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Military History, Democracy, and the Role of the Academy
Tami Davis Biddle
| Wayne Lee's review essay offers an excellent overview of some of the most interesting literature to appear in the field of military history in the last decade. It is a welcome stocktaking, especially since we are at a moment when it is appropriate to assess the role of the military in American history and American society. There is no denying that what we typically call "military history" has been a controversial discipline inside the academy. This is understandable, and not wholly inappropriate, since democratic societies ought to treat all military issues carefully and with self-awareness. But care and self-awareness do not—and should not—equal avoidance. Among its many roles, scholarship plays a civic function: it facilitates our understanding of the institutions we have created and opens a debate on their purpose. By focusing on literature that draws explicit connections between American military institutions and American society and culture, Lee has given us an excellent point of departure for an important and timely discussion.1 |
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Americans seem to have a great appetite for history, and every year the sale of trade press books on military topics is brisk. The reasons are not hard to discern. Military history gives center stage to events that are profoundly and immediately consequential: the lives of hundreds—or hundreds of thousands—can rest on decisions made under great stress. Those who write in the discipline can work on a vast canvas full of movement and energy; they can, simultaneously, draw attention to the details shaping the choices made by those in command of events. The pace, scope, and urgency of war tend to telescope time and change, and to illuminate those human proclivities and characteristics—including character flaws—that can assume an importance far greater than they ever would in peacetime. Contingency matters too, as James M. McPherson stressed in his astute and beautifully rendered history of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom. The outcome on a battlefield, as at Antietam or Gettysburg, can matter terribly.2 |
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But if all those factors can result in gripping and important work, they can also result in products that fill academic historians with skepticism—and even dread. Those of us on the academic side of military history often find ourselves working to escape association with popular writing that grasps too readily at "great man" theories or triumphalism. Potential pitfalls abound, and it is easy enough to fall into them, especially since there are financial incentives for embracing gauzy sentimentality or simplistic tales of derring-do. Writing in a recent special edition of the Times Literary Supplement called "New Ways in History," Keith Thomas surveyed the field of history in the United Kingdom and observed laconically, "Military and naval history are exceptionally vigorous, with a huge lay following for accounts of battles and campaigns, not all of them intellectually demanding."3 His words apply to the situation on this side of the Atlantic as well. |
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