freecounterpoint: MFT, What do you think?

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

MFT, What do you think?

8 comments:

Tecumseh said...: He found no articles on the conduct of World War II, the American Revolution, or the Napoleonic Wars. There were articles that discussed atrocities in the English Civil War and in the American Civil War and an article on World War I — on women soldiers in the Russian army.

Sounds very pinko-Frenchie. Luckily, we still have VDH. But this is a dying breed. We're back at Constantipole, waiting for the hordes to climb the ramparts.; 5/29/2007 10:53 PM
Mr roT said...: yeah. sickening. soon cohomology classes will be about women in math.; 5/29/2007 10:56 PM
Tecumseh said...: .. eaticng borscht, and wearing combat boots?; 5/29/2007 11:11 PM
Mr roT said...: xyex...; 5/29/2007 11:32 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...: JJ wondered what I thought. I guess students will have to study what they enjoy, either in the class room or outside of the accredited class room.

This story doesn't bother me one bit, and I don't see Military History in the same state of crisis as this blow-hard. For example, I've been ordering primary sources from the Michigan Historical Reprint Series that deals with post Civil War frontier soldier memoirs.

If you want to believe that Military History is working its way out, then you'll be able to find evidence. If you want to believe that it's still important, then just join the Society for Military History.

Are you guys gonna join? Or are you gonna sit and just bitch about it?

No way that I'd join this outfit though: they are interested in battlefield tactics, all the way down to how many .45 casings were found at one particular bunker. Often the papers they deliver at conferences are so focused on the micro that they lose sight of the macro.

Instead, perhaps you guys would be interested in Simon Schama, "Landscape and Memory." Read it in conjunction with Tacitus, Germania.; 5/30/2007 11:00 AM
Mr roT said...: I read Germania a while back. Tacitus was a badass even on this early warmup of a work. Yhanks for the recommendation to the companion volume.
Still, I bet you are wrong, mft, and this blowhard is right. If you say that the milhist guys are counting minie balls, that makes the situation only worse by showing that one guy in the department not concentrating on how many black women it took to win the civil war is instead gazing at battlefield minutiae and missing anything that could carry a real lesson.; 5/30/2007 11:20 AM
My Frontier Thesis said...: JJ, there are plenty of military historians out there who don't don the Military History title. In fact, you posted an article some time ago written by some Feminist Historian who just took the Harvard Helm, and we both agreed it was a good history of the Civil War (until she started comparing it to the present day). I don't want to disuade anyone from studying Military History. But if they relegate themselves to just the History of Battlefield Tactics, then they might miss all that other stuff that's crucial to winning a war. Without objection, my grandmother accompanied my grandfather to the southern Plains during Dubya-Dubya Two. Unfit for combat duty, grandpa built Boeing bombers (he polished the glass dome for the machine gun turrets, I think on B-28s -- there's some type of Coanda application there). Yet Grandma's story is just as important as Grandpa's.

I will admit that things have gotten so silly within the discipline of history, especially with the creation of all the subdisciplines -- Women's History, Political History, Military History... in the end, it's HISTORY. Everyone is trying to label themselves, or searching for labels to ascribe to others. My only litmus test is this: I know a good piece of history when I read it, and re-check the primary sources for myself.

One more note: google "Custer and the Little Bighorn" and see what number of hits that yields. I got 611,000 hits just a second ago.

Again: join the Society for Military History if you're so troubled. We need to approach this positively, and encourage undergrads interested in military history to enter the other subfields of history, and make their Military Women's History contributions in the AHA, or wherever.

Also: I think you'll enjoy Schama. I believe he's still at Columbia University.; 5/30/2007 4:09 PM
Mr roT said...: Those 611,000 hits are from nonacademics, mostly. There are of course about a thousand that link to articles about native-American lesbianism and how their rugmunching during the battle contributed to whitey's losing.; 5/31/2007 1:02 PM

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