Has history as a dscipline been diluted?

[Vr4douche]

It seems to me that as time goes on history becomes more and more diluted. Look through faculty lists of PhD candidates and their topics. At most schools a sizable percentage of them relate to gender, sexuality, race and environmental studies. Some departments even specialize in those fields. Now I do not mean to base those studies...I find some of them very interesting...but I can't help but feel that history departments are the wrong place for them. For instance, I know of one PhD student studying the bear hunt and government hunting policies in the 1970s...wouldn't environmental studies be a better place for this than history?

 

I am concerned that the development of those studies as history topics has not been matched with an increase in the number of graduate spaces in history departments. Consequently it is becoming harder and harder for those wanting to study 'traditional history' to find positions within graduate departments. For instance it was a struggle for me to find a department where I could study military history for a PhD...UBC, Toronto, and McGill have no military historian on the payroll!

 

Am I alone with this concern?

[Fianna]

Have you read Guldi and Armitage The History Manifesto? That's one of their arguments. I think there's some there there to what you are saying, although race is one of my areas. Military history is definitely out of fashion in the discipline currently, because there has been more of a focus on "bottom up" histories, and social history in general, rather than more traditional institutional histories.

[jpb]

As someone who studies one of those non-traditional historical fields, as you called it, I don't agree that history departments should deny them or force them into other departments. If someone wants to study U.S. environmental history, for example, it seems strange that they could adequately study their topic w/out a broader knowledge of U.S. history. Similarly, it seems strange that someone could call themselves a U.S. historian without understanding environmental history in some respect. It's a bit of a rambling answer, but fragmenting history into specific departments creates historians who struggle to understand how their research focus fits into the larger portrait of U.S. history.

[Vr4douche]

@ Fianna: No I have not read The History Manifesto but I have read That Noble Dream which discusses this to a point. This was just something I've been thinking about lately and figured it might serve as a good distraction for those waiting for application results. I will admit that military history is one of the more obvious examples I could have picked. It is surprising to me that, considering this is the centenary period of WW1 there are only a few historians working on it in Canada.

 

@ JPB: The problem is that there are many places for the 'non-traditional' studies but not for the traditional histories.' For example, those interested in gender can study it in Gender Studies, Anthropology, and Sociology and probably other departments. Where else can a military historian go? I know many qualified historians who cannot find a department with a supervisor that can supervise their PhD.

[a.rev]

I think history is all encompassing and where you find yourself really depends on how you approach the topic. I'm interested in cultural history and material heritage but not exactly art history, anthropology, or heritage studies. Although I focus on traditional arts, I'm more interested in discussing the politics than the aesthetics. I'm familiar with both approaches (my undergrad is in art history and anthropology) but feel what I want to do is more akin to history than the others. I'm also a fan of big history, something many might just think is physics or, after a certain point, biology. Charles C. Mann discusses how the Columbian Exchange forever altered the global landscape and Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism blends biology and history to show how environment/biology lended itself to European expansion, but that doesn't mean they're not history. I don't think that people should be discredited or discouraged becoming more interdisciplanry in their research. I'm in the camp that believes casting a wider net leads better perspectives. There are still plenty of departments that seek out "traditional" historians, but these departments are also admitting those interested in gender, technology, and environment. More competition isn't always a bad thing and I think these new approaches make history more relatable to the general public.

Edited February 21, 2015 by a.rev

[APBrown]

I agree with JPB. Many of the other non-history departments may have people who study similar topics but fail to look at them in a historical context. Therefore most of the time, these departments are good for history students to take classes in, so they can develop their theoretical foundation, but would not serve well as their home department. It is important to see if their research functions more as a theoretical piece or historical piece.

 

I think it is also important though that we do not confuse terms. Just because something is the more traditional history, does not mean it is necessarily a more legitimate history. Historians have to continually ask new questions, impose new theories, and construct new frameworks in order to create new narratives. 

 

The disappearance of military historians in history departments is part of a larger trend in the historical profession. With the establishment of social history and the rise of cultural history and postmodern/poststructural histories, those have become the primary focus of department search committees. The US in the world subdiscipline is also a focus of search committees. While several military historians have adopted the war and society or new military history methodologies, many still maintain the traditional and operational approaches. It seems to me that if departments hire military historians, it is in that new historiographical vein and most search committees believe that most operational and traditional military historians belong in the military colleges and federal government.

[APBrown]

And I would debate the idea that non-traditional historians have other places to go. I research environmental diplomacy but just because I am interested in politics does not make me a political scientist, just because I am interested in environmental issues does not make me a geographer. It is important to remember that people in these departments are still historians, not just anthropologists, linguists, or sociologists. While they do use theories from other disciplines, they are still grounded in the appropriate historical context of the period they study.

[ashiepoo72]

I don't think military history is out of fashion, I think the traditional way of studying it is. If we study war as battle to battle, tactic to tactic that is no longer fashionable, but I also feel it doesnt do the history justice. If we work under the assumption that historical actors experienced life in complex ways like we do--that their conception of everything revolves around a network of competing, intersecting, contested and negotiated ideologies, experiences and beliefs--how can we not study more than traditional history? What seems silly to me as that we need to break history into so many categories, when history in my mind should encompass them all. Makes me think we historians like the easier task of compartmentalization, as most humans do.

I study war and conflict, and I can tell you that when i look at the Vietnam War, for example, there's no way I can do cut and dry military history to get the richness I want in my research. How can we look at Vietnam without looking at the war as a crucible for the creation of gender identities, as well as a place where these ideas begin to crumble? When the female veterans, like nurses, experienced gender discrimination and hostility, yet their story is removed from the larger narrative? When Vietnamese women played such a huge role in the conflict, and we're some of its greatest victims? How can we not look at the environment as part of the soldiers' experience? How can we strip it of politics, which affected military tactics and battles? How can we not look at class when the majority of the grunts were working-class or poor, or age when the average soldier in the field was 19? How can we not look at race, when the civil rights movement began galvanizing african Americans against the war and many black soldiers felt commonality with the Vietnamese more than their white military commanders? How can we not look at the sensory aspect, the womp-womp of helicopters and buzzing of bullets and booming of artillery? Or the medical aspect--the medical apparatus was extremely well articulated during the war, and this colored the experience of soldiers and personnel.

I categorize myself as a social, political and global historian because our discipline still asks for that kind of categorization. But I don't believe that history is easy to categorize, nor do I think it should be. That's my long answer.

[SunshineLolipops]

Considering that I could be fairly pegged as a military historian, I do find it frustrating that military history is not only out of fashion but actively discouraged, particularly because we have been at war for over a decade. That being said, I think that the smaller niches and sub-fields have been neglected to the detriment of more traditional fields. For example, I would find a history of WWII deficient that did not include the effects it had on gender roles or include the contributions of half of the population.

I tend to consider conflict as a remarkable primary source generator, and an opportunity to see how different segments of society mobilize or resist warfare. Essentially war forces people to put their money where their mouth is (while frequently putting pen to paper) and shows how different societies respond to a variety of stressors. The more facets of a society that have been intensively studied that I can draw upon in my study of war the better.

I just wish admissions committees saw military history that way.

[Cpoco]

Welcome aboard to the postmodernist bandwagon.

[ashiepoo72]

I think some admissions committees welcome people who look at military history in ways beyond the traditional. I wouldn't have gotten in anywhere otherwise--a huge part of my research has to do with war and the military.

[SunshineLolipops]

For what it's worth I do find that ignoring the nature of one of the most powerful forces of change in history to be more than a little silly.

[Vr4douche]

This is not only the result of the rise of social or cultural histories, the linguistic turn, post-modernism-structuralism-colonialism. I have the same problem with International Relations...its studied in history departments, International Relations departments, and Political Sciences. Yet it is difficult to find a history department that will allow you to study late-antique history....that has to be studied in Classics (which isn't interested in it) or Divinity.

 

I think we need to develop a more specific notion of history and to have history departments enforce that definition. Until then history departments will be open to anyone studying any topic that has any relation to history.

Edited February 21, 2015 by Vr4douche

[ashiepoo72]

I'm extremely uncomfortable with the idea that we need to have a defined notion of history (who's defining it? Why are they the one who get that power?) that needs to be enforced.

You asked if history is getting diluted...maybe it should be diluted in the sense that it is extremely multifaceted. I don't think eliminating military history is the answer--and obviously I don't think this is what happened, as I had no problem finding programs with strong military components in history. But I don't think defining history in strict, bookended terms is the answer either. That seems quite regressive in my mind. But what do I know, I'm a lowly grad student not a premiere historian.

[mvlchicago]

(I've only read one or two replies in this thread, please forgive me if I'm being repetitive. Also during undergrad I studied heavily under subaltern/postcolonial influence so I'm inevitably biased.)

What exactly wrong with porous boundaries? You seem to be focusing on history in a vacuum when this is a question faced in most other humanities/social science disciplines.

Philosophy's analytic side has sort of lost out to the continentals. English has been admitting entry to a number of digital aesthetics (humanities, video games, music.) Anthropology has expanded (since Geertz) beyond the typical dichotomies of European-Other. Economics has become incredibly porous in regards to rational choice and applications in basically every field ever since WWII. Even the hard sciences are trying to figure out where to place things like Biophysics or anthologies of climate change.

Returning to "traditional" conceptions of history is unlikely to yield much relevance or utility to history moving forward. If military-political history is losing ground, it's probably because national narratives on a whole have become less useful when it comes to discussing the present and how we got here. That's not saying people shouldn't be studying it, but we're not exactly in a world where large battles and nationalist sentiment are driving much of the change. Are you expecting history to bracket itself off and continued losing any interest in being useful within the broader picture?

The movement from structural-postructural, modern-postmodern, national-imperial orders isn't happening to frustrate "tradition." It's happening because there's a serious loss of coherency when one tries to explain, say, the late twentieth century movements within the Global South, or the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. Maybe traditional categories are going to play a role in the new explanations and ideas, but it seems a little silly to insist we need a specific definition of "history" without explicitly coming up with reasons why such specificity would be useful.

[Vr4douche]

As I said, the addition of these new fields would be fine if they did not come at the expense of other fields...if they came with additional funding to create additional spaces for graduate work. But they haven't...they have usurped money and left a hole in the discipline.

 

So history cannot have a narrowly defined purview but other relevant departments can? It seems like history has become the safety net of the social sciences.

[kblooms]

How is the integration of all these disciplines bad? How have they usurped money?

[mvlchicago]

My entire point is that no field has a narrowly defined purview. What department are you thinking about that has maintained a rigorous hard line in the social sciences? 

And issues about funding are less ideological than they are about the fact that research–especially humanities research–is on a decline worldwide. Scott Walker in Wisconsin as an example, but one can also look at the broader context of the neoliberal era in regards to educational opportunities. Like, yes it absolutely sucks that we have to make decisions about what should or shouldn't be funded, but if you were given a history budget and the constraints of the real world, you'd probably end up funding those projects, which would help garner further funding in the future. 

Edited February 21, 2015 by mvlchicago

[a.rev]

The world does not exist in a vacuum nor is it relegated to "the march of time." I think there is plenty of room in departments for "traditional" historians but the prevalence of us who focus on history interwined with other disciplines is also on the rise. I think you're assuming that because more departments are admitting these types of students they are not admitting tradition historians, instead of considering that perhaps the admission rates reflect ratio of "traditional" historians to environmental/gender/etc. If only 10% of the applicants study what you have defined as traditional does that mean they should constitute 100% of the department? I don't think so. The idea that we need remain in the archives and write histories that exclude all other disciplines makes me uncomfortable and a little sad to be honest. 

[navyblackmaroon]

I think that history's greatest strength is its porous nature and its ability to overlap (or even co-opt) interests and methods from other disciplines. As someone who studies a topic that has commonalities with what people study in other fields, I find history to be a better environment to develop my research. I can appropriate distinctive methods and theories from other disciplines, while at the same time I am not obligated to carry the theoretical burden that I would have to serve if I were working in another type of department. In turn, this allows me to develop a project with a distinct (historical) perspective.

 

For example, I work extensively on issues of urban planning and "renewal" in Mexico. If I were working in an urban planning/studies program, I would have to dedicate much of my attention to theories of urban design. That is not the case when working as a historian. I recognize the importance of those theories, but my work does not revolve discussing them. I am interested on the impact and relationship of planning with local social movements, national politics, and the fluctuations of the economy. I could only really study that in a history department.

 

As some other users already mentioned, the discipline does not exist in a vacuum. There seems to be a drive to find new and different things that challenge existing ideas or narratives. That may place some fields of historical research in a disadvantage. However, as ashiepoo pointed, there are ways for these traditional fields to fit the demands of the "academic market." It's really a matter of selling your research/topic in a way that is relevant to the trends and the recent historiography.

[ashiepoo72]

We work within a discipline. Yes, our work should interest us, but we need it to also be useful within the discipline. The discipline changes and grows in response to this research, as our research does (or should do) in response to the needs and directions of the discipline. That the desire for cut and dry, traditional history isn't being met in the discipline isn't something to deride--WE don't work within a vacuum, just as much as history doesn't. If you want to move the discipline back toward more traditional approaches, write a groundbreaking work that creates a new school of historical thought. There are openings within a dynamic discipline for that kind of shift.

If you want the discipline to change, be that change and make it valuable to the rest of the people who also make up that discipline. If you can do that, my hat is off to you.

[dr. t]

First, "traditional" military history has fallen out of favor for several reasons, but the foremost among these is that the discipline of history has evolved. The type of history which recounts equipment types or the details of battles is much closer to antiquarianism---mere fact collecting---than it is to the modern practice of history. The useful pieces of the military subfield have been rolled into the analytical frameworks of social or cultural historians. To put it bluntly, military history properly speaking (as opposed to history which involves militaries) is dying because it is no longer considered interesting or useful.

 

Second, different disciplines approach the same question in different ways. Let's take the example of bear hunting. A study of bear hunting could indeed by carried out in environmental sciences, but the methodology, approach, and conclusions would be fundamentally different than if the same study was conducted in a history department. If it's a historical study of bear hunting, it falls under the auspices of history. Similarly, a political scientist would write a book about Thomas Aquinas that would be very different from a theologian's, and a historian would write one which was different from both the political scientist's and theologian's.

 

Third, by extension of the first two points, the "non-traditional" subfields in which we look at historical questions through the lenses of gender, sexuality, environment, or race have become popular because they provide useful perspectives on those questions. They improve our understanding of the past, and thus we use them. Military history does not, and thus we don't.

Edited February 21, 2015 by telkanuru

[terralily]

As someone who skirts the boundary between disciplines (art history, history, literature, law, politics, environmental studies), I rely on tradition as well as non-traditional historians.  I would not be able to ground my analysis if I didn't have the knowledge of traditional top-down political history.  That being said, someone who studies gender history or environmental history would not find a women's studies or environmental studies department suitable for their work.  The focus of those departments is not solely on the historical facets of those issues; they are concerned with modern applications to the problems, political realities, and philosophical approaches to these issues.  As someone said before, historians benefit greatly from taking courses in those departments, but they would not find their research focus well-suited for doctoral work in that department. Additionally, an environmental historian, for example, would not necessarily have the requisite science and politics background to thrive studying within that field, or, more importantly, to find a faculty position.  

[Eigen]

Just to emphasize what other people have mentioned- fields at the graduate level are much, much more segregated based on the methodology, approach and perspective than they are the topic. This is true across fields- in STEM, you could find a research group studying nearly the same thing in 6-8 departments, but each are approaching it from a training and perspective consistent with their discipline. How an electrical engineer approaches nerve conduction is different than how a psychologist approaches it, and both of these will be distinct from a structural biologist or chemist. But the perspective in the different approaches is often valuable. 

 

It's for this reason there's actually more of a push-back against "studies" departments (gender, aging, etc) as they focus on a topic rather than an approach. It means that the graduate training period isn't focussed on training someone to have a great breadth beyond their field. The argument is that it's far better to be a historian, or a sociologist, or an anthropologist with a topical focus in gender dynamics or the aging process than it is to study the aging process from a less defined standpoint, and personally, I would agree. 

 

Coming out of a PhD program should have you trained to explore more than one topical area or field with fluency- you might not know the facts, details or players as well, but you have the training to learn those and become fluent.

 

Just my 2 cents.

[APBrown]

Yeah, as others have already stated, I am also uncomfortable with (1) Creating a clear definition for what the term historical entails and (2) Thinking that non-traditional history can have a diluting effect on the profession. We can all agree that history deals with events, people, movements, ideas, and processes that that occurred in the past. How we go about that is up for debate and negotiation across the historical profession. If we only considered the traditional forms of history, some of the greatest works of history that illuminated the stories of non-elite, non-white peoples would not have been created. We must all make sure that our stories are rooted in the past but otherwise theories from other disciplines provide excellent frameworks through which to create new stories. We have gone a long way from the traditional histories advocated for by the empiricists and the results of the historiographical debates of the last several decades have done a lot to help that. Lastly, there is a major difference between using political theories and being a political scientist, using sociological theories and being a sociologist, and using cultural theories and being an anthropologist. We are rooted in the past and that is what makes us unique compared to other disciplines. We need to top thinking about different versions of history as a binary of legitimate and illegitimate. Rather we must think of the various historical approaches as puzzle pieces, each depicting a different aspect of humankind's story.