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American Military History: The Need for Comparative Analysis
Brian Holden Reid
| I have enjoyed reading Wayne Lee's wide-ranging and stimulating discussion of the imperatives underlying the writing of much academic military history. It is perhaps worth stressing at the outset in a piece in a distinguished scholarly journal, written by academics for other academics, that many nonacademic historians write fine military history, and this is one of the subject's strengths. Whether they are former service personnel, civil servants, judges, or professional writers, they often write with greater facility and sometimes produce better books in certain areas than academics largely because of their professional experience and perspective. That those works are "found guilty by association with applied and popular military history" "within the academy," as Lee points out, is often the worst kind of academic snobbery, though, fortunately, he has not succumbed to it. Yet Lee does not answer a central question raised in his article: Why does this "shadow of opprobrium" persist undeservedly?1 |
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The most distinguished of British military historians, Sir Michael Howard and Sir John Keegan, in particular, enjoy high prestige in the United States. Is Keegan an academic? The point is debatable. Although it can be suggested that he pioneered the form of cultural analysis that has so excited academic military historians for many years, he has been repeatedly scornful of its ramifications, especially the influence that literary criticism and the social sciences (such as international relations theory) exert on both the style of argument deployed and the texture of some of the writing.2 Reading Lee's essay confirmed for me the vague boundaries of military history, especially its academic boundaries. |
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Although there are some points of detail in Lee's assessment with which I would quibble, I wish to explore in my response a method that is underdeveloped in American military history: the comparative approach to the subject. I have close links to the United States (with family connections), but I am not of it and do not teach in an American university. So, my aim is to attempt to take the argument a stage further, while not adopting the irritating habit of Niall Ferguson of assuming that Britain is the source of some unacknowledged superior wisdom. Perhaps something of value might emerge from the reflections of a scholar from across the Atlantic. |
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My starting point is to agree with Lee that the cultural dimension is enormously important in the writing of military history, as war is a reflection of the cultural mores out of which political organization flows. It is therefore all the more important that historians come to terms with their own cultural assumptions, and not only when they think of the recent past. We need to be aware of the similarities between cultures as well as the differences, and when discussing the military institutions of one country, we need to be aware of their parallels with others. |
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In a special issue of American Nineteenth Century History, I argued that the broad contours of American military history can best be understood in just those comparative terms, especially by comparison with the military experience of Great Britain. Although I was glad to note Lee's citation of Isabel Hull's important work on German military culture, I thought that as his essay proceeded, it seemed to reflect a form of cultural "isolation" that seemed at odds with its conclusion and its appeal to cultural awareness.3 That is to say, the essay portrays the cultural identity, so to speak, of American military history in exclusively American terms. The writings of non-American scholars were used to invoke and to offer authority to sustain a general framework or approach, but never to illuminate a specific issue in United States history—with one exception to which I shall return shortly. |
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