CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog
Entries by Mark Grimsley
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Why the Civil Rights Movement Was an Insurgency, and Why It Matters
Cross posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
A video of the talk I gave at the U.S.Army Heritage Education Center in mid-March is now available online:
Sunday, March 1, 2009
The "New Media," the Surge, and the Writing of History
What is the contribution of the "new media" -- electronic discussion forums, especially blogs -- to the making of recent history? Dave Dilegge wants to know.
A retired Marine Corps major and liaison officer to the Marine Corps Center for Irregular Warfare, Dilegge is also co-owner of the influential Small Wars Journal and its companion blog. In today's SWJ Blog he writes:
Last weekend I sent out the following “RFI” [Request for Information] to a number of bloggers I know:
Andrew Exum’s post / review of Tom Ricks’ The Gamble several weeks ago at Abu Muqawama [another important national security blog] got me thinking (once again) about the impact of the “new media” on issues concerning national security, military doctrine and concept development, as well as lessons learned. As one part of this new media I’m not sure I fully grasp our influence – though I am often told we are, quote – “making a difference”. Here is the excerpt from the AM post that got me thinking about this:
“The New Media: Ricks cited a discussion on Small Wars Journal once and also cited some things on PlatoonLeader.org but never considered the way in which the new media has revolutionized the lessons learned process in the U.S. military. [...] Instead of just feeding information to the Center for Army Lessons Learned and waiting for lessons to be disseminated, junior officers are now debating what works and what doesn't on closed internet fora - such as PlatoonLeader and CompanyCommand - and open fora, such as the discussion threads on Small Wars Journal. The effect of the new media on the junior officers fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was left curiously unexplored by Ricks, now a famous blogger himself.”
I’d like to get your thoughts on this - nothing elaborate – maybe a paragraph or two on the core issues concerning the new media and it impact on the military. I’d then like to post the responses I get as one post on SWJ.
The responses he's received are consolidated into a PDF file Thoughts on the “New Media” and are being updated here.
The underlying question is of relevance not only to future histories of the Iraq War but also to many aspects of the history being made today. Two issues arise: 1) How long will it take for academic historians to become savvy enough about the new media to assess its influence on the events they have already begun to explore?; and 2) Who, if anyone, is archiving the evidence base -- those billions of electrons on which long term evaluation of this question depends?
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Fighting for the Dream
Cross posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
I'm currently spending a year at the U.S. Army War College as the Harold K. Johnson Visiting Professor of Military History.
When I accepted the invitation, I agreed to two main teaching responsibilities: to serve within my seminar group as principal instructor for the Theory of War and Strategy course; and to develop and execute a spring elective course.
I intentionally deferred selecting an elective subject until I'd been here long enough to figure out what students would be interested in, and maybe just as important, what they needed to know; and also what I could uniquely bring to the table from my own intellectual journey. The whole point of having a visiting professor is to get access to an expertise and perspective not already available within the institution.
Anyway, I thought long and hard about it, and finally decided that the best thing I could do would be to build a course around the extraordinary War for the American South conference at Ohio State University's Mershon Center in November 2006 -- really one of the highlights of my career as a military historian. For all the talk about "tenured radicals," academic culture is in many ways astonishingly provincial and careerist in orientation. Consequently it took a bit of guts for a group of Civil Rights historians, military historians, historians of Black Liberation and historians of Reconstruction to come together to accomplish something that none of us individually had developed the competence to do: explore the violence of the First Reconstruction and the struggles of the Second Reconstruction through the lens of war. But we did it, and although a few in the audience pooh poohed the whole idea, I think that most people found that it opened doors for new understandings, and that working together across fields, we made discoveries and connections we would not have made, blinkered within our areas of specialization.
So here, in summary form, is the outline for the course, with links to the course readings and a general reading list at the conclusion. I thought the day of Barack Obama's inauguration was a fitting day on which to unveil it publicly. In a sense, the moment that he assumes the most powerful office in the land will be a moment that, in the century between 1865 and 1965, tens of thousands of southern Americans fought to prevent, and that tens of thousands of other southern Americans (white as well as black) fought to make possible. And they did it largely through means of complex insurgencies that anticipated many of the same dynamics we now see in the 21st century.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
What Students Need to Know About the U.S. Civil War
Back in July the Foreign Policy Research Institute organized a workshop that brought together about thirty primary and secondary school teachers and several several military historians, including myself. The general subject was "What Students Need to Know About America's Wars." I was asked to address this question as it pertained to the Civil War. Here's what I came up with:
The most important thing to understand about the Civil War is the sheer fact that it happened.
The United States of America has now endured over two centuries under the same form of government. That is a great success story — one that Americans take largely for granted. The country has grown and changed in many ways and has endured many challenges, nearly all of them addressed within the limits of constitutional government. How many other countries can make such a statement? The massive exception to this rule is the Civil War, a war that began when seven states refused to abide by the result of a constitutionally mandated, fairly conducted presidential election with an unambiguous winner. Instead they left the Union to form their own separate republic. In the weeks that followed, four more states joined the Confederacy, and those eleven states fought a four-year war against the other twenty-two. Six hundred twenty thousand Americans perished during that conflict. That was about 2 percent of the U.S. population in 1860, the equivalent of 6.1 million today.
What accounts for this singular failure of democracy? Over the years, historians have offered different explanations. In the first half of the twentieth century, it was common to blame a “blundering generation” of politicians for losing control of a crisis that was largely of their own making. After World War II, it became common to view the conflict as unavoidable: the product of a fundamental contradiction in a society that preached freedom and equality yet attempted to reconcile those values with the institution of chattel slavery.
But perhaps a better answer is that the war reflected a failure of American citizens themselves.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
The Worm Turns?
Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
Rock-ribbed, old school military historians have long chafed at admonitions to incorporate into the field such novelties as gender. To them, a recent Times Higher Education article suggested -- tacitly -- that their days of chafing may be nearing an end.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
The Solitary "No"
Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
According to Technorati, yesterday over 2,500 blog posts made mention of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I thought that probably the world could do without one more, but at least one of my readers disagreed, albeit without sufficient guts to offer his name or a valid email address. Of my post on political jui jitsu, he wrote, "This is the best post you could come up with…. typical."
At first I thought this was merely an attempt to bait me. Then I noticed that preceding the sentence was the notation, "12/7/41."
Although I can't slake his thirst for one more remembrance of the day that FDR correctly predicted would live in infamy, I can at least commemorate the day on which FDR asked Congress for a declaration of war. That event occurred sixty-six years ago today.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
The No Asshole Rule
Abridged and Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
Over vacation I read a book I bought earlier this year: The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't, by Robert I. Sutton. I'd picked it up strictly on the basis of the eye-catching title, the fact that the author was an apparently well respected professor of management science at Stanford University, and a couple of paragraphs from the introduction:
I first heard of "the no asshole" rule more than fifteen years ago, during a faculty meeting at Stanford University. Our small department was a remarkably supportive and collegial place to work, especially compared to the petty but relentless nastiness that pervades much of academic life. On that particular day, our chairman Warren Hausman was leading a discussion about who we ought to hire as a new faculty member.
One of my colleagues proposed that we hire a renowned researcher from another school, which provoked another to say, "Listen, I don't care if that guy won the Nobel Prize. . . . I just don't want any assholes ruining our group." We all had a good laugh, but then we started talking in earnest about how to keep demeaning and arrogant jerks out of the group. From that moment on, when discussing whether to hire faculty, it was legitimate for any of us to question the decision by asking, "The candidate seems smart, but would this hire violate our no asshole rule?" And it made the department a better place.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
The "Marshall Brief"
Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
In my graduate readings course this quarter, the main writing assignment requires students to compose a 3,000-word response to a question relevant to their PhD general examination (aka "preliminary examination" or "prelims"). General exam questions usually demand cogent analyses of very broad issues -- the academic equivalent of the "Marshall brief," named for George C. Marshall, U.S. Army chief of staff during World War II.
Forrest C. Pogue describes the Marshall brief in his multi-volume biography of the general:
For some time before Marshall arrived [at Fort Benning, Ga., where during the early 1930s he served as assistant commandant of the Infantry School,] officer students had been required to write a monograph on some aspect of military history. That had always been a time-consuming and nerve-racking exercise, and Marshall made it harder. He required that the monograph be delivered orally in a class lecture limited to twenty minutes. Once when a class insisted that the time was much too short to allow the subject to be covered properly, Marshall, on the spot, delivered a lecture outlining the Civil War in five minutes. He set great store by the monograph as a device to force officers in training to come directly to grips with a problem and outline it clearly and briefly. (vol. 1, 254-255)
In his classic novel Once an Eagle, Anton Myrer has an officer gleefully recount the origins of the Marshall brief:
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Halleck and the Problem of Motive - Pt 1
Over on Civil Warriors I've begun a couple of posts on Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, aka "Old Brains" -- probably the least martial nickname in American military history. Nowadays Halleck is an obscure figure. I doubt that anyone who is not a U.S. Civil War specialist knows much about him, if indeed they even recognize the name. But for most of the war -- from July 1862 until March 1864 -- Halleck was general-in-chief, the top commander in the Union Army.
Even after Ulysses S. Grant took over the post, Halleck served the balance of the war as the Army's chief of staff. He handled most of the Army's administrative matters, served as an intermediary between Grant and the political heavies in Washington, and received most of the correspondence from the Army's field and department commanders, which he then summarized and passed along to Grant. Correspondingly, he often relayed to them Grant's instructions. Historian T. Harry Williams termed this relationship the beginnings of a "modern command system."
For about a week now I've been revisiting Halleck, general-in-chief of the Union armies from July 1862 until March 1864, when Grant assumed the post -- Halleck then became his chief of staff. The experience has reminded of just how entrenched our view of many Civil War figures can become -- and more generally, the extent to which interpretation of individuals (and for that matter, groups), is driven by guesswork about what motivated their actions. This is of course a perennial issue and I'm far from the first to notice it. But precisely because it is a perennial issue, it merits periodic re-examination.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Applications Welcome; Specialists in X Preferred
Many job advertisements contain language similar to the following:
The Department of History of the University of Utah invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professorship in the History of the United States and the World. We prefer a scholar specializing in US relations with Asia, the Middle East, or Latin America.
My question is, how should a prospective applicant read this preference? Personally I think it means that if you specialize in a different area -- say U.S. relations with Europe -- your chances of landing the job are significantly reduced; and that is, in fact, the purpose of stating the preference: as "truth in advertising" and as a means of focusing the pool. My read is that only if a really exceptional European specialist should apply, or if the pool of specialists in the preferred areas proved disappointing, would the European specialist stand a chance.
Recently I have heard others, however, offer a different interpretation: that the preference may well exist only at the margins, and would come into effect only as a means of "breaking a tie" between a highly qualified European specialist and an equally qualified Asian, Middle Eastern, or Latin American specialist. I'm skeptical on this point, and therefore invite a reality check.
It's probably true that newly minted PhDs will apply for any job that fits their qualifications, and will ignore the clause regarding preference. But would this be the case if the ad were for a senior scholar. But would this be the case if the ad were written for a senior position; i.e., one intended to attract well-established associate or full professors? Would a distinguished professor, already ensconced in a good department, be likely to apply given the job description?
Thursday, June 21, 2007
More Crocodile Tears for Military History
Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
Tuesday's Cincinnati Enquirer featured a column entitled, "'Locomotive of history' Derailed by PC Professors." It's basically a re-hash of John Miller's "Sounding Taps" and a New York Sun article about historian Mark Moyar's lack of success in securing an academic position, allegedly because he's a military historian with a revisionist perspective on the Vietnam War.
The column implies that military history once flourished on college campuses -- not true -- then points out that no military history courses are taught at Xavier, Miami, or the University of Cincinnati. This is supposedly because of rampant political correctness.
The column makes no mention of the fact that Wright State, which is in the vicinity of the above three institutions, does offer courses in military history. Ohio State, of course, fits awkwardly with the column's thesis, but the author gets around it thus:
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Teaching About the Military in American History
An Institute for Teachers
(March 24-25, 2007)
A couple of weeks ago I was one of several military historians who gave presentations at a weekend symposium intended to help teachers -- mainly high school teachers -- learn how to better integrate military history into their American history curricula. Other presenters included Paul A. Rahe (University of Tulsa); Pete Maslowski (University of Nebraska); Paul Herbert (Executive Director, Cantigny First Division Foundation); Brian M. Linn (Texas A&M University); and Walter A. McDougall (University of Pennsylvania).
Each of these presentations -- and several others by such luminaries and David Eisenhower and Rick Atkinson -- were recorded for webcast. The webcasts and additional information about the symposium are now available online. From what I've seen, the quality of the webcasts is good and well worth a look.
Friday, January 26, 2007
Divided By A Common Passion
Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
A vigorous exchange is underway in the U.S. Civil War blogosphere about the relationship between "amateur" and "professional" historians: essentially meaning non-academic and academic historians, respectively. It reminds me of that song from the musical Oklahoma: "Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends." And it reflects a perennial issue when it comes to historical periods that interest both academics and lay people.
To follow the conversation, start with non-academic historian Eric Wittenberg's musings about whether to bother getting a graduate degree in history (and scroll through the numerous comments), then go to academic historian Brooks Simpson's thoughtful response (which has also generated a lot of comments). Eric replies and provides links to other blogs that have entered the conversation; e.g., J. D. Petruzzi and Kevin Levin. The tone is that the division between "professional" and "amateur" historians is unfortunate and leads to needless friction.
Ethan Rafuse offers a dissenting view to the "love fest" and attracts his share of comments, most of them critical of his insistence that there really are important distinctions between academic and non-academic historians. Among the commenters is Brooks, who promises -- and delivers -- a follow-up post.
The debate is still in full cry, and well worth checking out.
Tuesday, December 5, 2006
Care About Military History? It's Time to Ante Up
Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age.
If you care about military history, it's time to step up to the plate. We've got an opportunity that we'd better not let pass.
Wisconsin has at last undertaken to fill the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair in American Military History. That's good news, but nothing has changed in the fiscal realities that until now have hindered a search. The university is still in a serious financial crunch, and the A-H endowment is underpowered. A million bucks just isn't what it used to be. To pay the salary and benefits for a top flight historian, the endowment has to generate a lot more revenue than it does currently. I would estimate the annual yield at between $40,000 and $50,000. That's something, but not enough.
If you care about military history, make a donation to the A-H endowment.
Here's why: The recent publicity surrounding the A-H chair guarantees that a fresh wave of donations -- even and perhaps especially small-scale donations -- will get publicized as well. It will serve as testimony to the level of interest in military history and believe me, it's something that will put dollar signs in the eyes of cash hungry university administrators across the country.
Here's how . . .
Wednesday, November 1, 2006
John Mueller Does The Daily Show
Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
This week The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is broadcasting from the Ohio State campus, thanks mainly to the fact that Ohio is a major battleground state in the coming election.
Stewart's guest last evening was John Mueller, professor of political science and Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair of National Security Studies, Mershon Center.
Mueller was promoting his new book, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (Free Press, forthcoming on November 14). It is essentially an expansion of his argument in the October/November issue of Foreign Affairs ("Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?") Given Stewart's political sympathies, there was no doubt that Mueller's thesis would resonate with the host. The suspense centered on whether Mueller's sense of humor was up to the task. It was.
The segment is available in streaming video on the Daily Show web site: the Tuesday, October 31 episode, part 3.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
More on the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair
Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
Recently I sent John J. Miller of National Review an email which he published on Phi Beta Cons, a section of National Review Online, along with a brief comment of his own. Here's the exchange:
Thursday, October 12, 2006
The AHA Has a Blog
Just in from The American Historical Association:
Dear AHA member,
The American Historical Association is pleased to announce AHA Today.
This blog focuses on the latest happenings in the broad discipline of history and the professional practice of the craft that draws on the staff, research, and activities of the AHA.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
The Debate on Military History
By now, everyone must know all about my views on the National Review article entitled, "Sounding Taps: Why Military History Is Being Retired."
Two fresh perspectives may be had at For the Greater Good:
A Bid for Insurgency, Military History-Style
. . . and Historicus:
More on the Military History Debate and Promoting it in Academia.
Saturday, October 7, 2006
Letter from the OSU Military History Program to National Review
My recent posts on this blog, Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, etc. regarding the National Review article "Sounding Taps" have hitherto reflected my personal views. The letter below represents the "official" response of the Ohio State Military History Program:
October 7, 2006
Letters Editor
National Review
215 Lexington Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10016
Here at The Ohio State University, we are intrigued by John J. Miller's September 26 column “Sounding Taps” over the field of military history. We appreciate the concern but, to paraphrase the fellow in the “Bring Out Your Dead” sequence of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “We're not dead yet.”
Nor do we seem to be dying. In fact, we are thriving, thanks to the support that our military history program enjoys within the history department, the presence on campus of the interdisciplinary Mershon Center for International Security Studies, and the generosity of outside donors.
We presently have three military historians -- Mark Grimsley, John F. Guilmartin, Jr., and Geoffrey Parker -- and one diplomatic-military historian, Jennifer Siegel. Between us we have published 51 books and 227 book chapters, essays, and articles. Much of this output is intended principally for scholarly audiences. The best university presses have published our books and many of our articles have appeared in refereed journals that span the entire historical field, including the American Historical Review in the United States and Past & Present in Great Britain. But a significant portion of our books and articles are written for the general reader and reflect our engagement with a wider public.
Friday, October 6, 2006
Introducing The Military History Foundation
In the wake of John J. Miller's National Review Online article "Sounding Taps," in which so many senior military historians essentially endorsed the thesis that academic military history was all but defunct, I've run out of patience. Plainly a number of senior figures in the field would rather wring their hands in despair than do the work of developing a strategic plan to grow the field. Well, if nobody else will do it, I'll give it a go myself.
I've created a new domain, militaryhistoryfoundation.org, and have begun to generate pages dealing with commentary on the state of the field and resources for building the field, especially in the realm of fund-raising. I've already interviewed one Ohio State development officer to begin learning to ropes; I meet with another this afternoon.
If it seems pretentious to pursue such an undertaking, you'll get no argument from me. But I'd rather be considered pretentious than passive. I figure at a minimum I can get the ball rolling.
Wednesday, October 4, 2006
More Nonsense About Military History From National Review Online
Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
My new amigo, John J. Miller, is still grasping at straws to defend his misinformed -- to put it kindly -- article on the demise of academic military history.
In NRO's Phi Beta Cons on September 29, he trumpets the arrival of "Reinforcements":
From a military-history professor:
Your article on the demise of military history as a discipline is right on the mark, except it doesn't go far enough. Grimsley seems blinded by the fact that Ohio State has about the only viable program at a first tier school. Duke and UNC are only shadows of their former selves. Senior military historians are not being replaced and once vibrant programs are dying or are already dead...
Much of the rest of the profession simply loathes military history and has little respect for those who toil in the field.
Note if you please the near complete lack of specifics, including even the name of the military historian who wrote this drivel. The sole exception is the mention of the Duke-UNC program, and here the anonymous military historian is dead wrong.
Duke and UNC are only shadows of their former selves.
What's this guy been smoking?
The UNC military history web site notes the existence of a collaborative military history program with Duke and lists the names of SIXTEEN faculty members who are either full-time military historians (six) or historians with an interest in specific wars (e.g., the War for American Independence and the American Civil War) or military affairs more broadly.
Tuesday, October 3, 2006
The Life Changer
Yesterday I visited Westminster - Thurber [Retirement ] Community here in Columbus, to give the first of four classes in a mini-course on the History of War. The course is under the auspices of an initiative called OWLS -- Older, Wiser, Lifelong Scholars. This is its eleventh year in operation.
At the outset of the class, I noticed that the fellow introducing me had in his hands a copy of my first book, The Hard Hand of War. I assumed he intended merely to waggle it at the fifty audience members by way of confirming that I was indeed a bona fide military historian.
After a very generous summary of my career to date, he held up the book. "There's something very special about this book, this copy," he said. "It is inscribed on the title page, 'For Billie, with gratitude.' Billie Cranford happens to live in Thurber Towers -- the same Billie. The book is dedicated to her and two other of his former teachers, and all this makes a very special kind of connectedness that we are enjoying this afternoon. And I would just like to read a couple of lines from the acknowledgments.
"'As my ninth grade English teacher, Billie Cranford supported both my writing and historical interests, encouraged me to think in terms of publication, and even excused me from regular assignments to undertake an independent writing project that formed my first attempt to grapple with the sweep of the Civil War.' And there's a bit more."
He turned to me and said, "Did we surprise you?"
It had just hit me that Billie Cranford must be in the room. I looked and, sure enough, she was.
Saturday, September 30, 2006
Populate a History Department
Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
Let's say you have carte blanche to populate a history department located in, say, the U.S. midwest. For purposes of the exercise, the department has no preexisting faculty -- or, if you like, numerous faculty will retire over the next five years, and you are asked to develop a strategic plan showing what the department should look like in five years. Select the faculty positions you consider most important for the 8,000 undergraduate students who attend this liberal arts college. You have fifteen FTE (full-time equivalent) slots available and a salary/benefits budget of $1,290,000, with benefits computed at 36 percent of salary. (Thus, a faculty member receiving $50,000 in salary would also require $18,000 in benefits.) You can count on an annual pool of 1.5 percent (e.g., $19,350 for the first academic year), for merit increases.
Thus:
Friday, September 29, 2006
An Officer at the Pentagon Evaluates NRO's "Sounding Taps"
In one of his occasional guest posts for Altercation, the blog of journalist Eric Alterman, LTC Robert Bateman writes concerning National Review Online's "Sounding Taps" article.
Bateman returned earlier this year from a hitch in Baghdad and is currently assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon.
As Bateman's article has no convenient permalink, and as he owns the copyright, with his permission I reproduce it here in full:
I generally don't much care where I get my news, so long as it appears factual. A fellow academic recently sent one story along, the link is below, and I believe it is worth some thought. As Altercators know, I am of the opinion that during War or Peace, it is important for citizens of a Democracy to understand war. The article highlights the sorry state of affairs for military history within academia.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
John J. Miller Strikes Back!
Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
John J. Miller of National Review Online was kind enough to email me a heads up that he's not taking my barrage of posts lying down. He gives me plenty of what-for on the Phi Beta Cons page of National Review Online. The page is subtitled, "The Right Take on Higher Ed." I'll give him a paragraph's head start, then let you jump to the page itself:
Well, my article on the decline of military history as an academic field has at least one professor all atwitter. Mark Grimsley of Ohio State is so flustered by it that I'm having trouble keeping track of his attacks on the theme of the article, the quality of my reporting, and my personal integrity — but the main one seems to be this, followed by this, this, and this. I guess he really takes the whole "publish or perish" thing to heart.
An Additional Post Card for John J. Miller, National Review Online
Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
Jeez, where to begin?
The NRO article makes much of the apparent failure of the American Historical Review to publish much concerning military history. But it overlooks the fact the 2004 annual meeting of the American Historical Association had as its theme "Thoughts on War in a Democratic Age." And while there is truth in the fact that the American Historical Review seldom publishes military history, no one has checked independently to see if 1) military historians are actually submitting articles for consideration by the journal; and 2) the submissions meet the high standards expected from any flagship professional journal.
A contraindication may be had by noting that the Journal of American History, generally considered to be as "leftist" as the AHR, has in fact commissioned an article on the current state of the field of American military history. Wayne E. Lee, a rising star at the University of North Carolina, is currently completing that study.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Crocodile Tears For Military History: An Open Letter to John J. Miller, National Review Online
Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
Dear John,
Thanks for nothing.
"Sounding Taps," your September 26 article in National Review Online, is on the surface a sympathetic lament for the supposed marginalization of academic military history. But it is constructed so tendentiously, and overlooks so many relevant facts, that it is really quite misleading.
So misleading, in fact, that you may have done more to harm academic military history than any bunch of "tenured radicals" has managed to do in many years, if ever.
Taps for Military History ??
The item below appeared in yesterday's National Review Online. Over the course of that day, I received several private emails asking what I thought of it. Later today I'll have a post
TAPS FOR MILITARY HISTORY
Why military history is being retiredJOHN J. MILLER
A decade ago, best-selling author Stephen Ambrose donated $250,000 to the University of Wisconsin, his alma mater, to endow a professorship in American military history. A few months later, he gave another $250,000. Until his death in 2002, he badgered friends and others to contribute additional funds. Today, more than $1 million sits in a special university account for the Ambrose-Heseltine Chair in American History, named after its main benefactor and the long-dead professor who trained him.
The chair remains vacant, however, and Wisconsin is not currently trying to fill it. “We won’t search for a candidate this school year,” says John Cooper, a history professor. “But we’re committed to doing it eventually.” The ostensible reason for the delay is that the university wants to raise even more money, so that it can attract a top-notch senior scholar. There may be another factor as well: Wisconsin doesn’t actually want a military historian on its faculty. It hasn’t had one since 1992, when Edward M. Coffman retired. “His survey course on U.S. military history used to overflow with students,” says Richard Zeitlin, one of Coffman’s former graduate teaching assistants. “It was one of the most popular courses on campus.” Since Coffman left, however, it has been taught only a couple of times, and never by a member of the permanent faculty.
One of these years, perhaps Wisconsin really will get around to hiring a professor for the Ambrose-Heseltine chair — but right now, for all intents and purposes, military history in Madison is dead. It’s dead at many other top colleges and universities as well. Where it isn’t dead and buried, it’s either dying or under siege.
Monday, September 11, 2006
9/11: Valor and Shame
Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
This afternoon I watched a DVD of United 93, a very good film released earlier this year about the one aircraft hijacked by Al-Qaeda on 9/11 that failed to reach its target (most likely the U.S. Capitol). The plane went down in a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
According to the best testimony we have, the aircraft went down after what the 9/11 Commission report terms a "passenger revolt" broke out at 9:57 a.m.:
Friday, September 8, 2006
"The Path to 9/11": The Saga Continues
Educational media giant Scholastic, Inc. announced it's dropping its original classroom companion guides to a controversial new docudrama about the events preceding the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks -- and replacing them with materials stressing critical thinking and media literacy.
"After a thorough review of the original guide that we offered online to about 25,000 high school teachers, we determined that the materials did not meet our high standards for dealing with controversial issues," said Dick Robinson, Chairman, President and CEO of Scholastic, in a press release.
The original materials had been criticized for oversimplifications and failures to address flaws in post-9/11 policies, including the invasion of Iraq.
Text of Scholastic, Inc., Press Release
Thursday, September 7, 2006
"The Path to 9/11": Exploiting an American Tragedy
A few days ago, the "Kossacks" -- regular contributors -- at Daily Kos began decrying an upcoming film called "The Path to 9/11, " to be aired by the ABC network this coming Sunday and Monday. It was, they averred, a thinly-veiled piece of political propaganda that attacked the Clinton administration and exonerated the Bush administration concerning what the Report of the 9/11 Commission concluded was a massive systemic failure of U.S. intelligence that happened on the watch of both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Initially I was angered to learn that 9/11 was yet again being exploited for partisan political purposes. Then I took a breath, poked around the Internet a bit, and saw a number of blog posts that portrayed the film as really quite arresting and dramatic and not slanted toward any political agenda. So I swept the Kossacks' outcries from my thoughts.
Then came last evening.
I was driving down to Lancaster, Ohio, to visit a conservative evangelical church and had the radio set to a conservative Christian radio station that is fairly prominent in these parts. A Michael Medved plug for "The Path to 9/11" was played twice in ten minutes. It strongly reinforced the right-wing propaganda interpretation.
The second time I captured most of it on a digital recorder. Here's a transcript:
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Beirut: An Aerial View of the Bombing
MSNBC has an interactive graphic showing a satellite photo of a portion of Beirut as it appeared on July 12 and another satellite photo showing the same area on July 31. You can toggle back and forth between the two. Only four targets are captioned -- a highway overpass, Hezbollah offices, the municipal building and Al Manar television -- but if you examine the photos in their entirety, it's plain that a substantial number of other buildings were also targeted or at least struck. The graphic is a litmus test of sorts for one's appraisal of the IAF strikes. Do you see evidence of a discriminate, proportional air campaign; or something more extensive?
UPDATE, August 12, 2:02 PM - The New York Times ran a similar graphic last week. It labels the bombed zone, "Main area of Hezbollah offices (before attacks, this area was fenced off and surrounded by guards)," which to my mind removes the litmus test. So to that extent, never mind. But both graphics are worth a look. Interestingly, the NYT's "before" image is in color, the "after" image in black and white.
Wednesday, August 9, 2006
The Sacred Oath Is Shattered
For weeks now I have been profoundly disquieted by the Israeli Defense Forces' tactical approach to combatting Hezbollah. I have wrestled with it on my professional blog; I have discussed it with friends both in and out of the armed forces; I have let it distract me from my planned agenda of summer work. But then, the ethics of war -- the problem of how to conduct war in a moral fashion -- has engaged me for a long time.
To date, an estimated 800 Lebanese civilians have died under the bombs and shells of the IDF's F-16s and self-propelled howitzers. The campaign has been a humanitarian disaster, a political embarrassment, and so devoid of military success that the Israeli general in charge of the operation has been sacked.
But enraged by the kidnapping of two IDF soldiers, the murder of several more, and the indiscriminate rain of Katyusha rockets that has fallen on Israel since mid-July, killing about 100 Israeli civilians, the response of those who sympathize with Israel has been to shrug off the deaths of Lebanese civilians. The standard line is to place the entire blame on Hezbollah because Hezbollah is said to have intentionally established command posts and rocket launchers in populated areas. Another refrain is to blame the civilians themselves, on the theory that only Hezbollah supporters would be anywhere near a Hezbollah military position. And inevitably, those whose sympathies lie with Israel have blamed the media for showing what Israeli bombs and shells do to human beings.
They have gotten so far gone with rage that a number of them now proclaim:
Monday, August 7, 2006
What Did Happen at Qana?
This afternoon I took a look at accounts of the IAF air strike on Qana, then examined the efforts of the right-wing or pro-Israeli commentators (depending on the term you prefer) to impeach those accounts. The latter group has gotten a lot of mileage today out of PhotoshopGate. And sure enough, the ex-Reuters stringer sure made inept use of the "clone tool." But even more inept, I discovered, have been the efforts to explain away the Qana tragedy.
What follows are the opening paragraphs of a three-part post on my professional blog. You can follow the rest of it there.
I've become curious about the various attempts to spin the Israeli attack on Qana which occurred shortly after midnight on July 30. So I conducted a LEXIS/NEXIS search, which yielded 279 hits (some of them duplicates), and then looked for accounts by journalists who actually visited Qana. Excerpts from these reports are given below, arranged in reverse chronogical order. They disagree a bit as to the exact number of dead, but none lend plausibility to the IDF's speculation -- eagerly seized upon in some quarters -- that the building was damaged but did not collapse for another eight hours.
Saturday, April 1, 2006
Letters to Leila: 11D: A Recon
The third in my series of Letters to Leila -- an introduction to blogging for academics unfamiliar with the medium -- is now available:
It explores 11D, a blog maintained by"Laura," a woman with a PhD in political science but who is "not affiliated with any university right now. Instead I'm changing diapers in New Jersey. Maybe I'll put myself on the market this winter. Maybe I'll hobble together a writing career. Maybe the kids will suck out every creative brain cell, and I'll be left a broken woman in a bowling alley in Paterson. Who the hell knows."
I figured since Leila is in Women's Studies, she might find 11D of particular interest. Frankly, I think anyone would, but particularly those of us in the academy.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Letters to Leila: The Case for Blogging
The second in my series of Letters to Leila -- an introduction to blogging for academics unfamiliar with the medium -- is now available:
It offers a precis of Ralph Luker's AHA Perspectives article, "Were There Blog Enough, and Time," and provides a link to "Custer and the Art of the Blog," a series of posts I composed last year when I was trying to explain the virtues of blogging to my department chair and, to some extent, myself.
Monday, March 20, 2006
Letters to Leila: Introduction
Cross-Posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
A few weeks ago I phoned Leila J. Rupp, Professor and Chair of Women's Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (that's her at left in the photo, accompanied by her long-time partner, Verta Taylor).
Leila is also a former colleague in my department. I selected her as my faculty mentor during my first year as an assistant professor, and she graciously served in that capacity until I got tenure. She eventually became Chair of the Ohio State history department before moving on to UCSB. Even after I became tenured and the department no longer required me to have a formal mentor, I continued to consult Leila for three reasons: 1) she is one of the best all-around professional historians I have ever seen; 2) she is one of the kindest, most fundamentally decent people I have ever met; and 3) where Leila is concerned, I have long been smitten with a slight but unmistakable case of puppy love.
In that respect I differ little from many colleagues, staff, and graduate students who have known Leila, because she genuinely cares for others and, in return, is a widely beloved figure.
I called Leila because I needed her advice about something. She supplied it, and then we briefly updated each other about developments in our respective lives. Among other things I told her about my experiences with blogging. She knew nothing about the medium but grasped at once that I found it a useful tool in my professional life and was therefore all in favor of it. In a follow-up email, she wrote:
And thanks for telling me about your blog, I checked it out and it looks really fascinating. I have one question, a stupid one, how does one find blogs? Do they come up on google?
I replied:
It's not a stupid question at all.
Globe of Blogs maintains a registry of blogs by title, topic, etc.
Cliopatria has a history blogroll.
Phliobiblon is maintained by Natalie Bennett, a freelance writer and commentator based in London. Her blogroll (the links to other blogs running down the righthand margin of the blog) has a lot of women's history/studies/feminism blogs.
Bitch PhD is an anonymous but very popular blog maintained by a feminist academic. On most days it's a lot of fun to read.
There are blogs that discuss practically every subject. (One is devoted entirely to reviews of burritos.) Technorati is a good place to find what blogs are saying on any given subject.
Evidently Bitch Ph.D. particularly tickled her fancy, because her next reply quoted just that snip of my email and said, "Thanks!"
Which could have been the end of the exchange. But I got to thinking about last summer and the whole Ivan Tribble affair -- that was when an anonymous academic wrote two essays for the Chronicle of Higher Education in which he more or less declared that academics who kept blogs (especially those without the protection of tenure) were committing professional suicide. Cliopatria closely covered the reaction of the academic blogging community, so I won't rehearse it here. But I will say that in a cycle of private emails, several of us "Cliopatriarchs" -- that is, those listed on the Cliopatria masthead -- discussed how we might go about educating the non-blogging academic community to this new medium.
At one point, I suggested that it might be worthwhile to ask an academic unfamiliar with blogging, yet willing to approach it with an open mind, to read over a few blogs and offer impressions. People thought it a good suggestion; the difficulty lay in finding someone willing to donate their time and effort. On that matter the suggestion foundered -- until I realized that in Leila we might have just the scholar we needed.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
The History of Military History - Pt 2
Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
Continued from Part 1
I assume that, in the AHA/AMI joint session, Arthur Ekirch and Tyson Wilson presented in the same order as the eventual versions that appeared in Military Affairs. If so, Ekirch went first.
Ekirch, be it remembered, had just published The Civilian and the Military, subtitled A History of the American Antimilitarist Tradition -- with which tradition Ekirch seemed wholly in sympathy and which he regarded as having been pretty much the norm for most of American history. Antimilitarism was not, of course, synonymous with pacifism. Session moderator Richard C. Brown had reviewed the book for Military Affairs -- it would appear almost simultaneously with the session -- and he wrote:
The author defines the antimilitarist as one who accepts war and armies as a sometimes necessary evil, but regards a large military establishment and conscript armies, even when needed, as a threat to the preservation of civil institutions of government. . . . He finds that some of our wars, notably the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, were unpopular with many Americans because of our antimilitarist tradition. Much resistance to the Union and Confederate governments during the Civil War was motivated, he believes, by the force of this tradition. Similarly, he shows that our antimilitarist traditions have been responsible for the rapid demobilization of our military establishments at the close of each of our wars. [Military Affairs 20, no. 4 (Winter 1956), 231.]
But with the advent of the Cold War and its attendant policy of military containment, Ekirch saw the twilight of these antimilitarist traditions, and that misgiving permeated his AHA/AMI presentation.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Speaking Truth to Power, Gathering Votes for Power, and Doing It Tax-Free
In November 2005, the Internal Revenue Service sent a warning letter to a liberal Pasadena church, averring that an anti-war sermon delivered just before the 2004 election violated IRS guidelines for non-profit organizations. In mid-January 2006, thirty-one central Ohio clergymen signed a copiously documented complaint asking IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson to investigate two conservative evangelical churches whose promotion of gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell, among other things, apparently transgresses IRS rules as well.
So far the religious blogosphere has treated these matters as essentially political in nature: on the one hand, a Republican vendetta against the Pasadena church; on the other, mere "sour grapes" on the part of liberal churches not in sympathy with the goals of the conservative evangelical churches.
But as an historian, I'm curious to know about the origins of the prohibition on electioneering activity by non-profit organizations (I have read that it came at the initiative of Sen. Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1950s, but have not confirmed that). I'm also curious to know whether, during the Civil Rights era, instances arose in which the non-profit status of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and various anti-segregation churches was challenged because of voter registration drives. If similar guidelines existed in the 1960s, were civil rights-oriented churches careful to observe them, and/or did segregationists level charges of non-compliance as a cudgel with which to beat them?
Any information and insights would be appreciated. You'll find several posts on the Ohio clergy's IRS complaint at my kinder, gentler--and certainly not military--blog, Radical Civility.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
The History of Military History - Pt 1
Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
The recent laments about the stepchild status of academic military history have spurred me toward a project I've had in the back of my mind for some time: an historiographical review of the field. Through the miracle of blogging, I'm not obliged to present this in linear order. Nevertheless, my point of departure occurs fairly early--almost fifty years ago in fact--when historians Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr. and Tyson Wilson squared off at a joint session of the American Historical Association and the American Military Institute (the forerunner of the Society for Military History). The session, entitled "Military History: Pro and Con," took place at the annual meeting of the AHA on December 30, 1956, somewhere in the bowels of the Hotel Sheraton-Jefferson in St. Louis, Missouri.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Post 9/11 America: The Best of Times
The September 11 attacks and the Global War on Terror they triggered are, on the greater scale of things, no big deal.
That's the conclusion of a survey of 354 American history professors undertaken by the Siena College Research Institute (SRI). Asked to rank eight "trying times" in American history-- The Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War I, Great Depression, World War II, Cold War, Vietnam/Cultural Revolution, and the current War on Terror, the War on Terror came in dead last.
The Civil War, my own area of specialization, topped the list. For the other rankings, see the complete story.
Friday, November 25, 2005
The General, The Bodies, The Sorrows, The Blogs
(cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age)
After some weeks spent mostly under the radar, Stephen A. Ogden's English 340: First World War Literature students at Simon Fraser University have begun openly posting the URLs to their group blogs. Here are links:
C. S. Forester's The General
A blog discussing C.S. Forester's novel, The General, and its relation to the events, people and ideas prominent before, during, and after the First World War.
Bloody Khaki
Another blog dealing with Forester's The General
Vile Bodies
A blog whose focus is Evelyn Waugh's 1930 novel, Vile Bodies.
EWWW! Vile Bodies
Another blog that focuses--evidently with some squeamishness--on Waugh's Vile Bodies. See also its predecessor blog, In Defiance of Long Novels.
The Sorrows of Satan
A blog dealing with Marie Corelli's 1896 novel, Sorrows of Satan
Monday, September 5, 2005
Me and Professor Tribble
That's my colleague, Geoffrey Parker. I took that picture back in February during a discussion in which I introduced him to blogging. In it, he's reading The Sixty-first Minute, the famous Powerline post that ultimately cost Dan Rather his job.
You may have heard of Geoffrey. He has written, edited, or co-edited thirty-two books. His best-known work is probably The Military Revolution. Military innovation and the rise of the West, 1500-1800, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1988 and winner of two book prizes. A second, expanded edition came out in 1996, with Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese and Spanish translations. A third, revised edition appeared in 2000 (Italian translation already available, Spanish translation in preparation.)
Geoffrey doesn't blog. He doesn't need to.
But he respects the fact that I blog, and that I need to. My department shares that respect. My annual review this year included the following:
"[In the past year, you published this, taught that, and served on such and such a committee.] Finally, you maintained a very interesting and important academic military history blog, which you have used with skill to develop ideas about the field and also to advance your thinking on important scholarly issues...."
Lest that sound like the department was just humoring me, I should add that the department also humored me with a nice raise in salary.
Saturday, April 16, 2005
Abolitionists and Blogging, Nineteenth Century Style
The historian from whom I received my graduate training in early American history was Merton Dillon, now a professor emeritus at The Ohio State University. Merton has written a number of books on the antislavery movement, among them Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and their Allies, 1619-1865 (Baton Rouge, 1990), one of the standard works in the field.
A couple of months ago, when I first really became aware of blogging, something about the medium niggled at the back of my mind, and finally I sent Merton an email with a question and some links for him to follow. Here is Merton's response:
Dear Mark,
I have succeeded in hooking up with your blog(s) and web sites and thus have access to the other sites you favored me with. I have to confess, though, that I haven't yet learned, and probaby never will learn, to enjoy this exercise or diversion. [But be that as it may, your basic observation about the resemblance between blogs and abolitionist newspapers is correct.]
A few words about analogizing bloggers and abolitionists: The earliest white persons of antislavery conviction sought to find others of kindred persuasion. Quakers were apparently the first to accomplish this, within the narrow boundaries of their own fellowship, by giving testimony at Quaker Meetings and Meetings of Sufferings. In the 18th century individual Friends traveled the colonies spreading the antislavery message among fellow Friends as thought it were the Gospel. A few of them wrote pamphlets or tracts which they distributed to likely converts.
The problem, then, in an age lacking popular print or other conduits of information, was how to reach like-minded people. How can such people find each other? How can random and inchoate ideas be gathered from these sympathetic but disparate people and molded into an acceptable, rationally consistent program? Interchange of thought must be the process. What shall be the agency?
Beginning around 1820 small, shoestring newspapers began the process. [Benjamin] Lundy's [The Genius of Universal] Emancipation was one of the first and most long-lasting. Lundy sent his paper where he thought it might be welcomed. He printed exposes of the slave systen and proposed remedies. He invited readers to contribute their ideas. Later, [William Lloyd] Garrison did the same. The remedies were as varied as the critiques.
It took a while before antislavery advocates found each other and developed something like a community. It took still longer for them to forge a program. It is not ungenerous to conclude that, despite all their writing, all their speaking, all their conferring, they never were able to set forth a program for abolitionism that all opponents of slavery found acceptable, but they did create a society or community. The process was similar to that experienced more recently by the founders of feminism, gay communities, etc.
How do people find each other? Bloggers in quite systematic and lightning-speed fashion are taking advantage of the opportunities technology has given them to speed and share ideas and, potentially, to create societies all with a facility Abolitionists could not have dreamed of.
Sincerely,
Merton
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
The Historical Profession and the Churchill Controversy
The AHA has recently issued a revised Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct. It was approved by the Professional Division, December 9, 2004 and adopted by Council, January 6, 2005.
Part of the statement reads:
In contesting each other’s interpretations, professional historians recognize that the resulting disagreements can deepen and enrich historical understanding by generating new questions, new arguments, and new lines of investigation. This crucial insight underpins some of the most important shared values that define the professional conduct of historians. They believe in vigorous debate, but they also believe in civility. [Emphasis supplied]They rely on their own perspectives as they probe the past for meaning, but they also subject those perspectives to critical scrutiny by testing them against the views of others.Much of the statement appears to have been written in response to the Joe Ellis controversy and certain famous episiodes of plagiarism, and the statement may need to be revised a bit in light of the Ward Churchill controversy. Even so, the phrases I have bold-faced do seem to speak to aspects of our espoused professional culture that seem relevant to the Ward Churchill matter.
Historians celebrate intellectual communities governed by mutual respect and constructive criticism. The preeminent value of such communities is reasoned discourse--the continuous colloquy among historians holding diverse points of view who learn from each other as they pursue topics of mutual interest. A commitment to such discourse--balancing fair and honest criticism with tolerance and openness to different ideas--makes possible the fruitful exchange of views, opinions, and knowledge.
This being the case, it is worth repeating that a great many dilemmas associated with the professional practice of history can be resolved by returning to the core values that the preceding paragraphs have sought to sketch. Historians should practice their craft with integrity. They should honor the historical record. They should document their sources. They should acknowledge their debts to the work of other scholars. They should respect and welcome divergent points of view even as they argue and subject those views to critical scrutiny. They should remember that our collective enterprise depends on mutual trust. And they should never betray that trust.
I want to suggest, however, that it is hard to find much evidence to support the idea that prior to the Hamilton College flap in January 2005, any historians, much less enough to be representative of the profession, took issue with Churchill's essay, "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens" or with its final version which was published last year by AK Press in Oakland, Calif. as On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality. The online essay was written before it was known who had struck the Twin Towers and Pentagon on 9/11. The final version, although published three years later, barely takes into account the wealth of info on Al Qaeda and its motivations that had come to light by then, nor does it improve significantly in documenting its contention that the World Trade Center "technocrats" were engaged--knowingly, he wants to argue--in genocidal projects.
I got some flak from the political right for trying to take Churchill's essay seriously, if only to confirm what lousy scholarship it really semed to be. I am now trying to take seriously the idea that academic speech must also be responsible speech, that while we must respect free speech we have an obligation as a profession to distance ourselves from those who present slipshod scholarship wearing the mantle of a professional historian.
I do not believe we as a profession need a formal rule on this matter. I believe we can be a very scary bunch of people when we want to be. I have seen for years the way in which our informal professional culture has intimidated:
- historians who wish to write popular history
- historians who wish to work in subjects deemed "traditional"
- historians who spend "too much time" getting the next book done
- historians who investigate the potential of new media--conceptual "cutting edge" good; technological "cutting edge" bad
If we can exert a chilling effect on the historians above, we can certainly exert a chilling effect on "historians" who undercut the standing of our profession, and undermine the credibility of those who do engage in responsible dialogue.
Most of us, however, simply won't do it. As I said in the earlier post, "Confronted with a piece of shoddy scholarship, the response of most academics is simply to ignore it. We don't discuss it, don't condemn it. We just evaluate it as unworthy of engagement."
In certain instances, however, that is not an adequate response. The refusal to speak out against bad history is bad for the profession. Most historians seem to think that the politicians in Colorado are wrong to be gunning for Churchill's job. That may be so. But it is hard to see how this profession--which does not hesitate to make judgments re student grades, graduate admissions, job hiring, tenure, promotion, etc.--has done much of anything to suggest that it has the interest or will to police its own profession.
I yield to no one in my belief that a) you can express any idea you want; and b) historians should be engaged in public conversations as well as academic ones. But if we expect to be taken seriously as a profession we have a responsibility to confront the Ward Churchills not about their ideas--Churchill's actual critique is merely warmed-over Noam Chomsky, and Chomsky does it so much better--but about the quality of their presentations.
I invite you to join me in a conversation on this matter.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
On the Justice of Roosting State Senators
The Ward Churchill thing has been flogged pretty hard, by me as much as anyone else. But there's one dimension I don't see discussed very much, namely the role of academicians in helping to create the controversy in the first place.
A few weeks ago I listened, via streaming audio, to an interview with Churchill on a Denver radio talk show. The host did a fairly good job of handling the interview. Churchill himself was fairly articulate except when called upon to explain the infamous "little Eichmanns" analogy. Then he suddenly got sort of quasi-articulate: articulate enough, I thought, that his supporters would find him lucid, but not so much as to deprive his opponents of ammunition. It seemed pretty much the way he liked it.
Toward the end of the broadcast, a Colorado state senator named Tom Wiens called in from the road to ask Churchill a few questions about his salary and teaching load: details he had planned to have his staff track down but if Churchill could offer them over the phone, what the heck. Senator Wiens did not exploit the chance to demagogue, posture or grandstand. He sounded to me like a conscientious public official intent on doing his job. I found that refreshing and sent him an email to say so.
To my surprise, a week later he actually wrote back to thank me. He offered some thoughts on the "free speech" aspect of the Churchill imbroglio, as opposed to all the other aspects that had yet to make much of an appearance: Churchill's Native American identity or lack thereof, his credentials, the charge of plagiarism, and so on. I will not quote from the email because he did not specifically give me leave to do so, and although I asked permission I never heard from him again. But as I began writing this post, I checked Senator Wiens' political web site and found that soon after he got a follow-up email from me--which I'll reprint in a moment--he joined the campaign to get Churchill dismissed.
"[C]hurchill's offensive comments are grounds for dismissal alone," states a press release from his office, "however Wiens also pointed out that the professor's statements show a lack of serious scholarship and questioned why a prestigious university such as CU would choose to hire someone of such questionable academic caliber and entrust him with our children's education. Just like any other state-paid job where competence is expected, Wiens is concerned that Colorado taxpayers aren't getting their money's worth in this case. In addition, this episode could cause CU's commitment to academic excellence to be called into question."
I think the senator is wrong about the offensive comments being grounds for dismissal. It doesn't fit my reading of CU's policies. But judging by the senator's email to me, the idea that "Colorado taxpayers aren't getting their money's worth" is where the rubber hit the road for him. The rest could well be just political posturing of the sort that politicians do.
Here's my reply to Senator Wiens. I have polished the style just slightly; otherwise it is word for word what I wrote:
Hi Tom (if I may),
I think you're on target. The question is how the enforcement mechanism is handled.
The Ward Churchill thing has served as a wakeup call for a lot of people, not just among public officials and university administrators but also rank-and-file professors like myself. I didn't run across Churchill's "roosting chickens" essay until a couple of weeks ago, but had I done so in September 2001 my most likely response, as a professional historian, would have been to ignore it. Every profession has its own characteristic culture. Physicians think, act, and dress a certain way. So do lawyers. So do clergy. So do military officers. And so do academics.
Confronted with a piece of shoddy scholarship, the response of most academics is simply to ignore it. We don't discuss it, don't condemn it. We just evaluate it as unworthy of engagement. Shoddy scholarship doesn't even get reviewed in academic journals, because space is at a premium and why expend space discussing a book or article that is egregiously sub-standard? True, books and articles do get evaluated negatively, but these nearly always are books and articles that have met some sort of "quality threshold," if you will. Typically they have been published by a university press or in a refereed journal, which means that at least a couple of experts have read and commented on the book or article in manuscript and said, yes, other historians--at least specialists in a given field--should read this.
It seems to me that a person occupying your office could legitimately pressure the historical profession to revisit this tendency to ignore shoddy scholarship, when shoddy scholarship attempts to gain a hearing by lobbing grenades like the "little Eichmanns" analogy.
Here is how you could do it. And please forgive me if this sounds obvious or somehow condescending. I was first exposed to the literature on professionalism and professionalization as an undergraduate, but it was in an unusual context--military professionalism--and I am not sure how common it is for educated people to receive systematic exposure to this literature. I may be telling you much that you already know. If so, I apologize and ask for your patience.
Professions enjoy a privileged status in society because they serve as a reservoir of skilled talent which society cannot readily supply. It takes a physician, for instance, to train a physician, and so we give the medical profession wide latitude in choosing those who will receive the chance to learn medicine, in determining how such people will be trained, and in deciding when they will be regarded as competent enough to practice. We also give the medical profession wide latitude to police its own membership. We as a society do this because we assume that the medical profession-- so long as it is socially responsible --will recruit, train, and police physicians better than we could do it ourselves.
Presumably, professional (i.e., academic) historians enjoy a privileged status in society according to a similar rationale. If that profession fails to demonstrate social responsibility, however--if it ignores the Ward Churchills rather than demands that the Churchills produce competent scholarship--then I think that you and your fellow public officials have the obligation to insist that the profession meet its social responsibilities. And if not, to serve notice that society will have to revisit the privileged status it accords academic historians.
I think that if UC were to fire Churchill for his essay it would be in violation of its own current policies. If it fired him for "fraud," for not being a "real Indian," no one would be fooled. We would all recognize that the real reason was, again, that "Roosting Chickens" essay. Cardinal Richelieu once said that if handed two paragraphs written by any given man, Richelieu would find something in it that would hang him. Similarly, most middle-aged Americans have something in their backgrounds such that, if you looked hard enough and then squeezed hard enough, would wreck their lives. Witch hunts succeed because of this.
The better course would be to encourage the historical profession to do in the future what it failed to do in 2001, when Churchill first published the essay; and again in 2004, when Churchill republished the essay in book form. What we should have done goes something like this:
You call this an indictment of American foreign policy? Such indictments are a dime a dozen. Who on the left has not argued that 9/11 is a reaction to American foreign policy over the past 20-30 years? Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, and Gore Vidal are only three names on the long list of people who have made this case and made it more eloquently, rigorously, and persuasively than you.
You might say that no one else compares the WTC "technocrats" to "little Eichmanns." But you can't get your "little Eichmann" analogy to work, because you fail to explain clearly Eichmann's defense in his trial for war crimes that the Final Solution was bureaucratized, and that his responsibility was merely to round up and transport Jews. His responsibilities ended at the Auschwitz gates. Had you done so, your readers might have seen that, arguably, the "technocrats" in the World Trade Center worked on financial deals that ultimately harmed people in the developing world and did so without realizing it, because as bureaucrats they were trained to think in terms of the job in front of them, not in terms of its larger consequences. Of course, in that case your analogy would fail because Eichmann assuredly knew the entire design of the Final Solution. He kept the minutes at the Wanssee Conference in January 1942.
Calling the terrorists "combat teams": Nice try. We need, for purposes of analysis, a vocabulary concerning terrorism that is less fraught with moralistic overtones. But you cannot possibly be serious to frame the attack on the World Trade Center within the structure of strategic bombing under the laws and usages of war. For one thing, that structure contemplates the use of force by state-level actors, and these were non-state actors. More importantly, the structure arises out of just war doctrine, and I somehow doubt the hijackers understood and justified their acts within the framework of a Judeo-Christian ethic of war.
Three years have passed. You wrote the original essay the day after 9/11, when we could only guess at the hijackers' identity and had few specifics about those who died in the attack. At this point, however, much new information has emerged by which you could test the ideas in your original essay and add specifics and nuance. Have you revised the essay in order to incorporate the wealth of information on Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda? Have you investigated what the firm of, say, Cantor Fitzgerald was actually doing the morning of 9/11? Identified and developed a case study or studies to show how a specific trade deal created in the Twin Towers played out in a specific place and affected a specific group of people? There is a fairly substantial literature on the adverse consequences of globalization, you know. Have you incorporated any of it into your scholarship?
I thought not.
-- That, Tom, is what we ought to have done. We failed to do it, and we owe you an apology for that. As professionals we are now necessarily obliged to defend Prof. Churchill's right to free speech, and as professionals we warn of the baneful effects that would fall upon controversial but sound, rigorous scholarship if Churchill were to be stripped of faculty status as well as his chairmanship of the ethnic studies department. But as professionals we could and should have stopped this train before it ever left the gate. We should have fixed this problem. You should never have had to spend a moment of your time with it. You have a right to insist that we clean up our act. I won't mind a bit. The next time I defend some controversial bit of scholarship, I don't want to feel my face redden when I do it.
Best,
Mark
Obviously, I didn't have much influence on Senator Wiens. But if you were looking around for evidence that we are prepared to do what I suggested, how much would you find?
Saturday, March 5, 2005
Playthings or Blasting Caps?
I have an odd affection for Ward
Churchill. I've never met this embattled fellow professor. I
doubt I ever will. I doubt even more that he has any affection for me,
odd or otherwise.
I'm a
military historian. Sure, I could tell you that one of my specialties
is the ethics of war, and that my current research deals with such trendy,
left-leaning subjects as counterhegemonic
resistance or the influence
of war upon race formation in the United States. It sounds very cool,
very fellow traveler. But then you read my c.v.,
and it says that I wrote part of the standard military history textbook at West
Point, and that I've interned at RAND Corporation, lectured at the Army War
College, and participated in a conference sponsored by the Marine Corps
University. It sort of blows the image. If the
"technocrats" of the Twin Towers were "little Eichmanns," as
Churchill puts it in his now notorious essay,
I'm a little Himmler.
It gets worse. Look deeper into the c.v. and you'll find that I've
written 25,000-word magazine biographies of, among others, Robert E. Lee,
Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and--shudder!--Nathan Bedford
Forrest. I suppose you could desperately imagine that these are searing
exposes of four white racists, but I'm afraid not. They were critical
enough to irritate a few Sons of Confederate Veterans, but most readers would
characterize them as respectful; even, in the case of Lee and Jackson,
admiring.
Of course, I wrote them years ago, before I presumably drank the kool-aid and
became a tenured radical. Let's face it, if you're an ideologue of the
right, and you really need to see me as one of Churchill's defenders, you'll
find a way to do it.
So let me make it easy for you.
I love Ward Churchill.
There! I said it, and I feel better. And so do you, if you're a
warrior of the far right. You've got your proof. Now you can feed
it to your readers, who will chortle over it with you. They won't think,
as I would think, that you're playing them for fools, feeding them quotes out
of context or hiding in plain sight the equation
of engagement with agreement.
It's all good, because I love you too, David Horowitz.
I love you guys because you help me think. There's really nothing like a
radical perspective to make you reconsider basic premises, and for someone in
my business, for whom ideas are playthings, this is all great fun. I
realize that for you ideas aren't playthings, but blasting caps, and you have a
point. Ideas indeed have real world consequences. The ideas
expressed in Ward Churchill's "roosting
chickens" essay have angered many. The ideas expressed in the statement of
principles of The Project for the New American Century have killed, to
date, some 1,500 American service
personnel as well as 16,000 to
18,000 Iraqi civilians, directly or by opening the door to a bloody
insurgency. They may also have opened the door to democracy
in the Middle East. I'll believe that when I see it, but your point
is made. Ideas are powerful. I can see why they scare you.
But while I appreciate your concern that an idea may fall into the wrong mind,
I have to say that I'm an adult, and I would also appreciate the common
courtesy of your letting me think for myself. My students, incidentally,
feel the same way. I brainwashed them. Sue me.
A challenge to those on the right: bring it on. Savage me all you
want. Trust me, a military historian can't get enough of your
scorn. In the academy it's like a badge of honor. It gets me in the
club. People stop thinking that I'm probably a CIA plant. Of
course, I've never been much for clubs, so . . .
A challenge to those on the left: don't try to play me the way the far
right plays its own supporters, goading them with sound bites and crude
propaganda. I've seen you do it, too. Knock it off. Sure, I'm
a registered Democrat, but don't take that for granted. Don't think, for
instance, that because I find FrontPage
magazine lopsided and unfair that I will not detach the substance of its
argument from its tendentious presentation--just
as I've been doing with Churchill. If eighty percent of university
faculty members are really politically left of center--and that squares with my
own observations, at least within the humanities--then how come? Is there
a political gate-keeping within the academy? I've seen no overt evidence
of it, but it's plausible that choices made according to other criteria have
the consequence, unintended but perhaps congenial, of keeping a lid on
conservative voices. I mean, it seems to me that you can accomplish quite
a lot of political gate-keeping just by denigrating the fields most likely to
attract conservatives as being "traditional," "old-fashioned,"
and "overrepresented" (without checking too closely to see if this is
in fact the case).
So let me repeat: I love you, Ward Churchill. I love you too, David
Horowitz. You tortured, angry, lovely men--you guys invigorate my
life. Churchill helps me figure out what would happen if Tom Barnett got to
implement the national security plan outlined in The Pentagon's New
Map. (Hint: ka-boom!!) Horowitz helps me figure out
what would happen if I asked my colleagues, here and elsewhere, why so few
academics in the humanities are Republicans? (Hint: Hollow jokes
about how it's because academics are smart. Yeah, so smart the other guys
control all three branches of government.)
Recall the famous slogan in the "war room" of the 1992 Clinton
campaign: It's the economy, stupid. Well, for people in the
academy it's the ideas, stupid. We like ideas. We need ideas.
We play with ideas, the bigger, the bolder, the better. Sure, they're not
just playthings, they're blasting caps; and now and again we lose a finger (or,
who knows, even tenure). But we can never have enough of them.
Recent Entries
- Thursday's Notes
- Midweek Notes
- More Noted Things
- Things Noted Here and There
- Sunday's Notes
- Reclamation
- Weak Endnotes
- Friday's Notes
- Thursday's Notes
- Elsewhere: Post-blogging 1940
News
Roundup
HNN Blogs
- Cliopatria
- Liberty & Power
- Judith Apter Klinghoffer
- How Stupid?
- Mark A. LeVine
- Allan Lichtman
- Tim Furnish
- Gil Troy
Contributing Editors
- Timothy Burke (∞)
- James C. Cobb (∞)
- Hala Fattah (∞)
- Mark Grimsley (∞)
- Michael Kazin (∞)
- Bruce Mazlish (∞)
- Wilson J. Moses (∞)
- Thomas G. Palaima (∞)
- Mechal Sobel (∞)
- Sean Wilentz (∞)
- Sam Wineburg (∞)
Cliopatria's Appendices
- Cliopatria Alumni
- Cliopatria Awards
- Cliopatria's Bookshelf
- Hall of Fame
- History Blogroll
- History Carnival
- Symposia
Blogs
- AHA Today
- Airminded
- Andrew Sullivan
- BibliOdyssey
- Boingboing
- Chapati Mystery
- Civil War Memory
- Civil Warriors
- A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe
- The Corner
- Crooked Timber
- Curious Expeditions
- Daily Kos
- A Don's Life
- Easily Distracted
- Edge of the American West
- Eunomia
- Executed Today
- FiveThirtyEight.com
- The Fix
- Frog in a Well
- Georgian London
- A Historian's Craft
- In the Middle
- Informed Comment
- Instapundit
- Northwest History
- Opinionator
- Paper Cuts
- Quick Study
- Religion and American History
- Siris
- Steamboats Are Ruining Everything
- Talking Points Memo
- Tenured Radical
- THS Blog
- University Diaries
- The Valve
- Volokh Conspiracy
- Walking the Berkshires
- War Historian
- wood s lot
- Wynken de Worde
- zunguzungu
Other Media
- Arts and Letters Daily
- Bookforum
- Books & Culture
- The Browser
- Chronicle of Higher Education
- Common-Place
- The Daily Beast
- Foreign Policy
- Global Voices
- The Guardian
- History News Service
- History Now
- Huffington Post
- Inside Higher Ed
- Literary Review
- London Review of Books
- The Nation
- The National
- National Public Radio
- The New Republic
- New York Review of Books
- New York Times
- New Yorker
- Politico
- RealClear Politics
- Romenesko
- Slate
- Tablet
- Times Higher Education
- Times Literary Supplement
- Washington Post
- Weekly Standard
- World Press Review
Shopping
Recent Comments
- Jonathan Dresner on More Noted Things
- Ralph M. Hitchens on Quite Rather
- Jonathan Dresner on A Complete History of the Soviet Union Through the Eyes of a Humble Worker, arranged to the melody of Tetris
- Chris Bray on Quite Rather
- Chris Bray on Quite Rather
- Chris Bray on Quite Rather
- Chris Bray on Quite Rather
- Jonathan Jarrett on Quite Rather
- Karen Lofstrom on Quite Rather
- Jonathan Dresner on It's Dying -- Let's Eat It
Archives
September 2010August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
July 2007
June 2007
May 2007
April 2007
March 2007
February 2007
January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006
February 2006
January 2006
December 2005
November 2005
October 2005
September 2005
August 2005
July 2005
June 2005
May 2005
April 2005
March 2005
February 2005
January 2005
December 2004
November 2004
October 2004
September 2004
August 2004
July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
April 2004
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004
December 2003
