Blogs to Watch

[Tom Odom]

Interesting that you selected Madison as a case history, Merv. From the Africanist view, Madison was for many years here it was happening in African studies, largely because Crawford Young, the "Dean" of Congo/Zaire related studies was there. I went there to a conference in 1986; I was working on LP #14 on the '64 Congo crisis and the reactions I got ranged fro blase to shocked that I was working on a military history paper invloving "imperialist" interventions in Africa.

Even my alma mater Texas A&M while I was a cadet did not have a military hsitory program. Gratefully Roger Beaumont arrived my senior year and over the next decade or so, A&M started looking at military history. My book as a Class of 1976 Centenial Class member became #100 in the A&M military history series, something was pure circumstance but also meaningful to me.

But before we get too judgemental about civilian academia, the military itself has not done a good job in using military history. The Center for Military History spent decades on the WWII green book series. It did not do an equally good job on either Korea or Vietnam. We (then BG Scales and the Desert Storm Study Group) wrote Certain Victory for 2 basic reasons: A. the Air Force had a project underway and B. CMH was not up to the task. The Military History Institute has been slow to join the 21st century, only recently starting to load documents on the web. The Combat Studies Institute stood up in the early 1980s because senior officers wanted someone to teach and write military history in a meaningful way. It has since undergone too many cuts but perhaps is now coming back with a series of papers that will resurrect its reputation.

Best
Tom

[marct]

Really good post, Merv.

Tom, you mentioned a failure of the military in "selling" military history, and I think you have probably raised a very good point that holds here in Canada as well. I suspect that some of the problem is also related to a general lack of interest in / knowledge of history being taught before university - at least it seems to be that way in Ontario. For example, only one of my students during the summer knew that Canada had over 400,000 troops in World War I.

The anti-military stance, what Merv called the "tenured radicals", has also spilled over into other areas. I am working with one student right now who has an interest in Intelligence analysis (it's part of her day job). Earlier this week, she had to do a presentation in a course on the History of Anthropology where she would take one of the "older" theoretical models and attempt to use it to analyze a current situation. She chose Durkheim's concept of "altruistic suicide" and applied it to studying suicide bombers. Halfway through her presentation, the professor teaching the course stopped her and told her that this was "propaganda". With attitudes like this running rampant, I really have to wonder...

Merv, while I liked your term "tenured radicals", I think that it is past time that the term "radical" itself was taken back from it's currently "occupied" status where it is held under the hegemonic control of krypto-Fascists (yeah, I can sound like a PC academic if I have to). "Radical" derives from the Latin "radix" or "root", and it is more than time enough for us to retrun to that original meaning and examine the roots of human existence. And, for the past 100 centuries, that means that we have to study warfare, religion, economics, technology, politics and the connections between them all. Currently, "radical" seems to be synonymous with "whining about being oppressed while enjoying a tenured position and sipping coctails and discussing either the inevitable revolutuion or the ultimate meaninglessness of life".

While it may be amusing, in a very droll sense, to watch these neo-Thomistic "scholars" argue about how many oppressions can dance on the head of a pin, it is ultimately a betrayal of both the profession of scholarship, of the societies in which we live and, most importantly, it is a betrayal of our species. I refuse to believe that we have spent the past 5+ million years evolving to end up locked in any type of restrictive "theology".

Sorry, I'll just get off my soapbox now...

Marc

[Merv Benson]

Thanks for the kind words, but I was excerpting from Miller's piece on institutional reluctance of many universities to study warfare. I do comment on Miller's article in my original post.

[SWJED]

Thanks for the kind words, but I was excerpting from Miller's piece on institutional reluctance of many universities to study warfare. I do comment on Miller's article in my original post.

Hat tip for bringing this to our attention - good job Merv.

[S-2]

As a former UW grad with a B.A. in Poli Sci/History, my very first class as a "gratefully red" badger was with Edward M. Coffman. A great man and lecturer, he'd (IIRC) served as a young lieutenant in the 1st Cav in Korea towards the end of that conflict.

A paper by me detailing my dad's adventures as a peripheral participant in T.F. Lynch was read in class by Coffman while mentioning me by name-quite an honor in a survey class of about 200 kids! I'm sorry to see he's since retired and that the Ambrose monies have gone unused.

It was a nearly impossible place to attend ROTC during the Vietnam War. Thankfully I didn't until it had become more of a non-issue during the mid-late seventies.