Review

In Echoes of War, Michael Adams examines how military history is translated, reinvented, and sometimes distorted in popular culture. He shows the connecting sinews between battles of the past and their current interpretations. More importantly, Adams provides valuable suggestions on how military history might be elevated in popular culture. For this reason, Echoes is a roadmap for not only understanding our relationship to the past, but enriching it. In each chapter, Adams analyzes how a specific era in military history has resonated in popular culture. His overarching concern is why some military events permeate the collective consciousness while others of equal importance fade into obscurity. For Adams, the dual keys to remembrance are publicity and usability. How battles are remembered has more to do with the worldviews of the interpreters than the role the battles played in their own time. For example, in "Knights on Horseback," Adams highlights three battles, Hastings, Agincourt, and Bosworth, all of which abounded in both good publicity and in usable history. Hastings, for one, had the advantage of being immortalized in the Bayeux Tapestry—a 231-foot masterpiece of hand-stitched PR. Agincourt was a crucial step in the decline of the mounted knight; a point utterly lost when caught up in the sweeping W.W.II vision of Olivier's Henry V. Bosworth signaled the rise of the mercenary. This aspect was ignored by Bosworth's most influential publicist, William Shakespeare, who had other morals to carve from the event.	1
Adams further argues that it was the knight's symbolic value that kept mounted regiments employed in war long after their usefulness had faded. By W.W.I the cavalry charge was suicidal. The lure of the mounted knight, however, was irresistible in an age when automatic weapons had leached all the individual glory from the battlefield and turned the soldier into a pawn. The ideal of the knightly quest has found expression in everything from the works of J.R.R. Tolkien to Mel Gibson's Braveheart. The survival of the knight as both symbol and soldier shows that popular imagination still needs him. The modern mind will celebrate the suicidal warrior, but not the anonymous one.	2
Adams makes the same fascinating analysis of other time periods, including our own. In the chapter, "Brutal Soldiery," he traces America's distrust of a national standing army back to political and military developments in the 17th–18th century. In "New Men with Rifles" Adams follows America's continued adherence to the myth that the reluctant amateur soldier always prevailed over the invariably corrupted professional. "Unlikely Heroes," explains the Victorian transformation of the soldier from a mercenary brute to a virtuous martyr; and the elevation of war from a necessary evil to a panacea for nations dulled by a character-sapping peace. In "Bearers of Burdens." Adams demonstrates how even battles of little historical significance are remembered when they contain symbolic value. In "Innocents at War," the book's most provocative chapter, he traces the desperate American need to play innocent, and the increasing difficulty of maintaining the façade of the "the good war" while mired in the jungles of Vietnam. He then skillfully connects this ostrich-like behavior with the present situation with Iraq. Adams claims that our historical tendency to sanitize war prevents us from giving proposed military action its proper gravitas. Adams asks that when we opt for war, we have full understanding of the beast we will unleash.	3
By challenging us to think critically about what we see in the popular media, Adams raises the bar for historical discussion. For high school and college instructors, the above issues are crucial. Students of all ages would benefit from understanding the malleable nature of historical remembrance. Even (and perhaps, especially) high school students should learn to view history, not as static, but a living entity reinvented by each successive generation. Echoes is also a valuable guide to the museum professional, public historian, and historical re-enactor. By examining the full complexity of war, purveyors of public history will create exhibits and reenactments that are both richer and more relevant. It is axiomatic that we will view the past through the lens of our own time. Adams, however, asks the popular media to delve deeper and explore historical context. Finally he encourages professional historians to join forces with the purveyors of "popular" military history. For good or ill, it is from the popular media, and not in the niches of academia that most Americans will form their most lasting impressions of the past. If we are to understand the present, the quality of those impressions does matter.	4
California State University, Long Beach Michelle Llyn Ferry

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