Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Part I A Normative and Pedagogical Framework
- Part II ROTC and the University
- Part III Military History Examined
- 10 Military History
- 11 Half Empty or Half Full?
- 12 Military Presence in Security Studies
- 13 Security Studies in the Wake of the Cold War University
- Part IV Concluding Thoughts
- Index
- References
11 - Half Empty or Half Full?
Military Historians’ Perspectives on the Status of Military History at the Leading Departments
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Part I A Normative and Pedagogical Framework
- Part II ROTC and the University
- Part III Military History Examined
- 10 Military History
- 11 Half Empty or Half Full?
- 12 Military Presence in Security Studies
- 13 Security Studies in the Wake of the Cold War University
- Part IV Concluding Thoughts
- Index
- References
Summary
The subject of history is the life of peoples and of mankind. To grasp directly and embrace in words – to describe – the life not only of mankind, but of one people, appears impossible.
– Leo TolstoyIn the last chapter, we did not consider explicitly the status of military history at the nation’s most prestigious history departments. The top-twenty history departments are the largest and, arguably, the most diverse departments in the country in terms of faculty and course offerings. But does “diversity” include substantial representation of military history in its traditional or newer forms? To answer this question, we conducted an inquiry into the status of military history in the top-twenty history programs in the United States during 2008 and 2009. Looking at the top-twenty history departments gives us greater insight into the status of military history in the higher echelons of history departments, and also provides a comparison to the surveys discussed in the preceding chapter, which covered a broader swath of higher education.
We selected the departments from the 2008 U.S. News & World Report list. U.S. News & World Report lists are notoriously subject to criticism and second-guessing, but this is not important for our purposes; where a department stands on the list is immaterial to our inquiry, for we are interested in the group as a whole, not how the respective departments rank vis-à-vis one another; and the inclusion or exclusion of a few schools does not affect our inquiry. Furthermore, if some departments on the list should be replaced by other departments, a similar claim could be made about the new list. Our only requirement is that the U.S. News & World Report list approximates the upper echelons of research departments, even if the list is not infallible or definitive. The schools on this list are, in rank order (some are tied): Yale; Princeton; Berkeley; Harvard; Stanford; Chicago; Columbia; Michigan; Johns Hopkins; UCLA; Cornell; Wisconsin; North Carolina; Pennsylvania; Brown; Duke; Northwestern; Rutgers; Indiana; and Texas.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Arms and the UniversityMilitary Presence and the Civic Education of Non-Military Students, pp. 320 - 355Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012