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Mind and Matter—Cultural Analysis in American Military History: A Look at the State of the Field
Wayne E. Lee
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Introduction | |
| The umbrella of military history covers a wide variety of practitioners and audiences. Modern academic military history adheres to the highest scholarly and pedagogical standards, but within the academy it is often found guilty by association with applied and popular military history.1 There are great virtues to be found among those other practitioners, but they also have their own purposes and audiences for which we in academia are sometimes held responsible. The applied literature derives from the now long-held conviction that understanding the wars of the past will help military leaders plan for, and succeed in, the future. Despite that prescriptive purpose, the modern American military's official history community is increasingly academically trained and—by mining mountains of archival (and often classified) material—is producing work of undeniable rigor that benefits the rest of us.2 More visible is military history prepared for a popular audience. The best of this work is very good indeed—two of the last four Pulitzer Prize winners in history were military histories—but in deference to its audience it favors narrative.3 The worst is nigh on inexcusable, and a visitor to the military history shelf at chain bookstores will doubtless find more of the bad than the good. |
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Academic military history has its own trajectory. It consists of two interconnected parts. The more traditional comprises the "material and operational" works that focus on the nature of weapons and the activities of armies within political, economic, and technological contexts. Such work continues to hold importance within the field. Studies of warfare, after all, can hardly afford to ignore the "matter" side of the equation. But at least since the 1960s, many academic military historians have engaged in the new military history—sometimes called the "war and society" approach to military history. The now-old new military history has focused on the more humanistic side of war: Who was in the military, and what happened to them while they were there? The tremendous success in answering those basic questions about the composition of military organizations and the experience of their members has begun to open up newer and more complex questions about values, motivations, and expectations. Military historians have thus followed the trend within the discipline from social history into the so-called cultural or linguistic turn. But many military historians see the emphasis on the subjectivity of reality and the hedging of agency by the strictures of culture associated with that turn as flying in the face of battlefield decisions with all-too-real consequences.4 |
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What does a cultural analysis of war entail? Before attempting a fuller answer to that question, it is important to acknowledge that one stimulus to such analysis arose from Victor Davis Hanson's suggestion that the ancient Greeks created a particular way of war, which was passed down through the ages as the "Western" way. John Keegan expanded Hanson's original vision to examine military history around the world and across all human experience. Keegan particularly wanted to challenge the idea that war was simply the product of the political interaction of states, fought according to rational calculations of military advantage. Keegan thus critiqued the famous formulation of the nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz that war is an extension of politics, saying that the formula "implies the existence of states, of state interests and of rational calculation about how they may be achieved." In contrast, suggested Keegan, "war antedates the state, diplomacy and strategy by many millennia. Warfare is almost as old as man himself, and reaches into the most secret places of the human heart, places where self dissolves rational purpose, where pride reigns, where emotion is paramount, where instinct is king.... War embraces much more than politics ... it is always an expression of culture, often a determinant of cultural forms, in some societies the culture itself."5 |
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