Investigations of a Dog

Most people in the history blogosphere will probably have noticed the debate over John J. Miller’s “Sounding Taps: Why military history is being retired” article which claims that military history is dying. Mark Grimsley disagrees, saying that military history isn’t dying, and even if it is we should be doing something positive to save it rather than just complaining. One of the positive things that Mark has started working on is setting up the Military History Foundation. The whole thing has reminded me that military history is nothing to be ashamed of, so in this post I’m going to talk about my personal experience of military history as a student in British universities in the 1990s. This isn’t necessarily relevant to the debate, since Miller was talking about US universities in the present, but I think my experiences show how military history has been successfully adapting to changing circumstances and suggest that it can continue to adapt.

I’ve been fascinated (or perhaps obsessed) with wars, armies, and weapons for as long as I can remember. I don’t know why. We’re still waiting on cognitive scientists to find out why some people like some things and some people like other things. I also don’t know why I decided to do a degree in archaeology. I found archaeology boring and difficult so I switched to history after two terms. The history department at Reading was very strong in military history. There were several members off staff who had war related research interests and others who were willing and able to teach military history in their courses. Military history was well integrated into the history degree course. For example, the survey of early modern Europe covered the debate over the Military Revolution and how military developments affected the growth of the state. The option course on the Hundred Years War with Anne Curry was probably the best course I ever took anywhere. It covered strategy, operations, tactics, politics, diplomacy, society, culture, and gender, showing how all these factors were both important and interrelated. In my final year I took the special subject course on the American Revolution with Malcolm Morrison. While his research interests are not primarily military, war played a big part in the course, and he taught it very well. Operations, strategy, logistics, and finance were given plenty of attention without detracting from the political and social causes and consequences of the revolution. These are just courses I took. Also on offer were courses on the First World War with Nick Atkin, Nazi Germany with Michael Biddiss, the Crusades with Malcolm Barber, and Britain’s home front in World War II with Roy Wolfe. Under the capable supervision of Frank Tallett, I was able to write a dissertation on early modern cavalry tactics and logistics.

The mid-90s seemed like an exciting time for military history. The journal War In History began publication in 1994 (and is still going strong). Anne Curry was building her database of English soldiers, work which has culminated in her superb Agincourt: A New History. The Centre for Military History at Leeds was set up in 1995. In October 1995 I went there to do an MA in Military History.

After finishing my MA, I won a studentship from the Reading University Research Board giving me three years of full funding to do my PhD at Reading, which I started in January 1997 (again under the supervision of Frank Tallett). While I was there I met Kerry Cathers, who was researching the use of horses in Anglo-Saxon warfare. So not only was I not the only military history PhD student in the department, I was also not the only horse specialist in the department! I frequently went to Jan-Willem Honig’s medieval and early modern military history research seminars at Kings College London. It was there that I met one of my heroes, Mark Fissel, whose career is another example of the importance of military history. Mark’s book on the previously neglected Bishops’ Wars helped to kickstart the “three kingdoms” approach to the British Civil Wars, shedding new light on how Charles I’s wars with Scotland contributed to the outbreak of civil war in England. Throughout this time there seemed to be a healthy interaction between military, social, and economic history. Peter Edwards was originally an economic historian who got interested in military history through his study of the horse trade, discovering a small group of horse dealers who supplied thousands of horses to parliament’s armies. Peter is very well respected by military historians of the civil wars and has always been a great help to me, even though I could be seen as invading his territory. My thesis covered aspects of administration, logistics, operations, economy, and society. It contributed to the debate over the New Model Army and took an unexpected detour into women’s history, both of which I consider to be interesting and important.

This suggests that military history was quite healthy in the UK in the 90s. It wasn’t all perfect. During my undergraduate courses some of the other students thought I was a bit strange for being so interested in wars. The amount of military content in the survey courses varied according to the interests of the tutor and how much freedom they were prepared to allow their students in choosing topics. Although I was in a department which gave good coverage to military history in its BA course, specialist degree courses in military history or war studies were (and probably still are) very rare. When I started looking for MA courses, I found it was a choice between Leeds and KCL. That might well be as many as the UK needs, and I’m not sure how it compares with other specialisations.

There was a vague impression among military historians that there was some kind of prejudice against us. This came out very clearly in the “what is military history” seminar during my MA. I even shamelessly played it up during my interview with the research board at Reading. I’m still not sure whether it’s true that there is a significant prejudice against military history. I accepted the idea without questioning it much because I’d been taught it by John Childs, even though I hadn’t experienced any real discrimination myself up to that point (and still haven’t). It could be that all the prejudice and discrimination go on at higher levels, affecting appointments, publication, and research funding. Or it could just be part of the cultural ideology of military historians, where binary opposites help us to define who we are by focusing on who we aren’t. Is imagining “tenured radicals” or “these people who think we just collect badges and buttons” as the Other a part of constructing a collective identity for military historians?

I’m not saying that military history isn’t discriminated against, just that I don’t know because I’ve never experienced any discrimination myself. Obviously things might be very different in the US, and things in the UK might have changed a lot since I finished my PhD. I haven’t had anything to do with universities for over five years. In any case, rather than being bitter about the past we need to think about what we’re going to do in the future. In the next post I’ll be looking at how military history might develop.

Bibliography

1. Anne Curry, Agincourt (Tempus: Stroud, 2005).
2. Mark Charles Fissel, The Bishops Wars (CUP: Cambridge, 1994).