Military history is the study of armed conflict in the history of humanity, and its impact on the societies, cultures, and economies thereof, as well as the resulting changes to local and international relationships.
The essential subjects of military history study are the causes of war, the social and cultural foundations, military doctrine on each side, the logistics, leadership, technology, strategy, and tactics used, and how these changed over time. On the other hand, just war theory explores the moral dimensions of warfare and, to limit the destructive reality of war, seeks to establish a doctrine of military ethics.
Military history is taught at academies and service schools as an applied field because the military command aims to prevent past errors and enhance performance by training commanders to recognize historical parallels in battle and apply lessons from the past. When certifying military history instructors the Combat Studies Institute deemphasizes rote detail memorization and focuses on themes and context in relation to current and future conflict, using the motto "Past is Prologue."
The discipline of military history is dynamic, changing with developments in the subject area as much as in the societies and organisations that make use of it.Cowley, Parker, p. xiii. The dynamic nature of the discipline of military history is largely due to the rapid change of military forces. The art and science of managing them, as well as the frenetic pace of technological development that has taken place during the period known as the Industrial Revolution, and more recently in the nuclear and information ages. An important recent concept is the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which attempts to explain how emerging technologies, such as gunpowder, have shaped warfare. It highlights the short outbursts of rapid change followed by periods of relative stability.
Popular versus academic military history In the history profession across major countries, military history is an orphan, despite its enormous popularity with the general public. William H. McNeill points out: This branch of our discipline flourishes in an intellectual ghetto. The 144 books in question [published in 1968-78] fall into two distinct classes: works aimed at a popular readership, written by journalists and men of letters outside academic circles, and professional work nearly always produced within the military establishment.... The study of military history in universities remains seriously underdeveloped. Indeed, lack of interest in and disdain for military history probably constitute one of the strangest prejudices of the profession.William H. McNeill, "Modern European History" in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (1980) pp. 99–100.
In recent decades, university-level courses in military history have remained popular; often, they use films to humanize the combat experience. For example, Eugene P. A. Scleh, history professor at the University of Maine, has explored the advantages and problems of teaching a course on "Modern War and Its Images" entirely through films. Students said they found the documentaries more valuable than the dramas.Eugene P. A. Scleh, "Teaching History Through Film", Film & History (1973) 3#3 pp. 12–16. However, military historians are frustrated by their marginal status in major history departments.John A. Lynn, "Rally Once Again: The Embattled Future of Academic Military History", Journal of Military History 61 (Oct. 1997), 777–89 online .Ronald H. Spector, "Teetering on the Brink of Respectability." Journal of American History (2007) 93(4): 1158–1160. online .
Academic historians concerned with military topics have their own scholarly organization, Society for Military History. Since 1937, it has published The Journal of Military History. Its four issues a year include scholarly articles, reviews of new books, and a bibliography of new publications and dissertations. The Society has 2,300 members, holds an annual convention, and awards prizes for the best scholarship.John Whiteclay Chambers, "The new military history: myth and reality." The Journal of Military History 55.3 (1991): 395+.
Historiography of military history Historiography is the study of the history and method of the discipline of history or the study of a specialised topic. In this case, military history is used to obtain an accurate assessment of conflicts by drawing on all available sources. For this reason, military history is periodised, creating overlapping boundaries of study and analysis, in which descriptions of battles by leaders may be unreliable due to an inclination to minimize mention of failure and exaggerate success. Military historians use Historiographical analysis to provide an unbiased, contemporary view of records.Morillo, Pevkovic, pp. 4–5.
One military historian, Jeremy Black, outlined problems 21st-century military historians face as an inheritance of their predecessors: Eurocentricity, a technological bias, a focus on leading military powers and dominant military systems, the separation of land from sea and recently air conflicts, the focus on state-to-state conflict, and a lack of focus on political "tasking" in how forces are used.Black (2004), p. ix.
If these challenges were not sufficient for military historians, the limits of method are further complicated by the lack of records, either destroyed or never recorded because of their value as a military secret. Scholars still do not know the exact nature of Greek fire, for instance. Researching Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, for example, has presented unique challenges for historians due to the destruction of records to protect classified military information, among other reasons. Historians use their knowledge of government regulation and military organization, and employ a targeted and systematic research strategy to piece together war histories.Bergen, Hilary, Documenting Shock and Awe: Researching Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. History Associations, 2015. http://www.historyassociates.com/blog/historical-research-blog/researching-iraq-and-afghanistan-wars/. . Despite these limits, wars are some of the most studied and detailed periods of human history.
Military historians have often compared the organizational, tactical, and strategic ideas, leadership, and national support of different nations' militaries.Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (Random House, 1987).
In the early 1980s, historian Jeffrey Kimball studied how a historian's political stance on current events affects interpretive disagreements about the causes of 20th-century wars. He surveyed the ideological preferences of 109 active diplomatic historians in the United States and 54 active military historians. He finds that their current political views are moderately correlated with their historiographical interpretations. A clear position on the left-right continuum regarding capitalism was apparent in most cases. All groups agreed with the proposition, "historically, Americans have tended to view questions of their national security in terms of such extremes as good vs. evil." Though the Socialists were split, the other groups agreed that "miscalculation and/or misunderstanding of the situation" had caused U.S. interventionism." Kimball reports that: Of historians in the field of diplomatic history, 7% are Socialist, 19% are Other, 53% are Liberal, 11% are None, and 10% Conservative. Of military historians, 0% are Socialist, 8% are Other, 35% are Liberal, 18% are None, and 40% are Conservative.Jeffrey Kimball, "The Influence of Ideology on Interpretive Disagreement: A Report on a Survey of Diplomatic, Military and Peace Historians on the Causes of 20th Century U. S. Wars", The History Teacher (May, 1984) 17#3 pp. 355–384 in JSTOR .
Online resources People interested in military history from all periods and subtopics are increasingly turning to the Internet for many more resources than are typically available in nearby libraries. Since 1993, one of the most popular sites, with over 4000 members (subscriptions are free), has been H-WAR, sponsored by the H-Net network based at Michigan State University.See H-War policies . H-War has six coeditors and an academic advisory board that sets policy. It sponsors daily moderated discussions of current topics, announcements of new publications and conferences, and reports on developments at conferences. The H-Net family of lists has sponsored and published over 46,000 scholarly book reviews, thousands of which deal with books in military history broadly conceived.See H-War book reviews . Wikipedia itself has a very wide coverage of military history, with over 180,000 articles. Its editors sponsor Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history and encourage readers to join.Richard Jensen, "Military history on the electronic frontier: Wikipedia fights the War of 1812." The Journal of Military History 76.4 (2012): 523–556 online.
Military and war museums
Military museums specialize in military history; they are often organized from a national point of view, where a museum in a particular country will have displays organized around conflicts in which that country has participated. They typically take a broad view of warfare's role in the nation's history.Stephen Wood, "Too serious a business to be left to military men" Museum International 38.1 (1986): 20–26. They typically include displays of weapons and other military equipment, uniforms, wartime propaganda, and exhibits on civilian life during wartime, and decorations, among others. Some military museums specialize in a particular subject, such as the Imperial War Museum Duxford for military aircraft, the Deutsches Panzermuseum for tanks, the Lange Max Museum for the Western Front (World War I), the International Spy Museum for espionage, The National World War I Museum for World War I, and the "D-Day Paratroopers Historical Center" (Normandy) for WWII airborne, while others, like the Canadian War Museum and the Musée de l'Armée, are more general. For the Italian alpine wall, one can find the most popular bunker museum in the small museum n8bunker at Olang / Kronplatz in the heart of the Dolomites of South Tyrol. The U.S. Army and the state National Guards operate 98 military history museums across the United States and three abroad.R. Cody Phillips, "The Guide to US Army Museums" (Center for Military History, 2005) online .
Curators debate how, or whether, to achieve the goal of providing diverse representations of war, including both positive and negative aspects of warfare. War is seldom presented as a good thing, but soldiers are heavily praised. David Lowenthal has observed that in today's museums, "nothing seems too horrendous to commemorate". Yet as Andrew Whitmarsh notes, "museums frequently portray a sanitised version of warfare."Andrew Whitmarsh, "'We Will Remember Them': Memory and Commemoration in War Museums." Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies (2001) vol. 7 pp. 11–15. The actual bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan became the focus of an angry national controversy with veterans attacking curators and historians when the Smithsonian Institution planned to put its fuselage on public display in 1995. The uproar led to the exhibit's cancellation.Otto Mayr, "The 'Enola Gay' Fiasco: History, Politics, and the Museum." Technology and culture 39.3 (1998): 462–473. online .
Early historians