Military history in the United States is widely seen as being 180 degrees off the mainstream of current historical fashion. To be sure, all intellectual pursuits follow fashions that change over time. Therefore, to say that history is caught up in a certain trend is in itself not saying much. The difference is not so much of kind as it is of degree; current fashions in the study of history seem to me to be more self-righteous and intolerant than they have been for generations.

Such statements probably strike many scholars as extreme, perhaps as the whining of a partisan specialist. The best way to recognize the true severity of the problem is to offer some hard statistics. One way of gauging what is deemed worthy by the self-proclaimed “cutting-edge” of the profession in the United States is to survey articles published in the American Historical Review (AHR), that flagship journal of the historical profession. To put it mildly, articles concerning military history, whether written by self-defined military historians or not, did not fare well in the 150 issues that appeared between 1976 and 2006. During this time, the AHR failed to publish a single research article focused on the conduct of the Hundred Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War, the Wars of Louis XIV, the War of American Independence, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and World War II. There was one article on atrocities in the English Civil War. Only two articles discussed the American Civil War as a military conflict. The first described atrocities committed by Confederate troops at Chambersburg, so military atrocities seem to be attractive to the AHR editors. The second article on the Civil War was the presidential address by James McPherson in the February 2004 issue. That same issue contained the only article on World War I, an interesting piece on women soldiers in the Russian army, justified to the editors, I suppose, not by the fact that it dealt with war, but the fact that it dealt with women. If I seem upset with the editors’ choices, it is because I am. At the same time that there was no article on the conduct of the Vietnam War, the AHR devoted an entire forum debate to the film JFK, and many of the articles published over the years seem to my prejudiced mind downright trivial.

Military historians need not be paranoid to conclude that they are after us, that many cutting-edge historians have honed their blades to surgically remove us from formal studies. And they do so for very well-meaning reasons. Just before Gunther Rothenberg retired from the Department of History at Purdue University, he asked if the department intended to hire another military historian to replace him. His chairman replied “No,” and justified the decision by saying that there was no social purpose to the study of military history. This is an immensely illuminating reply.

As always, the study of history stands at the uncertain and conflicted frontier between the past and the future. In other words, the subtext of historical studies has often been about dealing with the present and advocating a course of things to come. That most ambitious of historical theorists, Karl Marx, spoke of the past, but he did so in order to confront the morality of his times and to argue for the inevitability of a different future.

One of my mentors, Charles Nowell, justified military history by insisting that just as doctors must study disease, historians must study war. But I am not completely happy with his utilitarian analogy. On the one hand, I am not really sure that in historical terms war is best regarded as a pathology. Too often it is simply the way things work, not evidence that things have broken down. On the other hand, doctors study diseases with the hopes of curing or eliminating them, and military history is not really about ending war. To twist Clausewitz’s aphorism, military history is not the continuation of peace studies by other means. Military history, particularly its applied genre, concerns the management, not the elimination, of warfare.

Insistence on social purpose implies that somehow the study of history should not only produce knowledge but must tie into some current political cause. In my department at Illinois, the strongest emphases are women and gender, race and ethnicity, and labor history. All of these are seen as contributing to social movements if only in the fact that they help to highlight identity, with its correlates of pride and outrage.

Many historians tend to empathize with their subjects and see the people they study as admirable, although often oppressed: women, racial minorities, and workers. They seem at times to extrapolate from their own kind of commitment, reaching the conclusion that military historians must like, or at least approve of, war and its horrendous costs. So, for many in the historical profession, the military historian’s lack of obvious social cause becomes evidence of her or his perverted values.

(John A. Lynn II, “Breaching the Walls of Academe: The Purposes, Problems, and Prospects of Military History,” Academic Questions 21 [winter 2007-08]: 18-36, at 30-2 [italics in original; footnotes omitted])