduates. Others have pointed out that international relations and political science have similarly occupied some of the space of history-based diplomatic historians.
That said, I actually thought Cohen’s article was one of the fairer and more balanced discussions of this increasingly tiresome topic, and I understand that, as a one-woman *Lingua Franca,* she has a huge amount of ground to cover. I’ve seen far worse in the NYT, especially what seemed once to be the annual “Let’s Make Fun of the Screwy Paper Titles on the MLA Program” piece. Moreover, she actually *did* recognize that these “traditional” vs. “nontraditional” labels draw lines in the sand that aree just that–sand.
June 17, 2009 at 9:43 am
Ahistoricality
Something about that chart doesn’t make sense: “diplomatic and international” history is clearly in decline according to those numbers, but World history and transnational history are growing fields. The definitions are screwy, somehow.
June 17, 2009 at 9:58 am
Vance
Where are you seeing “World history and transnational history”? I’m confused — but pretty sure they’re not in Cohen’s chart or article.
June 17, 2009 at 10:04 am
Charlieford
“nowhere in evidence more . . .” I’ve never thought much of the no-split-infinitives rule, but about that, I don’t know. As to substance, can we agree that lamentations about the state of history are present politics?
June 17, 2009 at 10:15 am
Lori
Future of diplomatic history to be discussed next week at a SHAFR roundtable. I can attempt to summarize and report back. Should be a rockin’ time.
June 17, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Ahistoricality
Vance: no, they’re not. But what does “international” cover if it doesn’t include world or transnational?
June 17, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Vance
Still feeling confused here. You wrote, “World history and transnational history are growing fields”. The chart shows “Diplomatic or international” as a shrinking field (in terms of slot-coverage).
June 17, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Timothy Burke
I don’t buy the premises of the article in terms of numerical decline in most of those areas in the past 5 to 10 years. But I kind of gave up on getting anywhere trying to convince folks who are sure that these fields are markedly less represented in the discipline in numerical terms the last time this debate did the rounds. As you say, it’s a stubborn belief.
However, I don’t think it’s entirely wrong to say that over the longer term (last 30 years), military, political and diplomatic history have become less predominant both numerically and intellectually within the discipline. The academy expanded overall during that time, so not all of social and cultural history’s growth came at the expense of other specializations: this is not a zero-sum game. But the proportions have shifted somewhat.
I also think that there’s some grounds for saying that there subtle struggles over status or respectability in disciplinary circles that have worked modestly against these fields in what’s being imagined to be their “traditional” forms. But subtle is the operative word here. The imaginary social historian meanie that these complaints summon up whose lips curl in undisguised contempt at the thought of military history strikes me as largely a caricature. All specialized fields like to carry around a sense of their imagined persecution: lots of Africanists, for example, can quickly serve up a complaint about how they are marginalized within the discipline, etc. Equally to the point, and this was the big thrust of my recent post, if political/military/diplomatic history is defined as a static rhetorical and methodological practice, as having to be just the way it was thirty years ago, small wonder if other scholars look askance on that kind of work, given that academic disciplines are so heavily driven by a belief that it’s important to innovate, to rethink, to be original. There’s a ton of great works of political, diplomatic and military history out there that the complainers may not recognize as such because it’s written in a fresh manner, incorporating the insights of social, cultural, environmental history, etc.
June 17, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Prof B
It’s also worth noting that a fair amount — @ least in a purely anecdotal, eyeballing-the-shelves-at-Borders kind of way — appears to be done by amateurs, including (especially?) the operational stuff. ["Amateur" not in the pejorative but in the traditional sense of the term.]
And since so much of that seems to sell so well — just flipping into the front matter there’s evidence of dozens of printings in many of them (Rick Atkinson, say) — perhaps there’s a kind of implicit market disincentive to do “scholarly” military history?
June 17, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Ahistoricality
Vance, I’m saying that World history and transnational history are not being included in the chart’s numbers. That’s precisely my point: they’re leaving something out.
June 17, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Vance
Ah! Now I get it, sorry. You were referring to reality, not the chart. Makes sense now.
June 17, 2009 at 3:47 pm
andrew
I like this part of the article:
You see, the actions and statements of presidents is a traditional topic and not done much anymore, while studying Truman’s decision to integrate the armed forces is something new and completely different.
June 17, 2009 at 3:57 pm
andrew
And David Carlton makes the point I wanted to make about economic history. To the extent that there was a traditional form of economic history, it was the kind of work that went into books like the Handlin’s Commonwealth or Hartz’s Pennsylvania book. That kind of work is probably closer to APD – which represents a sort of return to political history in both poli sci departments and among some historians – or business history. Economic history as presently done is a relative of quantitative social history.
On Ahistoricality’s point: many of Cohen’s quotes look like they were taken directly from a discussion on h-diplo in March 2009. See the logs here. The thread subject?: “terminology: diplomatic history, international history, and transnationalism.” It’s too bad she didn’t do more work trying to sort out the terms.
June 17, 2009 at 4:12 pm
dana
Honest question. Thirty years ago, if I were to make this chart, would diplomatic history, military history & whatever we mean by international history be under one umbrella?
Point of honest question: I wonder if subdiscipline proliferation is perhaps part of the perception that certain areas are underrepresented. E.g., if an area used to have three positions, but now it is two areas with three positions, that would shift the numbers.
June 17, 2009 at 5:29 pm
silbey
Lots of good comments, thanks.
David Carlton makes a nice point about the way in which the subject is more complicated in *any* of the specialties which enter into the discussion, whether military or economic history. I do also wonder–as a parallel of economics departments “taking over” economic history–how much the rise of public policy departments has pulled in people who might otherwise have done political history.
Ahistoricality highlights another contradiction in the narrative, which is that the evolution of fields is discounted. Thus “transnational” history does not count towards diplomatic history, because it isn’t, in some way, pure enough. Social military history doesn’t count because it’s interested in the battlefield. Etc. Etc.
don’t think it’s entirely wrong to say that over the longer term (last 30 years), military, political and diplomatic history have become less predominant both numerically and intellectually within the discipline.
But the number of military history scholars seems to have gone up!
Again, you’re doing the same thing that you did in your post: conflating together three disparate specialties into one and claiming that they share the same experience. More, you’re conflating several different kinds of military history into one: military history as scholarship, military history as a scholarly specialty and popular military history. The last one, as Prof B points out, is doing very well indeed in terms of sales. But what of the first two? I think it’s quite possible that military history as scholarship has been reduced in importance while there simultaneously has been a growth in the size of military history as an academic specialty.
Dana’s comment is here directly on point: military history as an academic specialty may well not have existed in any meaningful way until after WWII. There was military history being written but it was by people who did not identify as specifically military historians. Michael Roberts was a historian of England and Sweden. B.H. Liddell-Hart was a journalist. Alfred Thayer Mahan was a naval officer. The Duke military historians–Richard Preston, Theodore Ropp, and I.B. Holley–were fairly rare exceptions.
Military history, oddly enough, may have developed as a distinct subfield of practitioners at about the same time as social history did. Unlike social history, however, the newness of this was obscured by the presence of military history produced by non-military historians (including other professors and military officers or analysts) and by the ongoing sales of popular military history. (This is not original with me; Mark Grimsley has suggested the same thing).
June 17, 2009 at 5:34 pm
eric
Are there numbers on articles in the flagship journals by specialty?
June 17, 2009 at 5:38 pm
andrew
There was this, which I can’t read right now (JSTOR), but you probably can.
June 17, 2009 at 7:30 pm
TF Smith
Cripes, did Cohen even look at the course offerings for the fall semester at this place, just down the street (more or less) from the Times?
http://www.college.columbia.edu/bulletin/depts/history.php?tab=courses
Or this one:
http://history.fas.nyu.edu/object/Fall2009GraduateCourseSchedule.html
Both are chock-full of courses on diplomatic, political, and military history, including – at NYU – a course as relatively specialized as “Italy in WW II.”
Along with missing the point of the table, did it occur to the reporter or any editor to, oh, I dunno, look at a class schedule – somewhere?
June 17, 2009 at 11:25 pm
Ralph Luker
David, On your point about the Duke military historians after World War II, while I. B. Holley published, and thus made his reputation, almost exclusively in military history, in the 1950s and 1960s, he actually taught U. S. survey and U. S. intellectual history. I don’t know that he even offered a military history course of any sort in those years. Teaching military history only came later. He’s been a superb teacher. Last I heard, he was still teaching part-time for the department and hoped still to be doing so at 100.
June 17, 2009 at 11:51 pm
Paula
Jesus, are we still having this conversation?
Reason #457,678 not to go back to the academy.
June 18, 2009 at 5:06 am
silbey
Ralph, thanks for the correction. So the Duke military historians may *not* have been an exception, after all…
Hmmm, and now that I go check, Richard Preston was trained as a Canadian rather than a military historian.
June 18, 2009 at 6:30 am
bobbygee
Why let the facts get in the way of a good story. The state run media is a mouth piece for the government. When I read an AP story or someone tells me to read a story from The New York Times my first thought is this is nice but is it true.. Bobby Gee Checkout my blog
http://bobbygee.wordpress.com/
June 18, 2009 at 6:46 am
Jonathan Jarrett
Good shot sir; I never even bothered to look at the figures, assuming that the article was a puff piece based solely on anecdote and opinions. I hadn’t expected to be this right! I wonder if the others who reacted without reading also just assumed it would be rubbish?
June 18, 2009 at 8:12 am
JPool
Training as a Canadian is both intensive and extensive. Contrary to popular belief in the US, Pronunciation is a relatively small aspect of such training, especially compared to such subjects as Self-Effacement and Cultivation of National and Regional Resentments.
June 18, 2009 at 8:51 am
silbey
Possible course topics for a “Training as a Canadian” major: “Why Canada is _not_ the 51st State” and “The Myth of ‘Eh’”
June 18, 2009 at 9:42 am
Anderson
military history as an academic specialty may well not have existed in any meaningful way until after WWII
Delbruck?
June 18, 2009 at 9:45 am
Anderson
Re: Canadians, I remember that my Canadian roommate (in Mississippi, go figure) was genuinely surprised that we didn’t study Canadian history in high school.
Because, you know, *he* studied *American* history in high school.
“Welcome to the hegemony” was not, to him, a satisfactory response.
June 18, 2009 at 10:26 am
JPool
“Welcome to the hegemony” was not, to him, a satisfactory response.
It rarely is. It’d be a great Gang of Four album title though.
June 18, 2009 at 10:50 am
Anderson
It’d be a great Gang of Four album title though.
Concur …. I remember the first time I heard “Anthrax” & went, “so THAT’S where Sonic Youth got that from.”
June 18, 2009 at 12:10 pm
silbey
Delbruck?
Delbruck’s an interesting case. He was certainly a military historian and thought of himself that way, but he wasn’t trained as a military historian, his appointment wasn’t as a military historian, and the other German historians thought him odd to be studying military history, which they thought beneath him (when he gave Theodor Mommsen a copy of his latest work, Mommsen thanked but said that he probably wouldn’t have time to read it).
When Gordon Craig came to write about Delbruck for _Makers of Modern Strategy_, he had never heard of the German before, which suggests that there wasn’t an organized military history field really in existence then (1943 or so).
June 18, 2009 at 2:50 pm
Anderson
he had never heard of the German before
Wow — Craig, of all people. Does he say that in MMS? I’m glancing at his article & that’s not jumping out at me.
June 18, 2009 at 4:48 pm
silbey
It’s from Christopher Bassford, Clausewitz in English : The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America, 1815-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). I don’t have the exact page number, but it’s ch. 19 and it was sourced to a letter from Craig to the author in 1990.
June 18, 2009 at 9:14 pm
TF Smith
What are the criteria for recognizing a given field within the discipline?
A professional journal?
The Army and Navy Journal began publishing in the 1860s, and Proceedings in the 1870s; both were more professional journals than historical, of course, but history was part of their contents from early on…. the SMH dates back to 1933, when it was founded as the American Military History Foundation; they started publishing the Journal in 1937…
June 19, 2009 at 4:52 am
silbey
What are the criteria for recognizing a given field within the discipline?
That’s a good question, and not one I’m sure I could answer completely. I think that a scholarly journal and association would be part of it. As you note the Army and Navy Journal were professional journals, not historical ones (in the sense of being aimed at primarily historical and scholarly topics). The SMH renamed itself (in 1939) the “American Military Insitute”, striking History from its name. The name only became the Society for Military History in 1990. The Journal was titled “Military Affairs” for a long time and was only retitled the “Journal of Military History” in 1990. My sense from that is not of a well-established specialty, but one just beginning to distinguish itself from the field in the mid-20th century.
June 19, 2009 at 9:30 am
Anderson
Thanks, Silbey. That’s pretty amazing — if Gordon Craig hadn’t heard of the guy, he was evidently obscure. (I gather we’re talking the 1st ed. in 1943; I see from the MMS bib page that Craig revised the Delbruck essay.)
… Kinda odd that MMS 1986 is described as a “sequel” not a new edition — I suspect lawyers.