Mind and Matter—Cultural Analysis in American Military History: A Look at the State of the Field

Extract

Introduction

The umbrella of military history covers a wide variety of practitioners and audiences. Modern academic military history adheres to the highest scholarly and pedagogical standards, but within the academy it is often found guilty by association with applied and popular military history.¹ There are great virtues to be found among those other practitioners, but they also have their own purposes and audiences for which we in academia are sometimes held responsible. The applied literature derives from the now long-held conviction that understanding the wars of the past will help military leaders plan for, and succeed in, the future. Despite that prescriptive purpose, the modern American military's official history community is increasingly academically trained and—by mining mountains of archival (and often classified) material—is producing work of undeniable rigor that benefits the rest of us.² More visible is military history prepared for a popular audience. The best of this work is very good indeed—two of the last four Pulitzer Prize winners in history were military histories—but in deference to its audience it favors narrative.³ The worst is nigh on inexcusable, and a visitor to the military history shelf at chain bookstores will doubtless find more of the bad than the good.