Has history as a dscipline been diluted?

[APBrown]

What I think this conversation boils down to, is what is considered a legitimate form of historical inquiry? The word diluted insinuates that there is a pure form of history (traditional history) and a foreign form of history (non-traditional) that is making history lose its flavor. From what I can tell, Vr4Douche's argument rests upon this idea that projects that incorporate interdisciplinary methodologies or theories could find a home in other departments. If they want to be in history departments that is okay, but further funding needs to come in order to accommodate them. This argument is wrong on many levels. First, as has been said before several times, these projects are not good fits for other departments. The rest of the social sciences primarily have a presentist focus, which goes against the very foundation of the historical discipline. Just because someone uses political theories in their work, does not make them a political scientist. Nor does using sociological theories make them a sociologist. This argument is not grounded in any reality.

 

Furthermore, you made the argument that graduate students using non-traditional approaches are coming into history graduate programs but history departments are not getting extra funding to accommodate these students. This argument implies that space in graduate school programs should first be given to traditional historians and space given to non-traditional historians only if there are the proper resources. that there is this hierarchy of historical approaches. You have frequently said that people who study non-traditional topics could find themselves in other departments. That is the same as saying that the non-traditional form of history is not a legitimate form of historical inquiry. Or at least not legitimate enough for spaces in history graduate programs. Lastly, I think you are confusing unusable and unfashionable. Social and cultural historians in history departments are not on a witch hunt against traditional history. You'll find that they use them in their own work. I think people still believe that traditional histories have their use. Traditional history is just becoming unfashionable in the academy. This is how historiography works. There are trends that come and go. If you want to show that your traditional history is relevant, challenges paradigms, and adds immensely to historical knowledge, then make that case in your Personal Statement. It is not the case that the historical academy is this rigid system that will not accept traditional historians but rather traditional histories, for decades, only told the stories of elites, whites, and men. The social and cultural turns rather attempt to show that other people matter too. 

 

Also, what do you mean by "I am concerned that white, straight, middle-class men have lost opportunity?" Have history departments declared war against white, middle class men and I just didn't know it?

[dr. t]

If you don't see that there is an imbalance in the system you are either blind or the beneficiary of the imbalance.

 

Or, you don't have a very good grasp on 20th century historiography.

 

On which point I ask the question once again: Since when is social history not 'traditional' history?

Edited February 22, 2015 by telkanuru

[Sigaba]

Am I alone with this concern?

FWIW, my areas of specialization are American naval/military/diplomatic history. I have been sandbagged by a professor who dislikes naval history. I have been told that I will never get a job as a professor in the Ivory Tower because I wasn't born in the 1950s. So I am aware of the issue on a personal level.

That being said, I think that your conduct in this thread is an embarrassment to yourself and your alleged interest in military history.

In regards to the latter, you have failed to demonstrate a familiarity with decades of historiographical discussion among military and naval historians on the future of the two disciplines within the profession. You have also failed to do any research to see how military and naval histories published over the last several decades incorporate the methods and sensibilities of the (no longer

"new") social and cultural historians that have come to prominence over the last half century.

You have completely and utterly failed to show a basic aptitude for research by not identifying the departments in the United States that emphasize military history even though those departments have been discussed on this BB on a yearly basis.

If your contributions to this thread are examples of what you are going to bring to the table as a graduate student focusing on military history, you are going to be a chew toy.

Put down the shovel. Show some respect for your alleged field of interest. Treat your peers with respect. Read more, post less.

[Fianna]

Its not a matter of my disapproval of the new approaches. No one cares if I do disapprove and I've said over and over again that they have value. My concern is that the new approach is dominating the discipline and there is a almost complete disregard for the old approaches. As I said earlier, the three biggest schools in Canada have not one military historian on staff. I understand the priority given to social and cultural history but they cannot be the be-all-end-all.

 

Historians certainly need to reach broader audiences. We do not work in a bubble or in ivory towers in the sky. We work in schools funded by tax payers and donors who are probably not interested in complex modern methodologies, gender identities and other subjects popular in modern historiography.  

 

I think it's also worth questioning whether or not students are interested in that type of history. The academic world is a marketplace, like any other marketplace and it's probable that when professors who were teaching those types of classes retired, the department chose to replace them with other types of scholars who attracted students to classes. The freedom of academic thought goes hand in hand with the problem of putting butts in chairs in undergrad classes.

This is something I'm working through as I plan my way through my PhD. Legal history is really interesting, and I love it to bits, but I also wrestle with the idea of how that's going to fit me in to the job market in 7 or so years. Many departments have one (and they're often cross-appointed with the law school). But that's still a really narrow market to send my CV out in to, especially in the face of the reality that universities are hiring fewer and fewer professors and job descriptions read very broadly - the goal is to hire someone who does <whatever the position is> but can also teach survey classes, department requirements for undergrads, graduate thematic seminars and interpretive dance. I think things like military history, from the old school of military history, falls in to a similar category. 

[Fianna]

I was not suggesting that methodology is not important to the study of history. Obviously it is...its also a part of the way I played basketball, fix my car, brush my teeth etc.. My point is that methodologies should not define history and should not influence a graduate school application. Yes, applicants should demonstrate a knowledge of different approaches, especially at the PhD level, but it is wrong and limiting to require certain approaches. If I have the grades to qualify, a good proposal, and a willing professor I should be eligible. And I don't care what anyone here says, I have been warned time and again that my projects are not social enough.

 

 

Methodologies define the way that you work. Traditional history implies (or at least should) a set of methodologies. Social history implies yet another set of methodologies. So does ethno-history, gender history, legal history, etc. All those subfields have methodologies and historiographies which you need to know, whether you want to or not. SOPs should reference the methodological framework that you plan on using or it's not a good SOP, and the description of the project is probably not compelling enough for a committee that isn't intimately familiar with that area of the discipline.

 

I also dispute the idea that simply having the grades to qualify, a good proposal and a willing professor should be enough. One of the biggest problems with the discipline is that it's simply producing too many PhDs for the available jobs in the field. Schools want to place candidates, that's part of their rankings. Students should expect to be placed, or else this is a waste of their time and money. Most PhD students are significantly supported by limited departmental resources, which need to be justified to the institution based on things like placement and rankings. These are all reasons why it's not just about having good grades and a good project are not enough. A project may be fantastic, but not viable. A candidate may have interesting work that isn't widely applicable, which means they're going to have a hard time finding the resources (external funding, grants, post-doc positions, etc) to complete and compete in the market. Departments really do care about those things, and it is part of the business of higher education.

[RevolutionBlues]

One way to consider this might be that, instead of looking at a shift from "traditional" approaches to those that dominate the field today as one that was either imposed from without or arrived through a replacement process, to think of it as the outcome of a long-term dialogue and mediation between earnest and intelligent scholars. Historiography is the nothing more than a conversation among historians about how we ought to practice our craft; historiography is not fixed dogma handed unreflectively from one generation of historians to the next (although it might be very possible that individual scholars treat the prevailing approach dogmatically). The perhaps unfair issue is that the burden of proof always lies on the heterodox. In this sense, one could be entirely right about the need to return to or at least resurrect approaches (i.e. military history or, in my case, economic history) that "lost" the argument within the field. However, there was an argument, and if one shoulders the burden of heterodoxy he or she is implicitly accepting the task of mastering both their preferred approach, but also that which has replaced it in order to restart the conversation and be able to argue effectively about what exactly the reigning paradigm is missing.

 

For example, Joan Wallach Scott started out as a New Social historian, and her first monograph, ​The Glassworkers of Carmaux, is a masterpiece of that approach. But when she helped launch or at least popularize a more post-structuralist and gendered tradition she had to do so by applying her thorough knowledge of the strengths of New Social History, but also its limitations. Only then was she able to apply, in the historical rather than historiographical essays in Gender and the Politics of History, a new methodology that overcame these shortcomings and built on them in a positive way.

 

It is entirely possible that we need a full-scale shift back towards the "traditional" methods, but it is much more likely that in dialectical terms we need to challenge the reigning antithesis to the earlier thesis by progressing to a new synthesis that adopts the best of both but in a fresh way that advances the field to a higher level. This is to say, I understand that it may be frustrating to see that what one wants to do is not currently en vogue, but this should be seen as a challenge to revisit the historiographical debate that generated the shift from "traditional" to new in the first place, develop a deep and thorough understanding of the strengths and limitations of both, and then more effectively shape a methodology and argue for its necessity. While many professors or programs might not be open to such an intellectual program and may even in some cases stubbornly cling to their own ways, I believe that most people and places are wholly open to this very thing, provided that the effort to do so is open rather than closed, progressive rather than reactionary, and constructive rather than destructive. In fact, it is this very willingness to brave the unknown that reinvents and reinvigorates our field with every generation.

[IvanBezdomnii]

As a Russianist this thread scares me considering it wasn't all that long ago when scholars of the Soviet Union were supposed to only study certain topics and come to certain conclusions and the totalitarianists and revisionists were almost literally at each other's throats at conferences. History is supposed to be diverse and multifaceted, people aren't supposed to agree all the time. History has never been and never will be completely objective. And it's beyond stupid to limit the realm of the possible in the field just because it fits in x y or z field. 

 

I'm sure that 99% of the people reading this thread agree, so I probably won't show my face here again.

[ashiepoo72]

Funny, Ivan, I'm taking a course on Soviet history, and we spent a lot of time discussing why Sheila Fitzpatrick got pilloried back in the time before Ronald Reagan took down the Berlin Wall with his bare hands

[dr. t]

As a Russianist this thread scares me considering it wasn't all that long ago when scholars of the Soviet Union were supposed to only study certain topics and come to certain conclusions and the totalitarianists and revisionists were almost literally at each other's throats at conferences. History is supposed to be diverse and multifaceted, people aren't supposed to agree all the time. History has never been and never will be completely objective. And it's beyond stupid to limit the realm of the possible in the field just because it fits in x y or z field. 

 

I'm sure that 99% of the people reading this thread agree, so I probably won't show my face here again.

 

I have a friend who will be sitting on some of his papers for the next 15 to 20 years so they don't sink his tenure chances because of nationalist sentiment. What you describe certainly exists (in some fields more than others), but it's not really what we've been talking about.

[IvanBezdomnii]

Funny, Ivan, I'm taking a course on Soviet history, and we spent a lot of time discussing why Sheila Fitzpatrick got pilloried back in the time before Ronald Reagan took down the Berlin Wall with his bare hands

Yes, she has written on this extensively. She actually got denied tenure the first time around, but Chicago wisely hired her afterwards as the foremost expert on Stalinism. See Richard Pipes for the opposite side of the story.

[IvanBezdomnii]

I have a friend who will be sitting on some of his papers for the next 15 to 20 years so they don't sink his tenure chances because of nationalist sentiment. What you describe certainly exists (in some fields more than others), but it's not really what we've been talking about.

I was inspired to this comment by the few posts I've read on social history. It was considered extremely radical in the Soviet field at first (as late as the 80s) and dangerous (because it showed some people actually benefited from the Soviet system).

[Chiqui74]

@ 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.

As someone mentioned before, military history is out of fashion.  It has come and gone.  So while you call it traditional, everyone else is calling it outdated.  The problem with "traditional" history is that it's WASPM dominated (in content, not in audience), is very exclusive of everything else.  That is no longer the way history is done.  I'm not putting down the history that you want to do, I'm just saying that it's just not done as much today as in the past, and that, I suspect, has much more influence on whether departments even have military historians than the fact that are other emerging fields.

[Chiqui74]

So, aliens?

The Kardashians! Or maybe Duck Dynasty. How about a new type of military history, like "[insert the name of anything under the sun] Wars"

[Heimat Historian]

This thread is amazing.  I have nothing substantial to add beyond that. Also as a white, straight, middle-class man I'm baffled by this statement."I am concerned that white, straight, middle-class men have lost opportunity." Encouraging non white, straight, middle-class men to enter the academy is one the most important shifts in the last 20-30 years.  Diversity of viewpoints can only make the discipline stronger. There is opportunity enough to go around. 

[virmundi]

A simple comment. No topic is inherently ruled out by virtue of 'fashion' or 'fad'. It is, however, necessary to consider that if you wish to address a topic through a lens that was identified as problematic ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or more years ago, you had *better have an extraordinary reason why that old-fashioned lens is still relevant in the 21st century.* 

 

I write this as a medievalist who is studying what seems at first to be a *very* old-fashioned topic that is *very much* out of the historical mainstream on its face. With that said, I am incorporating the ideas, insights, historiography, and theoretical frameworks of the 21st century, which have not only interested my advisor, but also scholars on two continents. The trick, of course, is now to pull it off and convince an audience that is broader than my advisor and other specialists in my sub-field that my work is of contemporary interest and relevance. I am not owed this audience -- I have to earn it. I don't think that Vr4douche is 100% wrong in suggesting that some topics are 'faddish', but it is also fair to note that these 'fads' are very much a corrective of centuries of exclusive focus on a very narrow range of topics and individuals, and that correction is far from over. My topic does not involve race, gender, and ethnicity, but I believe strongly in the importance of those lenses of historical (and contemporary!) analysis. I am determined to convince my colleagues that my voice and my work are part of a broader conversation that *must include at its core* those frames of analysis, even if this particular project of mine does not place them there.

 

In short -- follow your muse, don't play the victim, and enjoy the process while you can.

[kotov]

Edited February 25, 2015 by kotov

[Riotbeard]

Hi!

 

I decided to skim the whole thread.  First Vr4Douche.  Congrats on starting an interesting thread and presenting an honest opinion, even if I don't necissarily share all of it.

 

1st.  I think Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering, Jill Lapore's The Name of War, and Jim Down's Sick from Freedom show that milatary history broadly considered is alive and well!  There are still great, well-received books being produced in these disciplines.  Is Shelby Foote out of fashion? Yes.  Should he be? In my opinion, yes.  I want to write a big, marxist history of secession but this is out of fashion, because it has largely been done. So be it.  Would more "traditional" military histories improve historiography?  I don't think so but I would love to hear an argument beyond why are they out of fashion.  Why should tactical, battle narrative histories be relavent today?  I think texts that focus on the experience of soldiers are still being produced and are relevant.

 

2nd.  You say academic history does not engage in mainstream culture effectively.  You are largely correct.  What is the solution (I mean this honestly, not rhetorically)?  I don't think the goal is to write more marketable histories like traditional military history, but instead to make other types of history more marketable.

[kotov]

Hi!

 

I decided to skim the whole thread.  First Vr4Douche.  Congrats on starting an interesting thread and presenting an honest opinion, even if I don't necissarily share all of it.

 

1st.  I think Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering, Jill Lapore's The Name of War, and Jim Down's Sick from Freedom show that milatary history broadly considered is alive and well!  There are still great, well-received books being produced in these disciplines.  Is Shelby Foote out of fashion? Yes.  Should he be? In my opinion, yes.  I want to write a big, marxist history of secession but this is out of fashion, because it has largely been done. So be it.  Would more "traditional" military histories improve historiography?  I don't think so but I would love to hear an argument beyond why are they out of fashion.  Why should tactical, battle narrative histories be relavent today?  I think texts that focus on the experience of soldiers are still being produced and are relevant.

 

2nd.  You say academic history does not engage in mainstream culture effectively.  You are largely correct.  What is the solution (I mean this honestly, not rhetorically)?  I don't think the goal is to write more marketable histories like traditional military history, but instead to make other types of history more marketable.

 

I would say something about how history is more relevant to the average non-academic as context for current socio-political events and that maybe more "academic" history texts ought to be marketed in that way, but then I realize that there are maybe about 10 people who care about my own research...

 

I guess the rationale for Holocaust studies is a bit different though, as are the methodologies.

[Riotbeard]

I would say something about how history is more relevant to the average non-academic as context for current socio-political events and that maybe more "academic" history texts ought to be marketed in that way, but then I realize that there are maybe about 10 people who care about my own research...

 

I guess the rationale for Holocaust studies is a bit different though, as are the methodologies.

Yeah i am in the 10-15 readers vein too, haha.

[kotov]

I mean, I guess if OP wants people who are doing "traditional" stuff, I'm a pretty straightforward Marxist (this is what happens when you work with old Russianists for most of your career) and I've done most of my research squinting at a microform reader or translating from volumes of government documents. I did some oral history stuff too, so hopefully that's not too "social" or "non-traditional" for OP's tastes.

 

In my field, basically every study has to account for the perpetrator/victim/bystander model that Hilberg used back in the early 60s, so I guess "traditional" political history is part of what I do, but that's the thing: it's part of it, not the entire project. This is the problem with OP's complaint. You can write a top-down political history or a description of strategy and tactics at the Second Battle of BFE all you want, but in almost any field, that's not a complete work anymore. I think someone previously mentioned the "so what?" factor; if you ignore the social implications of the politics, or the experiences of the soldiers fighting the Second Battle of BFE, then it isn't going to interest a serious academic audience because you haven't really answered the most important question: so what? (Actually, you probably haven't answered very much at all within the context of the historiography of your field either, but I digress.)

 

Oh, and since OP seems to think there's some kind of witch hunt against straight white dudes in academia, I'm also a straight white dude.

[poliscar]

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that Military History is becoming somewhat of an emerging trend? Obviously not in a traditional mode, i.e. "the exploits of white dude generals," but I think also not necessarily in the mode of Social History? 

 

I'm thinking in particular of work in Media Studies (Kittler, Siegert, Virilio, Stiegler, etc) as well as recent interest in figures like Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt. Additionally, I don't want to discount recent developments in warfare; consider the recent influence of drones? Surely we will be seeing histories of drone warfare at some point in the future. In this context, I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing a lot of work on war as culture technique, on military modes of seeing, and on weapons as extensions of human bodies—to name a few possibilities. These subjects seem to straddle a number of different areas, including strategy and tactics. 
 

Maybe we should be looking at Histories of Science/Technology/Media/Architecture for the continuation of Military History, rather than either consigning it to some sort of historiography junk-heap, or completely folding it into the cultural or social. I don't agree with the OP, but I think some areas of Military History have been discounted in the socio-cultural turn. I think the issue now is finding the best way to recuperate issues like tactics and weaponry without falling back into white-man history.

(Realizing I should expand a bit more—I think that the social histories of war that have been mentioned in the thread are super great and relevant, but that we're going to be seeing something a bit different soon. I'd expect more work focusing on the non-human, on machines, assemblage theory, early cybernetics, camouflage, etc. Perhaps "object" or "technique" histories might be the best labels. Hanna Rose Shell's book on camouflage, Hide and Seek, is an interesting example of what we might start seeing more of.)
 

Edited March 21, 2015 by poliscar

[modern]

1) Every state school in the US and around the world is tax-payer subsidized.

 

 Not true.

 

More generally, good luck with getting away with skipping 80 years of "progress" (for lack of a better word) in any discipline and expecting people within that discipline to let you get away with it and even to support you and fund you. And I mean especially outside of the humanities and of academia. 

[Sigaba]

I'm going to throw in two cents' worth of MOO/IMO in response/reply to some of the contributions to this conversation.

 

First, while military, naval, diplomatic, and other forms of "traditional" history may not be as prominent in the Ivory Tower as they once were, that does not mean those fields have come and gone. For better and for worse, practitioners of these fields reach broad audiences, sell significant numbers of books, and influence contemporaneous debates over politics and policies. (By worse, I mean specifically Victor Davis Hanson.)

 

Second, the traditional approach to military history centers around topics such as operations (saying "battles" may get you an odd look), the operational art, strategy, the politics of conflict termination, command relations, and (sometimes) logistics because of the utilitarian nature of the discipline. Broadly speaking, the assumption among professional armed forces is that the study of warfare allows one to learn the lessons of history. The application of those lessons can potentially increase an armed force's military effectiveness. This is to say that to many stakeholders, military, naval, and diplomatic history is "applied" history. (FWIW, I do not agree. History is not a social science.)

 

This utilitarian approach goes hand in hand with the widespread belief that the training / regimentation / acculturation of a professional armed force trumps notions of race, ethnicity, class, religion, and culture. Winning and losing is about commanders matching means to ends, combatants having sufficient material and doing as they were trained while living up to the ethos of their units. If soldiers massacre civilians, it isn't because they brought to a village civilian conceptions of ethnic difference, but because there was a catastrophic failure of training and leadership somewhere along the line. (An irony here is that politically conservative members of the American armed services frequently blame society for the perceived shortcomings and inadequacies of their respective services.)

 

This utilitarian approach is, IMO, a firebreak between military/naval/diplomatic historians and their peers in the Ivory Tower. Overall, members of the former group, with a handful of exceptions including Jeremy Black, Peter Paret, and Michael Howard, have not invested enough time and effort to bridge the firebreak and to embrace the issues of concern to professional academic historians. In retrospect, this choice appears more and more to have been a mistake. 

 

However, from a contemporaneous perspective the choice may have been easier to make. Arguably the most globally significant policy debates since the late eighteenth century have centered around military and naval affairs. Many of these debates have developed over decades; the American armed services took to Iraq and Afghanistan notions of a "revolution in military affairs"  that had been heatedly debated since the 1970s. (Unfortunately, a critical mass of policy makers did not sufficiently heed the concurrent historiographical debates over "military revolutions.")  

 

Given the choice between participating in highly refined debates among a handful of academic historians or potentially shaping how a global war might be lost or won, which would you choose as the more important task?

[EndoftheLine]

interesting thread. I'm not sure if "diluted" is the term I would use, but I will say that sometimes I feel like the rush to be a part of what is "hot" can result in some problems.

 

For example, scholars have produced some truly wonderful transnational histories in recent years and I think the move toward transnational history is, in general, a positive one. But, as someone who does not study Western Europe or the US, it sometimes feels to me as if the paradigm exists to give Americanists an excuse to talk about non-American regions without learning another language or without properly understanding the trajectories (and what influenced those trajectories) of sometimes radically different historiographies.

[mvlchicago]

As interesting a discussion as this would be, I'd gently suggest making a new thread where it won't come with the baggage of this one.