Inside stuff from the History gig: Why the biz is getting more superficial, and maybe why the kids seem to be getting more illiterate all the time.

An old friend of mine from Grad School days recently sent me an email pointing out an article in the New Republic, talking about how the study of military history is loosing ground these days. This is something that we've seen coming on for a while, knowing as we do that, for years, decades, the schools have been pushing social history over just about everything else. Women's studies programs don't usually produce long tracts on the use of the English longbow at Crecy. The article tried to look for a cause:

How can we explain the academy's odd neglect? One frequently mentioned reason is that few contemporary historians have any personal experience of the military. Today, a historian has to be in his mid-fifties (and male) ever to have faced the possibility of the draft, and most American historians come from the privileged strata of society that managed to avoid military service during Vietnam. But this answer doesn't really work. Historians routinely teach and write about a great many subjects absent from their own experience: slavery, plague, feudalism, industrial labor, human sacrifice. Why should war be different?

Another frequently given reason is that historians tend heavily toward pacifism, and this is probably true to some extent. For one thing, repeated surveys have shown that historians' political beliefs skew considerably to the left of the general electorate's. And, just this winter, the membership of the American Historical Association passed, by a three-to-one margin, a resolution urging historians "to do whatever they can to bring the Iraq war to a speedy conclusion." But this explanation, too, is unsatisfactory, since historians routinely write and teach about many phenomena they detest.

A more important reason, I would argue, can be found in the development of the modern social sciences. As sociologists like Hans Joas and Michael Mann have observed, the origins of these sciences lie in liberal, Enlightenment-era thinking that dismissed war as primitive, irrational, and alien to modern civilization. Canonical thinkers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Montesquieu and Benjamin Constant, believed fervently that, as human societies grew more rational, and as commerce bound nations closer together, war would disappear. "We have reached the age of commerce, which must necessarily replace the age of war," Constant wrote in 1813.

When I was an undergrad at UTA, back in the early 1980s, I signed up for a class on The Second World War. When I signed up, I thought I'd be spending my time looking at why the war happened, relating it back to World War One, and then getting insights on the war itself that I couldn't get from popular history. I was disappointed when the professor walked in the first day and told the class that we wouldn't be talking about battles and strategies. Several students openly expressed their relief, and I sat there wondering what the hell I'd gotten myself into.

We spent the next 16 weeks looking at how the war had effected Women and various minority groups, and looking at how horrible the allied bombing was on German and Japanese civilians, and other such liberal drivel. I never took a class from that dude again (He now heads the History program at a big college in Arkansas). That was the standard situation back then. Most of my profs back then were New Left liberals who'd done their Grad school work in the '60s and early '70s, and whose attitudes were dictated by those times. Most of them hated presidents like Truman, Eisenhower, LBJ, and Nixon, and loved FDR and Kennedy, and couched their lectures to impart those attitudes to their students. It seemed at the time that the study of history was basically designed to instill a huge guilt trip in the mostly white, middle class student body. It was amazing that I was able to wade through all that crud and eventually graduate.

I continued to read about the things that interested me after college, and when I went to grad school, I found that there was a much better environment. Still, not a lot of military topics came up, but I was used to it by then. I read lots of social history, but also some interesting stuff on other conventional topics. I was amazed, and originally horrified, at the number of people in my classes who, when asked by the prof, wanted to write their semester papers on religious topics. I walked out of my first grad school seminar lecture thinking I'd mistakenly signed up to a seminary school. Funny though, by the end of the semester, most of those folks had shifted their topics to more conventional things, on the margins of their original themes, and I was feeling a lot more at home. It turned out to be a huge amount of fun, and a time I miss sometimes. I think my thesis (as half assed as it was), was about the only one I was hearing about at the time that had any military aspect to it.

I still enjoy reading military history from time to time, and watch the History channel whenever they're not going on and on about UFOs, Bigfoot, and the da Vinci Code. There are some very interesting folks out there doing interesting things in Military history. One guy that I like a lot is Victor Davis Hanson, who tends to look at military history in the classical era (ancient Greece) and project it's lessons forward to our own time. I've always said that if we can't learn something that informs us about our own times, the study of History is wasted.

Another guy that I think a lot of is John Keegan. I read a book of his back in grad school, called Faces of Battle, that blew me away. He writes in a way that brings the history to life, which most history writers can't do. He also wrote maybe the definitive history of WW2, which I also have. Excellent stuff, if you're into it. There's a lot of this sort of stuff out there. As the article states, there's no shortage of popular history on military topics, but if scholars are staying away from it, and not looking at the lessons of the past, how will that effect the next generations ability to make the decisions they need to make in the world? I mean, if we're gonna be in the middle of everyone's shit, we should probably study plumbing, right?

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And here's another interesting thing to know. A buddy of mine who teaches at Austin Community College, tells us that there is a move on down there to "update" all the social sciences, to make them more interesting to Black and Latino students, who apparently are not passing ACC or UT history classes at the same rate as White students. The full time profs are supposedly horrified, but the administrative pols are determined to do it. Any institution that gets government money will use the new books and curricula. My buddy points out that they don't have too many minority students at ACC, so they are very sensitive to charges that they are not teaching courses that these students can pass. But we have a huge number of minority students at CTC and particularly on Ft. Hood, due to the army, and they do as well as anyone else.

The only problems I have are a few Asians, Latinos, and a few others who have issues some with the Kings English. Hell, most of my students, regardless of ethnicity, need to have a few longer words explained to them. Shit, that's my job. I'm there to challenge them and teach them. Most of them figure out a way to make it. I had a Korean student this time, wife of a soldier, who agonised over words on the exams and needed to get a Korean language history book to help her study. She worked her ass off, and used to go into fits when she made anything less than a perfect grade. She took both of my history classes at the same time, and made an A in both.

So, when I hear how hard it is for people to make a decent grade, and they were born here and speak the language fluently, I really don't have an easy time working up a lot of sympathy. The people who came here from somewhere else, work their asses off, and end up being you best students, those are the students I live for. They make you feel like you're doing a good job. It seems like the dumbing down that they've been seeing at the lower levels (like standardized testing in grade school) is finally spreading to the colleges.

Well, I won't stop talking about dead White guys. I think we owe them a lot, and we owe these kids a decent education. They can send me whatever book they want, but they can't control what I talk about in class. Eventually they'll force us to adopt standardized pretests and post tests, to test whether or not we are teaching the correct curriculum. They already want us to do this, allowing us to make them out ourselves, but most of us ignore it. So, I'll keep taking two and a half weeks to cover the Second World War, with pictures of planes and tanks included, and at least my students will know a thing or two in the end.