Recently, the National Review published Sounding Taps, a dire jeremiad by John J. Miller about the state of military history in American universities. The article warns that military history is increasingly unfashionable, and except for a few bastions like the service academies and Ohio State, it’s in danger of dying out as a subject. Miller blames liberal suspicion of all things martial for the decline in the number of new faculty hires specializing in the study of battles and strategy.
The refusal of many history departments to meet the enormous demand for military history is striking — the perverse result of an ossified tenure system, scholarly navel-gazing, and ideological hostility to all things military…
Mark Grimsley, my colleague at Cliopatria, issued this response in his capacity as an Ohio State military historian. In a nutshell, he doesn’t think "Taps" is being sounded for military history; from his vantage point, it’s time to play "Reveille." Military history is on the rebound, and the suggestion that it isn’t is due more to conservative alarmism about the state of higher education than it is to the actual "facts on the ground". Grimsley writes:
Some in academia may view military history with jaundiced eye, just as some others may feel impatient with women’s history or frustrated at the shortage of faculty positions to cover adequately the non-Western regions of the world. And it must also be acknowledged, candidly, that military historians have not always been good ambassadors for their field. But in our view the situation is nowhere near as bleak as John J. Miller’s article portrays — not at OSU and not in this country.
In my survey courses, I do very little military history. In my Western Civ classes, there are a few battles so vital I describe them in detail: Salamis and the Somme, for example. But I always fall short of what some of my eager young men want. Every prof who teaches survey courses knows the type: the earnest lad who comes to office hours, filled with righteous anguish because I chose to talk more about the unique status of Spartan women than the heroics of their husbands and brothers at Thermopylae! I’ve noted that the most consistent complaints I get as a professor is the lack of military history in my survey courses. I emphasize religious, gender, and social history at the expense of battle tactics time and again, and given the time constraints, I make no apologies for it.
But I do regard military history as immensely valuable. I may be a pacifist progressive, but I think a basic understanding of how battles unfolded and how strategy works is vital for any professional historian. My dissertation, believe it or not, had a healthy dollop of military history within its 300 dreary pages. I wrote on the role of the English church in the Anglo-Scottish wars of the middle ages, and had to include detailed accounts of the battles of Falkirk and Neville’s Cross, two engagements in which clerics played vital roles in English victories. If nothing else, it left me with a great sense that luck — or divine providence — played an especially important role in the outcome of many of these bloody encounters.
I will note that when I was hired to teach European History/Women’s history, I was hired to replace a historian who was a military specialist. Jim Kingman, the man whose "spot I filled", was a gentle, kind, soft-spoken professor who taught the same survey courses I did — but with infinitely more attention to battle tactics and far less attention to social and intellectual developments. He stayed on in the department for a few years after I was hired, and many times said to me, ruefully, "Hugo, what I do seems to be going out of fashion." He would agree with John J. Miller’s assessment that military historians, at least in some places, are indeed being replaced by those whose interests are elsewhere.
I am glad to hear military history is thriving in some institutions. I am glad that women’s history continues to thrive, and that "men’s history" is emerging as a legitimate discipline. Those of us who teach survey courses to undergraduates need to draw from many different sub-fields of history, and at least a cursory knowledge of war is essential to do our jobs well. I’m grateful for the training I got in the field, but I am equally glad it is not my specialty. But I wouldn’t mind hiring a colleague who knew a hauberk from a Howitzer.
I’m an undergraduate history student right now (Hoping to one day be a Historian, specialising in Canadian Social History)
My European history courses have always included a general description of how battle tactics worked in the period, and of the outcomes of important conflicts, but we’ve never spent much time talking about the individual battles or the really fine details. The more important element is always presented as being the social and economic consequences of the battle (and for that matter, the ones that led to it)
My Canadian History courses haven’t even gotten to that much detail about wars other than the Red River Rebellion, The northwest rebellion, and the two world wars.
I’m not really sure how I feel about Military History. I’m not very interested in it, myself, and I’m not sure how valuable it is, but I think if people want to study it they ought to have the opportunity.
In addition, the “International Security” subfield of IR in political science depts is alive and well–it’s my understanding that tenure track positions in Security have increased considerably in the last five years (for obvious reasons). While few political scientists have a Historians patience or eye for detail, it’s worth noting that Security Studies tends to be among the more historically and qualitatively inclined of political science subfields.
If Miller was being serious rather than writing for NRO, he might have written something worth paying attention to. I have both seen and heard of incidents in which faculty whom are politically left are unwelcoming or uninterested in military topics, and I think this is ridiculous and stupid, politically and professionally. But Miller mixes a potentially serious concern with a bunch of nonsense, like his gay-baiting bit (”Not that they’re anything wrong with that”) on the WVU guy. Historians have multiple teaching fields beyond their research specialty, and they needn’t be directly related. I’m sure scores of teachers of military history regularly publish on topics unrelated–so why focus on the guy who works on hairstyle history? And the idea that the social impact of war is a wholly inappropriate topic for military history is, frankly, beneath contempt.
In addition, the “International Security” subfield of IR in political science depts is alive and well–it’s my understanding that tenure track positions in Security have increased considerably in the last five years (for obvious reasons). While few political scientists have a Historians patience or eye for detail, it’s worth noting that Security Studies tends to be among the more historically and qualitatively inclined of political science subfields.
If Miller was being serious rather than writing for NRO, he might have written something worth paying attention to. I have both seen and heard of incidents in which faculty whom are politically left are unwelcoming or uninterested in military topics, and I think this is ridiculous and stupid, politically and professionally. But Miller mixes a potentially serious concern with a bunch of nonsense, like his gay-baiting bit (”Not that they’re anything wrong with that”) on the WVU guy. Historians have multiple teaching fields beyond their research specialty, and they needn’t be directly related. I’m sure scores of teachers of military history regularly publish on topics unrelated–so why focus on the guy who works on hairstyle history? And the idea that the social impact of war is a wholly inappropriate topic for military history is, frankly, beneath contempt.
Hi Hugo
When you tell your students about the Somme, do you mention that 20,000 **men** were killed on the **first** day of the battle? (that 20,000 being just on the allies’ side). Do you also mention that a FURTHER 120,000 allied **men** were killed during the next five months at the Somme?
Ah yes, those were the days when women were ‘oppressed’.
Harry, men sent them there. Where were the women who devised the machine guns, the gas, and the battle strategies? Was Hindenberg a woman? Was Kitchener? George V? Wilhelm II? That old men have asked younger men for pointless sacrifices is one of the great truisms of history; that women have generally had no say in the matter is another.
Thanks for that, Angry Harry. Liberal liars told me the Somme was fought between the Amazons and the Wild Women of Wongo, but you have enlightened me! Please tell more - were the Peloponnesian wars really decided by a no-holds-barred smackdown between Electra and Wonder Woman, or is that another feminist fabrication?
Jeremy, the latest research has revealed that Alcibiades was really “Alcibidia”, a cross-dressing student of Socrates. Her woman’s false heart led to her betrayal of Athens and the eventual defeat of that noble city.
Hugo, I knew it had to be something like that! Cherchez la femme, eh?
Although I love history, I have to admit that I have never quite been able to grasp the importance of military history, assuming that military history refers to the evolution of battlefield technology and strategy.
Obviously there is some significance there. The development or acquisition of a new type of military could explain the growing power of a particular group, for example. But what about the minutia of whether such-and-such general’s decision to attack the right flank of an army as opposed to the left flank? It’s tough for me to see why that would matter compared to the broader issues of social history, political, and economic history which tend to explain more about how we live our lives today across the board. The fact that there was a war is clearly important to how people lived their lives — the loss of a significant portion of young men in Britain during World War I, for example, made a big difference as did World War II’s effect on the U.S. economy. But the particulars of which type of gun was used or what kind of battlefield maneuvers a particular general preferred seem awfully esoteric and perhaps primarily of interest to people who are actually going into that line of work. It seems tantamount to learning about the specific types of technologies used in factories down the ages. I guess when I study history (as a total layperson I should add!), I am interested in the “so what” more than the facts or the details in and of themselves. I have never been able to see the “so what” in military history and thus have been content at general references to the importance of a particular battle or particular battle strategy.
I am guessing that military history has declined because there is no longer an across-the-board expectation that all young men will join the military at some point. I’ll defer to you historians, but I always assumed that military history was meant to have a direct impact on preparing men to be officers in the military. That purpose no longer applies to the college population across the board.
I deal with the same type of issues in my course on the American Civil War. Since I teach in Virginia most of my students anticipate a semester filled with R. E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson along with the minutaie of the battlefield. Of course, the battles and campaigns are covered, but most of the analysis is geared toward understanding how the fighting connected to broader political and social issues. This is clearly a reflection of the direction of Civil War history over the past few decades. I also include an entire section on gender history where we discuss the roles of women and the way that certain gender assumptions shaped attitudes about the war. This is perhaps the biggest disappointment for some of my male students. It’s almost as if their war or what they perceive to be their war has been ruined.
Yes Hugo. Well done. It was indeed **men** who sent 150,000 soldiers to their death.
No dispute there.
However, I never suggested that women were responsible for the Somme, did I?
But, tell me, Hugo. Does the fact that men were ‘in charge’ - or, indeed, ‘the cause’ - alter the fact that it was 150,000 ***MEN*** who were ***killed*** in that battle?
Or do you discount these deaths simply because other men were responsible for them?
It seems to me that you use the typical feminist trick of counting men as victims ONLY if the perpetrators are women.
How convenient, eh?
The victims of men ONLY count as ‘victims’ if they are women!
I tell you what, Hugo. Do your best to try to distinguish between a victim and a perpetrator. It shouldn’t be hard to do.
And I think that you will find that men - rather than women - are more often the victims of most things.
AH
At the risk of thread drift, my question for Angry Harry is this, even assuming he is correct:
So? Is there some contest I don’t know about as to who can claim more human suffering for whatever category they belong to? (Uh, I’d so no.) And is the purpose of military history to honor people who died? (To this, I would also say no. The purpose of history is to figure out what we can learn from it that is relevant today. If it were merely to bring honor to people who died, we should also have earthquake history, flood history, dread disease history, and random farming accident history. Certainly, earthquakes, floods, and dread diseases may constitute important history but it is more in terms of the effect these things had on the development of society. It’s not just “lots of people died, and therefore we should learn about it.”)
And, further, my Dear Hugo …
I do not, for one minute, object to your view that MANY men are controlling, violent thugs - pigs! - animals! Nor that ***MANY*** men have caused ENORMOUS problems to the world.
No dispute there Hugo.
But whenever you talk about women being the ***main*** victims of ‘oppression’ - or victims of ‘mistreatment’ - or victims of whatever, you are just plain wrong.
The victims of men are mostly - BY FAR - other men.
Happy, while you may be right that the particulars of military strategy in such and such battle and so on may seem (and often are) obscure in terms of their contribution to the grand narratives of history, I think this critique could be levelled against many other fields of history; indeed, perhaps most of them. The differences in crop rotations in different regions, the slight changes in average age of marriage over time, the electoral practices of early parliament, etc, etc–one of the things I like about history is a commitment to the details prior to having a clear narrative about why those particular details are important, if they are at all.
On another note, it seems to me that Angry Harry couldn’t be more off topic if he tried; he’s clearly functioning as a provocatour. He’s obviously quite frustrated that women and feminists don’t do what he wants them to. Let’s not give him what he wants by responding.
one of the things I like about history is a commitment to the details prior to having a clear narrative about why those particular details are important, if they are at all . . .
That’s probably why you’re a professional and I am just a humble layperson! I definitely like to have the narrative laid out FOR me.
And I guess I don’t totally hate military history since I do enjoy other people’s battleship blogging! (Which comes in nice digestible chunks as opposed to a whole book or course, which might be a bit much for me.)
Hello djw, I am not off topic.
Hugo was talking about the decline in teaching military history, wasn’t he?
And being that Hugo is Hugo, I merely wanted to ascertain whether or not he pointed out to his students that it was men, mostly, who died in battles; and that, as such, they should be counted as ‘victims’ - victims of some kind of oppression.
By doing this, Hugo would be able to convince more young men in his classes that war was stupid.
If, however, young men see war as ‘heroic’, then they are more likely to support wars!
I know Hugo well enough to know that he will try to get his ‘feminist messages’ into the minds of young men when he is teaching them. And I also know that Hugo does not like war.
Ergo, when he does talk about military history, he can make his young men less inclined to support ‘war’ by pointing out to them that they will not be heroes if they become soldiers, but victims!
AH
Angry Harry, I’m going to confront you where others won’t. Yes. I think that the deaths of those men, who signed up to risk their lives or at least didn’t have the courage or convictions to fight the draft, are in a certain way less tragic than the deaths of those who had no choice in the matter at all. Their deaths came quickly. The deaths of the women who were financially dependant on those men were more torturous, they had to live with grief, hunger and a fate they had no choice in. They had to carry on after losing loved ones.
To look at those who made a concious choice to risk their lives in war as victims is senseless. Any human life ending is a tragedy, but Soldiers have always had the choice not to fight, and many have taken it. They aren’t passive victims of the machinations of rulers, they are the instruments of it.
Too many honest, decent human beings died in prisons during the two world wars for refusing to fight for me to accept that those that did fight never had a choice. They made the wrong one, and while I don’t think they deserved to die for that, I also don’t think you can look at them the same way as civilian victims of warfare.
Hello Labyrus
Do you really think that when young men of 17,18 and 19 are told by FEMINISTS that they are cowards for not going to war (as per the FEMINIST white feather campaign in 1916) and when young men are told that their country is in mortal danger by the whole of the government-controlled media that, somehow, from the ether, they are going to believe differently?
Those men DIED for you. And MILLIONS were permanently HANDICAPPED.
Don’t they even count as victims in your eyes?
Well, look, if you think about military history solely as the history of hardware and tactics, then it’s true that it’s pretty untrendy right now. These things are cyclical, and it might come back, but right now it’s out of fashion. But I think there are all sorts of interesting questions to ask about the military which might work well with what’s currently trendy in the historical profession. For instance, I’m really interested in questions about how the experience of military service formed elite American men’s ideas about citizenship in the 20th century. (Citizenship is very hot at the moment.) To get at that, you’d have to ask exactly what that experience was. I’m thinking about something like Frederickson’s Inner Civil War, which argues that the actual experience of serving in the Civil War informed the ideas of post-war Northern intellectuals. David Kennedy did something similar for World War I in Over Here, a book which takes seriously the idea that the experience of serving in the war really mattered.
And I guess I would also say that part of their untrendyness is military historians’ own fault. If you look at intellectual or political or diplomatic history, the people doing interesting stuff in those fields are not doing it in exactly the same way they would have been in 1965. They’ve paid attention to the overall way the historical field is developing, and they’ve applied those insights to find novel and interesting things to say about what could be old-fashioned topics. (And while I’d agree that “maritime history” has declined, from my vantage point intellectual and political history are thriving, and diplomatic history has just been subsumed into the broader field of international history, which is trendy beyond belief at the moment.) I’m not sure that military historians are actually doing that. If they want to make a case for their field being interesting, they might want to do some work that speaks to people outside the field.
A fascinating episode which raises all sorts of interesting questions, but I don’t think it’s something that military historians would touch. Actually, I suspect it’s most discussed by people in the field of gender history. It figures prominently in Nicoletta Gullace’s book “The blood of our sons”: men, women, and the renegotiation of British citizenship during the Great War.
Well, I don’t have the patience to *do* professional history, military or otherwise, either. But I do enjoy consuming seemingly trivial histories, in small doses.
Sally writes: A fascinating episode which raises all sorts of interesting questions, but I don’t think it’s something that military historians would touch.
Yes Sally, a fascinating episode - an episode wherein FEMINISTS accused men PUBLICLY of being cowardly for not going to war.
However, Hugo is not a military historian. And he is a man who is, quite clearly, concerned with gender issues and concerned about the mistreatment of others - both men and women.
As such, when he talks about war to his students, he can conbine his humanity and his gender concerns by pointing out that **men** are the primary casualties in war - by the MILLION. And it is **men** mostly who governments actually send to war - not women.
Harry, in most wars throughout history, women have been the spoils of war, raped and worse time and time again. Women not victims? Go reread the Trojan Women.
Hello Hugo. I never said, nor suggested, that women were not casualties in war.
And tell me Hugo, how many British and American women were raped by Germans in WWII?
Very few.
Now tell me how many British and American **men** died or were maimed in that war?
MILLIONS.
They died and suffered for your liberty, Hugo.
Harry, I guess I just don’t understand your vehemence. Of course male soldiers die in war. Any Western Civ class (heck, any broad overview course) will tell you that, and probably rattle off the number of military (and usually civilian as well) dead at the end of whichever conflict they’re discussing. My high school textbooks did that. What Hugo is discussing is the decline of *military history,* that being the study, specifically, of specific battles and the tactics therein.
As for me, I’m perfectly fine with having gotten much more politics and culture out of my overview history courses than specific battles. What’s more useful for someone with a specialization in Middle Eastern history to know — the tactics and strategies used at the Battle of the Camel, or how that battle shaped the way Islam is practiced and how the main groups relate to each other because of it? (And for the gender studies, how the fact that Aiesha personally led the losing force affected the way Muslim men viewed women.) Obviously, I am on the side that prefers more politics and culture. I think it helps understand the way events ripple through time much better than tactics do.
But then, too, I despise wargaming et al., and have never cared for pure tactics.
Now tell me how many British and American **men** died or were maimed in that war?
Tsk, tsk, tsk, Harry. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten all those brave Soviets who died for your freedom? Or is it inconvient to remember that if there hadn’t been a Soviet front, Britain probably would have fallen before America would have gotten involved, given the large number of isolations in the US?
Or is this a sign of the lack of military history in higher education? No, couldn’t be, because a lil’ ol’ girl remembers who was on what side.
Harry, sweetie, what in heck are you talking about, that the white feathers in WWI were a feminist idea?
In two minutes of searching, I found out that the Organization of the White Feather (the people who started this idea of handing out white feathers) was organized by Admiral Charles Fitzgerald. One of the main supports of the organization was Mary Ward, who, as far as I can tell, was a prominent leader in the Anti-Sufferage movement. Now, since I have yet to me an actual feminist, male or female, who think that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, please show me something that might actaully make me think that you’re not just talking out of your hat.
Is it really a good idea to be making up your own history when you’re talking to people who have more than a passing interest in what actually happened?
(Hugo, if I’ve been too insufferably snarkish, please feel free to tell me to tone it down.)
Taking the slightly unpopular note here BUT…
If it is true that military history is dropping off, than all I have to say is good riddance to bad rubbish. I suffered through years and years of disconnected dates and names of battles, and my history was always presented as a series of wars. It was dull as all heck, made me sick to my stomach, and didn’t seem to have any relevance to anything.
Oh, and Angry Harry, it’s better when you spout bs to make sure that it’s not easily verifiable. Wikipedia is an excellent resource: three clicks disprove you. One, on white feathers, two on Mary Ward, and three, on Mary Ward being the leader of the anti-suffrage movement. Perhaps you are confused: just because you are a woman, that doesn’t make you a feminist. Oh, and for that matter, anti-suffrage means “Against voting rights”, in this case, women’s voting rights. Maybe you thought suffrage was suffering?
From The Syliva Pankhurts Memorial Lecture 2003
The outbreak of the first World War in 1914 propelled the WSPU away
from feminism in favour of patriotism. It suspended its activities on the suffrage
in order to focus attention on the war effort, leaving the East London Federation
as almost the only active group in the suffrage campaign. However the ELFS
was not the only suffrage organisation after 1914.
Christabel returned from her self-imposed exile in Paris to campaign
against the ‘German Peril’. Both she, her mother and their supporters toured the
country drumming up support for the recruitment campaign ‘and handed the
white feather to every young man they encountered wearing civilian dress.
James Lovegrove was only sixteen when he joined the army on the outbreak of the First World War.
On my way to work one morning a group of women surrounded me. They started shouting and yelling at me, calling me all sorts of names for not being a soldier! Do you know what they did? They struck a white feather in my coat, meaning I was a coward. Oh, I did feel dreadful, so ashamed.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWfeather.htm
Women are such pacifists, eh?
Women get their men to fight for them and then they accuse men of being violent!
I don’t know that it was a feminist idea, but it was definitely taken up by a lot of British feminists. That Gullace book I cited above has a lot about it. Essentially, her argument is that the war threatened the women’s suffrage movement: it cast women as victims of male aggression and objects of male chivalry, not as autonomous political actors worthy of the vote. It reinvigorated a version of citizenship in which women are objects, not subjects, of political action. One feminist strategy to fight this was to argue that citizenship was defined by patriotism, not by direct military service. They played up their own service in things like munitions factories, but they also fixated on the figure of the male shirker to show that not all men were willing to do their bit. Women’s service as disciplinarians of wayward men showed that they were actors, and not just acted upon, in the war effort.
The thing is, what’s interesting about this is not the giant MRA obsession with the male vs. female oppression Olympics. It’s that citizenship has always been highly gendered, and that the male obligation to serve in wars was the flipside of the male right to political self-determination. During World War I, women were protected from the former, but they were also denied the latter. (And of course many men who didn’t serve were still allowed to vote. Nobody denied a man the vote because he had flat feet and couldn’t serve in the military.) How and when that changed is an interesting historical question. What Angry Harry is doing is just whining, and it’s tedious.
That’s the result of bad teaching, not bad scholarship, I think. You could make anything really boring if you taught it that way. Women’s history would be an amazing snooze if it consisted of memorizing the dates when various states passed acts permitting women to own property. The academic study of history isn’t about memorizing dates and names. It’s a huge shame that history is generally taught in American schools by people who don’t really know what the discipline is about.
Sally, thanks for the book tip. I really have no trouble believing that there were feminists/suffragists who were involved in the white feather movement; but AH seemed to be working under the impression (or perhaps was just wanting others to get the impression) that the white feather shaming was a feminist ideal. I don’t think that is true any more than I think that eugenics is a feminist ideal, despite the fact that many early family planners were for it. (Although a good number of them, Sanger included, were much more pro-convincing “the right sort of people” to breed more rather than convincing “the wrong sort of people” to not breed.)
What I’m finding interesting in this discussion is that the white feather movement used the patriarchy to hurt men. It plays on a number of gendered sterotypes (man must save the poor weak women from the invading Huns; unless you go to war, you’re not a *real* man; etc.) to harm men. Does Gullace talk about that? Either way, it does sound like an interesting read. I wish I still had access to an academic library.
Ha ha, I’m not sure *any* Soviets intentionally died for our freedom, although their sacrifice was extraordinary and deeply admirable. Neither we (sadly) nor the Soviets (fortunately) fully triumphed in WWII.
People, really, you’re missing the real meat when you skip military history. Like the smashing protons in the particle accelerator, you learn the most about reality by studying what happens in extreme situations.
A good dose of war history will provide more insight into Man’s nature (and that includes women); the essence of our cultures and societies; and the threads of history; than any amount of psychology, sociology, politics or related disciplines.
As a proof of this, note that the Bible — the greatest repository of wisdom — contains many battle accounts!
Happy, you say,
But what about the minutia of such-and-such general’s decision to attack the right flank of an army as opposed to the left flank? It’s tough for me to see why that would matter….
My view of military history is idiosyncratic; I find it useful, but only in small doses. To me, the reason that focusing on tactics can be useful is to help students realize how contingent history is. It is easy to look back and think that what happened was basically inevitable (slaves are freed in one country after another; women get suffrage in one country after another), and that’s sometimes the case; but sometimes, slight differences in tactics–coin-toss choices–would have made a huge difference in outcomes. (Most military historians of the War Between the States would think that a few different tactical decisions could have kept Atlanta from falling until after the election, and avoided a loss at Gettysburg; in that case, the South would have survived the war.)
That’s a really good point, SamChevre.
If we define military history as tactics only, then I’m not sure that a “decline” is a big problem (although some tactics do seem timeless). However, if we define military history as studying strategy, and especially if we combine that with an analysis of the national policy that the strategy was intended to achieve, I think we can learn a lot that applies to us today. What do we want to achieve, and are we using the right tools to get there? Maybe we can even apply that type of analysis to our lives…
That IS a good point Sam, although again only justifies military history in small general chunks rather than intricate detail.
Also, I certainly wouldn’t want the study of tactics and strategy and technology to be lost. Obviously, there are people who ought to understand this stuff. It’s just tough for me to see the relevance to the average college kid.
Of course, it can also be like sports. A lot of people glean lessons regarding character from studying the lives of great soldiers and commanders.
Angry Harry: I checked out the full quote. That person is DENOUNCING that those women were leaving suffrage rights to go force people into war. And a pair of XX chromosomes does not a feminist make (nor does an XY set does an MRA make). Were there some women who “shamed” men into going to war? Probably. But I couldn’t find a single feminist organization that was focused on making people go to war. If you want to focus on the fact that more men died (which is iffy…I want to know how many women died because of starvation, or because they were nurses, or because they were civilians that got bombed…the numbers are sketchy at best) then yes, let’s look at that. Or if you want to talk about how more male soldiers died because they were the only ones allowed to be soldiers, or as a result of other men (which would be patriarchy, by the way) yes, we can talk about that. But to say that a group of ANTI-feminist women were the major force by which men signed up is idiocy.
Kip, I disagree. I think we learn more about humans from art than battle. Who you are when things get tough may not be who you are when things are comfortable, and I’m not interested in who you are when things are miserable. I want to make it so everyone is secure.
And the Bible isn’t exactly the greatest repository of wisdom. In fact, a lot of the stuff in there is contrary to good wisdom.
I have to disagree with you on that one, Antigone. Wasn’t it Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who said:
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
And he’s 100% right, in my opinion. While this may be off, wouldn’t finding out what people are truly made of simply like smelting? Putting them under intense heat and pressure, and the false bits and pieces are filtered away so we can see what they really are.
Rex, I’d read War Is a Force Which Gives Us Meaning before saying that war is, well, a force that gives us meaning. And the civil rights struggle was just that — a struggle. There was violence, yes, but it was not a war.
Not to get into any gender issues here. I’d just like to state that I am a person who finds Military History, especially military tactics to be interesting and informative. And yes, I do think that by studying war we can learn more about ourselves (Human beings that is). So I do not think it a wasted excercise. I can see how studying tactics and dates could be boring to some people, that’s simply their own preferences. I myself find studying advanced mathematics and languages to be boring, but that doesn’t mean that those subjects don’t have value and importance, as some commentors have stated about studying military history.
Finally, a comment related to gender issues mentioned above by commentors such as Angry Harry and others: War and conflict is a destructive force which causes pain, grief, injury, and death to anything it touches, whether they be male or female, human or non-human (animals, plants, bacteria, fungus).