Blog CCXXXI (231): The State of Military History (Part 4)

Editorial Note: This posting is part of an exceptionally long essay on the status of military history.  Since it is over 5,000 words in length, it has been divided into four parts.  Click here to read part 1, part 2, and part 3.

All to the good, but I believe the piece never gets to some of the real strengths of military history.  The popularity of the topic in book stores is not the strongest of these.  (Few academics are ever going to write a book that sells 20 or 30 thousand copies—which in the commercial world of New York based publishing houses is still pretty small).  The strength comes from the fact that the military needs military history and supports the field in many, many ways.  (Some of what follows are points that Lynn made in his 2008 article.) 

First, there is more money in the field than in many others within the history business.  The private foundations associated with many military schools and history centers have book awards, article prizes, dissertation grants, fellowships, visiting professorships, and sabbaticals.

Another factor, perhaps the most important, is that there are a lot of non-academic jobs for military
historians.  Each branch of the U.S. armed services has a history center that employs history Ph.D.s to produce official histories.  (This situation also exists to a lessor degree in other English-speaking countries).  Although many historians might look at these as studies as propaganda, that view misleads more than it informs.  These studies are honest efforts on the part of a large bureaucracy to learn lessons about its past performances that it can use in the future.  These official studies do not preclude historians from asking other questions.  There are probably going to be other issues that future historians will want to discuss, and the official histories do not foreclose these questions.  In fact, in many ways they help facilitate interest in the topic, and access to the documents.  One final point, many units also have command historians who are part archivists, part on demand researcher, and part analyst.  People working in these positions often have much more influence on events than professors sitting in an ivory tower.

These are also teaching jobs, like mine, at military schools like the Naval War College, or the U.S. Air Force Academy, the U.S. Naval Academy, and so on.  The students you interact with, be they undergraduates at one of the academies or mid-career professionals at a staff college, are very, very good.  They eagerly consume military history, not because they are history buffs—some are—but because it is a tool in their professional development.  It is also worth noting that all of these jobs pay much, much better than the academic average.

The Society for Military History, the main academic organization in the United States for historians focusing on this field, is impressively run.  Although it is scholarly outfit, it is very welcoming of those holding jobs outside of academia.  My guess is that roughly a third of the people on the program have jobs outside of an academic history department.  Although it is American organization it is globally minded.  Its journal—The Journal of Military History—publishes articles and book reviews on all time periods and regions.  So, you will probably see articles on both the Confederate States Army as well as the Mongol Horde, and reviews of books about military innovation under Louis XIV as well as the performance of various Arab armies in the 1960s.  The journal has also published foreign scholars.  What is more impressive is that SMH has held its annual meeting outside the continental United States and has had a foreign scholar serve as its president.  The organization has a $00,000 budget and has a paid staff to manage its day-to-day operations.

Another factor is that military history has a constituency outside of academia.  Politicians, journalists and big dollar donors like military history.  During this public debate on military history, several people without a Ph.D. in history intervened and shaped decisions. There are two ways to look at these interventions, either: a) academics bent to this outside pressure, and did things they would not have done, like filling the Ambrose-Hesseltine professorship; or 2) academia responded to the attention that the debate was getting and gave the field more coverage in journals and conferences to explore an issue on which society had an interest. (In many ways, this influence has been exceptionally important, and is one of the reasons why I believe Logevall and Osgood might end up winning the debate they started in 2016 about political history).

Another strength is that there are a lot and I do mean a lot of venues for military history.  By my count there are at the moment 22 peer-reviewed academic journals published in English that do military history: 

1. Air Power History
2. British Journal for Military History
3. Canadian Military History 
4. Civil War History
5. First World War Studies
6. International Journal of Military History and Historiography
7. International Journal of Naval History
8. The Irish Sword
9. Journal of the Australian War Memorial
10. Journal of Chinese Military History
11. Journal of the Civil War Era
12. Journal of Medieval Military History
13. The Journal of Military History
14. Journal of Slavic Military Studies
15. Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research
16. Journal of Strategic Studies
17. Military History Journal
18. Military History of the West
19. Small Wars & Insurgencies
20. U.S. Military History Review
21. War in History
22. War & Society

There are more if you look at French-, Spanish- and/or German-language journals.  There are at least six more if you look at the journals focused on diplomatic history; the realm of strategic history is
often where military and diplomatic history meet, and these journals have often published articles that are part military, part diplomatic in nature.  Those are just the academic journals.  If one includes the professional, military periodicals that the various armed services produce, and/or the magazines aimed at the general public, this list could be very close to 100.  That is a lot of venues to get your ideas out to an audience, and places to have your work reviewed.

It is possible to go too far with this argument.  “Military history has always been marginal; unfortunately, the golden age of military history never existed,” Stone stated.  “Military history has been isolated in the academy for as long as there has been an academy.” Case in point, after he came to the Naval War College, Kansas State did not replace him.  There is also still push back in academia.  There was a prominent job search for a position in military history at a major university in 2016-2017 that apparently did not get filled.  There is all sorts of gossip as to why.  

While it is misleading to use the metaphor of a turning point, the public debate does suggest something has changed.  The real questions to ask are:  How much? Where? And for how long?

Editorial Note: click here to read part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Blog CCXXX (230): The State of Military History (Part 3)

Editorial Note: This posting is part of an exceptionally long essay on the status of military history.  Since it is over 5,000 words in length, it has been divided into four parts.  Click here to read part 1, part 2, and part 4.

In many ways, the public debate on military history slowly started to simmer down in 2009 when Wisconsin hired a historian to fill the Ambrose-Hesseltine professorship in U.S. military history.  The university either had enough funds to "top off" the accounts that fund the position, or the faculty in the history department realized they had to hire the position.  My read of the situation is that it was probably both.  I would give it a 60/40 division of responsibility, but which side you give 60 percent, and which you give 40 is something I will leave to the reader. 

In several other ways military historians scored several substantial victories.  Major venues in academic history began making concessions to military history.  By my less than stringent count, the AHA had 30 sessions related to military history at its 2015 meeting.  That same year the OAH held a roundtable on the status of military history.  Mark Grimsley made his comments available on his blog.  He argued that the field was much stronger than when he wrote "Why Military History Sucks."  He also agreed with the position that Lynn took that there were a number of different career paths for the military historian:

PhDs who specialize in military history have four viable career tracks: civilian academe, to be sure; but also PME, public history (where there is considerable demand for expertise in military history), and national security research institutions such as RAND Corporation. I once pointed this out to a colleague of mine, who shrugged it off with a jibe about the 'military-industrial-academic complex.'  The colleague, safely ensconced in a tenured berth, could afford to take such a view. My students can’t. Consequently, nor can I.  As the anecdote suggests, in my view it remains a fact that military history lags badly in terms of its acceptance within academe. This does not mean that tenured radicals are driving military history out of the academy, as the National Review asserted in 2006; much less that it has been “purged” from the academy, as the Wall Street Journal declared in 2009. In fact, there are more graduate programs in military history that at any preceding time. However, I continue to find that historians outside of military history frequently look askance at the field, usually on the basis of unexamined assumptions.

My take: this assessment is basically correct.  My quibble is with the assumption that there are  jobs for history Ph.D.s in the think tank world.  These institutions want Ph.D.s but not historians.  Other than that, he is basically correct.  Academics look down upon military history and always have, except—according to some research I have done—during the 1942-1945 time period. 

In 2010 Stone of Kansas State wrote a short, but important article, “The Future of Military History: A Glass Half Full,” in  Historical Speaking (April 2010), 33-34.  He designed this essay as a rejoinder to the symposium that had taken place in the journal on military history.  This piece is one of the most interesting contributions to this public debate, because it broke away from the "woe-upon-me" school of thought that had dominated so much of the public debate about military history's role in the profession.  “There’s good reason to believe that military history is as strong as it has ever been for all the reasons listed in the symposium.” These factors included strong enrollments, public interest in the topic, and financial support from think tanks and foundations interested in the field.  The real acid test for military history or another sub-field is employment options.  Here the evidence is ambiguous.  Trying to find a job as a history professor, regardless of specialization, is amazingly difficult these days.  Stone’s research of data from the American Historical Association found the percentage of faculty teaching military history ranged between 2 and 3 percent from 1975 to 2005.  Departments offering courses in military history fluctuated between 30 and 35 percent.  Those numbers are not particularly great, but neither are they as bad as many in the public debate had assumed.  Another factor that Stone found is quite interesting.  In absolute terms the number of military historians doubled from 1975 to 2005.  “It is worth keeping in mind that far more military historians are practicing their craft in American universities now than thirty years ago.” 

Sandberg

In 2012, Brian Sandberg of Northern Illinois University, writing on the blog of the Society for Military History, argued there had been a clear turning of the tide in the historiography: "In case you haven't notice, violence studies are in. There has been a steady flood of publications on warfare and violence over the past decade". He cited the publication of major works, such as Peter H. Wilson’s The Thirty Years’ War: Europe’s Tragedy, Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, and Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.  His reasons for this change were fairly simple.  "The shock of the September 2001 Attacks, the lengthy commitment of the Afghan War, and the polemics surrounding the Iraq War have all contributed to a massive growth in interest in the serious study of the history of violence and warfare."

The leadership of the SMH worked to take advantage of the turning of the tide with the release of its white paper: "The Role of Military History in the Contemporary Academy.” (I wrote about this document in Blog CXCIV (194): The SMH White Paper and the Future of Military History).  The paper hit on a major strength of military history:  "Our students’ desire for knowledge creates an important opportunity for Departments of History. The late recession has produced a drop in humanities majors as students seek courses that seem more likely to produce an immediate payoff in terms of jobs and wages. Legislative budget cuts have forced even state schools to conform to a tuition-driven model, and departments that cannot attract a sufficient number of students can expect hard times to get harder." All of that is true, but that fact that students often vote with their feet or their tuition is something that decision makers should consider. "University college administrators, particularly college deans and chairs of History Departments, may find some relief in the appeal of military history. Courses in military history tend to fill, not only with history majors and minors, but also with students from other disciplines who are interested in the field. And because military history intersects regularly with the profession’s other subfields, it can serve as an ideal gateway to the other specializations any given History Department has to offer. It may, as well, lure back some of the students who have been drawn away to political science, international relations, and public policy departments."

Because of this shift—which was subtle—critiques in journalistic venues went into hibernation for several years.  In 2016 Robert Neer reopened the debate with an article in Aeon, the digital magazine of ideas and culture. In "The US Military is Everywhere, Except History Books," Neer stated that "academic historians, especially those at the nation’s most richly endowed research universities, largely ignore the history of the US military."

Ann Little on her Historiann blog made her feelings clear with the title of a post on this topic entitled: "Here We Go Again: Military Historian Complains that No One Teaches or Writes about Military History Any More, Part Eleventybillion."  She observed: "Yes, it’s a perennial complaint we hear about the absence of military history, although it’s usually part of a not-very-sophisticated political attack on the other fields history departments also represent these days."  She makes another strong point:

If Neer were remotely curious about the world west of the Hudson River, he might discover that hundreds of state universities and colleges–Aggies, and the directionals, primarily, like North Texas, Texas A&M (two very prominent military history bastions he mentions in his article!), not to mention the University of Colorado and Colorado State University–hire in military history, teach military history classes, and promote colleagues who research and write in the field.  But none of this matters because Harvard, Yale, and Columbia don’t!  

Although this point is a strong one, I am of two minds of it.  First, I agree with Little; there is a lot more to the historical profession than the departments of eight private schools in the northeast.  On

Little

the other hand, the Clauset, Arbesman, and Larremore, "Systematic Inequality" article that I spent so much time discussing on this blog makes it clear that eight schools (just not the eight in the Ivy League) are responsible for filling the majority of the good jobs in the profession and that kind of influence is significant.  So, there might be sound reason for getting upset about what a small handful of schools are doing, or not doing. 

Paul Huard wrote a news story on the defense news web site: War is Boring.  The title of  his article is interesting: "The Battle Over U.S. Military History Loved by Ordinary Americans, Hated by Scholars? The Answer is More Complicated Than You Might Think," but the piece fails to deliver on the complexity it suggests.   Huard repeats the argument that military was dominated academia in the past—it did not—and the old argument that it is popular with the general public, just not academics.  “I’m not going to criticize anyone’s interest in any kind of history,” Little is quoted in the story. “We need audiences to buy and read our books. But I will suggest that popular writers of the ‘battles, bullets and bios’ school underestimate their reading audience.”  She also adds: “I think anyone who will buy and read serious nonfiction should be treated like a sentient and thoughtful adult who can handle the complexity or ambiguity of warfare. Many, if not all, are not necessarily looking for another heroic biography or another reflexively and stupidly patriotic treatment of military history.”

Little appreciated the article: "Interestingly, both in Huard’s article and in recent private correspondence between me and Neer, we probably agree on more than we disagree."

Neer and Huard were not the only ones advancing these views in 2016.  Max Boot, wrote an article "Teaching to the Narrative" in Commentary magazine on the Logevall and Osgood debate on political history.  He was sympathetic to their arguments, but tried to turn the conversation back to military history: "The failure is even more serious in the field of military history which has been all but drummed out of the prestigious universities."

Editorial Note: click here to read part 1, part 2, and part 4.

Blog CCXXIX (229): The State of Military History (Part 2)

Editorial Note: This posting is part of an exceptionally long essay on the status of military history.  Since it is over 5,000 words in length, it has been divided into four parts.  Click here to read part 1, part 3, and part 4.

The wide-spread attention that these articles garnered had an impact among academic historians.  Two of the main journals within history—The Journal of American History and the American Historical Review—published historiographical assessment of military history in 2007.  These two articles were:

• Wayne E. Lee, “Mind and Matter—Cultural Analysis in American Military History: A Look at the State of the Field,” Journal of American History, 93 (March 2007), 1116-1160
• Robert M. Citino, “Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction,” American Historical Review, 112 (October 2007), 1070-1090. 

Lee's article was the centerpiece of a roundtable in the JAH on the state of military history.  Lee, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, examines the cultural turn in military

Lee

history, which he sees as a different topic and approach from the social history approach that had been so central to the "war and society" view of military history.   A number of historians: Sir Basil Liddell Hart, Russell Weigley, Victor Davis Hanson, and John Keegan have pushed the idea that there are cultural norms within the military and the larger society that shape a distinctive approach to war.  This article was an interesting historiographical examination of work on the U.S. Army, and—to a much lesser degree—the U.S. Air Force.  “Cultural analysis in military history should connect that "idea template" to wartime behavior, while recognizing that there may be different templates at different levels with in the military and the political leadership,” he argued. 

Four historians offered their assessments in the pages that followed.  A trio of foreign scholars (Brian P. Farrell of the National University of Singapore, Marc Milner of the University of New Brunswick, and Brian Holden Reid of King’s College London) argued that there was a need for comparative studies of the U.S. and British Armies to see if there really was a distinct cultural approach to war as so many argue.  Ronald H. Spector in his commentary added that ground power dominated military history and that scholars needed to look more at naval power.

The other major article of 2007 was Robert M. Citino’s “Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction,” a 20 page historiography.  He starts the article with a tired observation: “Military

Citino

history today is in the same curious position it has been in for decades: extremely popular with the American public at large, and relatively marginalized within professional academic circles.”  He also notes “its academic footprint continues to shrink, and it has largely vanished from the curriculum of many of our elite universities.  It has been this way for a long time, and frankly, there seems little chance that things will change any time soon.”  Fortunately, he does not spend the rest of this essay belaboring this point.  He notes that there are three main subjects that military history explores: war and society; operational history; and the history of memory.  His discussion of the literature goes back a hundred years to the work of English and German Medieval historians who tied changes in military technology to the rise of feudalism.  (Historians since have disputed these views).  He also discusses more recent military histories of Ancient Greece, Rome and then moves to Southwest, South, and East Asia before spending a good deal of time in early modern Europe, and then the United States. 

Despite this wide ranging account, he did not get to everything.  His analysis ignored accounts about the application of military power at sea and in the air.  (Then again, not many people write on these topics.  That probably has something to do with a larger unfamiliarity with the sea and the air as transportation venues among historians.  There is plenty of scholarship on railroads and the auto industry; far less on maritime or aviation history).  His study also tended to ignore strategic history—where military, political, and diplomatic history collide.  (This field is one in which social scientists rather historians dominate, so there might have been good reasons for Citino to pull his punches).   The long and short of it is this essay is an impressive, wide-ranging study that shows the diversity of military history.  If one is looking for a quick introduction to the field, they would have a difficult time trying to find a better starting point.

As these articles were going into print, another venue of opinion journalism fired a shot in this debate.  David A. Bell, a historian of Napoleonic France at Princeton University and a contributing editor for The New Republic entered the fray with his essay "Casualties of War: Military History Bites the Dust."  Bell argued the military history suffered because of the success of other fields. "Most historians pay scant attention to military history," he noted, "particularly the part that concerns actual military operations."  That might be a luxury that universities could no longer afford as the United States was in the midst of a long fight in the shadows against terrorists organizations like Al-Qaeda. 

In the real world, nonintellectual concerns constantly impinge upon what professors teach and write, while the question of the university's civic—as opposed to intellectual—obligations is not easily put aside. During the cold war, the government and private institutions like the Ford Foundation provided impressive funding for various sorts of 'area studies,' so as to increase American understanding of the regions in which we might find ourselves confronting the Soviets. It was not a question of forcing existing professors to teach or write on new subjects, but of encouraging movement into the desired areas.

The issue even entered the presidential campaign of 2008 when Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee, a candidate for the Republican nomination, blamed the decline of military history on the ideological nature of university faculty.  "History that ignores the importance of warfare is not history," he remarked in a radio address.

In 2008 Lynn wrote another article on the state of military history for Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars.  He argued in "Breaching the Walls of Academe: The Purposes, Problems, and Prospects of Military History" that there were three different kinds of military history: 1) popular; 2) academic; and 3) applied.  With those three distinctions in mind, much Military History, which boasts eighty thousand readers; its own book clubs; and now its own television channels. There is a great deal of money to be made on popular military history."  The problem with popular military history, he explains, is that to reach as wide an audience as possible it must take a superficial approach, which creates problems for academic military historians. 

Lynn

of the criticism that had been fired in journalistic venues was aimed at the refusal of academic institutions to teach operational military history.  One of the odd things about history Ph.D.s is that there is not much of a demand for that degree outside of academia compared to a Ph.D. in other fields like civil engineering, economics, or marketing.  The military history Ph.D., as Lynn notes, is something of an exception: "Popular military history is, indeed, an industry. It fills bookracks in the United States and around the world. It has its own magazines and journals, for example,

I am not sure that Lynn is entirely correct.  What is popular with the public is the history of combat at the tactical and operational levels.  A lot of what the public consumes is superficial, but that probably has more to do with the venue than anything else.  (How much detail does a sixty minute documentary give compared to a book in even a best case scenario?)

Lynn is on better ground in his discussions of applied military history.  I should note that applied military history is basically what I do at the U.S Naval War College.  Lynn describes applied military history as "the use of military history as part of the professional education of officers and as a guide in establishing doctrine and planning and waging war."

From my experiences working at a military school, this point is basically correct.  The study of the past is exceptionally important to most armed services.  The military uses history as part of its professional development in a way few, if any, other professions do in contemporary American society.  "Historical examples can provide warnings against poorly conceived actions on strategic, operational, and tactical levels or in weaponry and logistics, while also suggesting more effective courses to follow. In addition, knowledge of the past can serve as a kind of checklist pointing the way to important factors to be considered now and in the future." 

Lynn makes one final point that in many ways gives historians of this field more influence than those in other sub-fields: "Military historians should be cognizant and proud of the fact that we pursue one of the rare sub-specialties of historical scholarship that is actually regarded as important for training and guidance by real world practitioners."

The debate even made the pages of the news magazine U.S. News & World Report when it was still a print publication.  In "Why Don't More Colleges Teach Military History?," Lee of UNC, Chapel Hill, offered the novel argument that the popularizers were actually a liability to military historians.   “They can make us look primitive in our approach to history,” he told the magazine.  “The solution isn’t to complain about it, but to try and generate military historians who do good work and creative work and who can speak the same language their colleagues do.”

In other ways, the article advanced the "woe-upon-me-as-the-honest-but-oppressed-military-historian" take on the field.  "Each of us is pretty much a one-man shop,” Carol Reardon of Penn State University told the magazine.  Russian military historian David R. Stone—then of Kansas State University, now a departmental colleague of mine—disputed this comment: “While it is certainly true that military historians are often isolated within their departments, that’s true of most historians in most fields.  I am part of a military history program at Kansas State, but when it comes to Russian and Soviet history here, it begins and ends with me.”  

The debate grew in force in 2009 when two major New York newspapers picked up on the topic.  In May, The Wall Street Journal printed the comments of Lewis E. Lehrman at the New-York Historical Society.  Lehrman, an investment banker who ran for governor of New York in 1982 as the Republican nominee, had played a role in establishing historical centers for the study of the U.S. Civil War at Yale University and Gettysburg College.  "The study of military history has in fact been purged from many of the faculties and curriculums of the universities of the Western world," he stated. "How did this happen? Perhaps it is explicable by some form of political correctness; or, parochial specialization; or, the armchair unrealism of the faculty lounge; even ivory tower snobbery—among other related social diseases."

A month later The New York Times entered the fray with a news article entitled:"Great Caesar’s Ghost! Are Traditional History Courses Vanishing?"  The article had a tone and took sides: 

Simply giving everyone a place at the table is just not affordable in an era of shrinking resources. “I’d love to let a hundred flowers bloom,” said Alonzo L. Hamby, a history professor at Ohio University in Athens, but “it’s hard for all but the largest departments or the richest.” In his own department of about 30 faculty members, a military historian recently retired, triggering a vigorous debate over how to advertise for a replacement. (A handful of faculty members had the view that “military history is evil,” Mr. Hamby said.) The department finally agreed to post a listing for a specialist in "U.S. and the world," he said, “the sort of mushy description that could allow for a lot of possibilities.”

Since this story was in The New York Times, it resulted in a flurry of commentary on blogs all over the internet.  All of them in disagreement:

• Claire Potter, "Let's Run Away from the Girls and Other Strategies to Make History Relevant to a Twenty-First Century Liberal Arts Education," Tenured Radical, June 11, 2009
• Mary Dudziak, "Another Slow News Day at the New York Times," Legal History, June 12, 2009
• Timothy Burke, "History As It Was," Easily Distracted, June 16, 2009
• David Silbey, "Never Mind The Facts…," The Edge of the American West, June 17, 2009

The Historical Society devoted several issues of its journal, Historical Speaking, to discussions on the status of "traditional fields."  These included: intellectual history, military history, economic history, and naval history.

My personal assessment is that these arguments are premised on the assumption that things were different in the days before Vietnam.  My own research on this topic, suggests quite strongly, that military history has never been a popular topic among academia...ever.  I wrote a paper on Theodore Roosevelt's tenure as president of the American Historical Association.  He was AHA president after his stay in the White House.  Needless to say, getting Roosevelt to serve in this position was a major coup for the organization.  The details, though, were a little less impressive.  Roosevelt decided to run for President again in 1912 and never attended any meetings of the AHA officers.  Most of the work of the AHA president feel on the vice president for that year.  Roosevelt did attend the 1913 annual meeting and gave the presidential address.  He also attended a session and spoke on the status of military history.  It was not a popular topic at the time, and many of the complaints people made in 1912 about the hostility of their colleagues towards their topics sound awful lot like those made a 100 years later.

Editorial Note: click here to read part 1, part 3, and part 4.

Blog CCXXVIII (228): The State of Military History (Part 1)

Editorial Note: This posting is part of an exceptionally long essay on the status of military history.  Since it is over 5,000 words in length, it has been divided into four parts.  Click here to read part 2, part 3, and part 4.

The X-Men

In 1963 Marvel Comics created the X-Men series, which in 2000 spawned into an extremely successful film franchise.  The X-Men characters are genetic mutations who have superhuman powers because of the presence of an extra gene.  These powers makes the X-Men special, but it also engenders hostility from the rest of society.  The irony of that situation makes the X-Men a very powerful metaphor to discuss a number of very different topics.

Military history and its relationship to the rest of the profession is like the X-Men characters.  In many ways the field is at the bottom of the professional hierarchy, at least in academia.  In other ways, it is one of the strongest fields in the history business today.  Reflecting both those apparently contradictory assessments, there has been a long public debate on the status of the field.  Historians love to examine their fate and debate the state of their fields. These type of debates usually take  place in academic journals where the main audience is a professional one.  In this day and age, though, there are a number of other venues in which to advocate or commentate, and the debate on the fate of military history has often involved non-historians for better or for worse. 

This debate was not the first examination on the status of military history.  There was a big one in the 1980s as the war and society approach grew in popularity.  This exchange, though, was traditional in nature.  It took place in academic journals and was aimed at specialists.  For examples, see:

• Richard H. Kohn, "The Social History of the American Soldier: A Review and Prospectus for Research," American Historical Review, 86 (June 1981), 553-567.
• Peter Karsten, "The 'New' American Military History: A Map of the Territory, Explored and Unexplored," American Quarterly, 36 (no. 3, 1984), 389-418
• Edward M. Coffman, "The New American Military History," Military Affairs, 48 (Jan. 1984), 1-5
• John Whiteclay Chambers II, "The New Military History: Myth and Reality," Journal of Military History, 55 (July 1991), 395-40

The public deliberation that I plan to discuss here focuses on the status of the field within the historical profession, and could easily be called the "Why Do They Hate Us So Much?" debate.  It started in the mid-1990s when Mark Grimsley of The Ohio State University, published an essay on his blog that soon became famous: "Why Military History Sucks."  He argued that other historians turned a blind eye to the field of military history because its quality was not particularly good:

Indeed, I would argue that the best military history is usually done by people who were not trained as military specialists. And the fact that they do do it should suggest not only their interest in military affairs but also the fact that they have to do it—that when they pose a historical question related to military affairs, too often no military historian ever thought of the question before or thought it was worth exploring. We were too busy writing about our subject in a way that did not connect with the concerns of non-military historians.

Grimsley's argument, though, was one that a lot of other military historians rejected.  For a good example, see: John A. Lynn II, “The Embattled Future of Academic Military History,” Journal of Military History, 61 (October 1997), 777-789.

There things might have stood—a debate fought on the pages of academic journals and a specialized blog with a very small audience—had it not been for Stephen E. Ambrose.  I have written about Ambrose and his many professional shortcomings, but one of the cooler things he decided to do was donate a big chunk of change to the University of Wisconsin to create an endowed position in military history.  Depending on your view, one of two things happened: 1) Ambrose did not provide quite enough money to fund a chair and Wisconsin had to use its own funds and investment revenues to cover the hidden costs of a faculty position (pension contributions, health care costs, etc.), or 2) the faculty in the department rebelled and simply refused to fill the position.

Miller

John J. Miller, the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College, took the later view.  He wrote an article in the National Review: "Sounding Taps: Why Military History is Being Retired."  He savaged the Wisconsin history department's refusal to fill the Ambrose professorship.  Miller's take was dire, as his title suggests, and he contended that the leadership of the historical professional was marginalizing the field:

Military historians who try for a more conventional career, however, often confront the academic equivalent of urban warfare, with snipers behind every window and ambushes around every corner. “You shouldn’t go into this field unless you really love the work,” warns [Dennis] Showalter [of Colorado College]. “And you have to be ready, like Booker T. Washington, to cast down your bucket where you are.” Many talented scholars wind up taking positions at second-rate institutions because they don’t have other options.

Grimsley

This article got a good deal of attention, which is a bit of an understatement.  It got reposted on the blog of the historical society: Randall J. Stephens, "Which History?" The Historical Society Blog.  Other commentary followed and there was an exchange about it on the H-Net discussion group dedicated to military history: H-War.  

At this point, Mark Grimsley entered the debate again.  He pushed back on Miller's attack on both his blog and the History News Network.  The two had an e-mail exchange, which they both made public, and came into agreement on the fact that Wisconsin had an obligation to fill the position, but disagreed on why the university had failed at that point to do so.  "Yours are crocodile tears. You'd love to see us disappear, because it would make a nice talking point in the increasingly stupid culture wars."

Victor Davis Hanson joined in the fight with an article, “Why Study War?” that was published in City Journal  (Summer 2007), the quarterly of the Manhattan Institute.  A historian of ancient Greece and Rome, he was a Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.  His take was similar to Miller's: “The academic neglect of war is even more acute today.  Military history as a discipline has atrophied, with very few professorships, journal articles, or degree programs.”

Editorial Note: click here to read part 2, part 3, and part 4.

Blog CCXXVII (227) More of the Logevall and Osgood Debate

There has been more on the debate that Fredrik Logevall and Kenneth Osgood started last August on the pages of The New York Times.  I suspect this debate will go on for quite a while and will probably be best measured in months and years rather than weeks and months. 

Some of what follows is stuff that I should have gotten in my first posting on this debate and some of it is fairly new.  There will, of course, be more.

James M. Perry, the former chief political correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, endorsed these views in a column he wrote for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.  He attributed a lack of political literacy to the rise of Donald Trump.

In September, K.C. Johnson, one of the very, very few historians that specializes on the Congress, wrote an essay "The Alarming Decline of U.S. Political History" on his blog and also posted on his twitter feed endorsing the views of Logevall and Osgood.  He made similar points in 2003 when he testified to Congress.  His essays is much like Blog CCXXII, but is better in its argumentation.  He also noted some of the same patterns in the negative reactions to the editorial.  He is a bit skeptical that anything will come of the Logevall/Osgood essay, though. 

At the most recent meeting of the American Historical Association, a session was devoted to debating the state of political history.  The fact that it occurred Sunday morning, when many people are heading to the airport or raiding the book display for the good deals, limited the turnout.  (I know of what I speak; I have been in an AHA session on Sunday morning.  There were a few more people in the audience than on the panel, but only a few.)

Getting more attention is a exchange of essays in the January 2017 issue of Perspectives on History.  Marc Stein, a historian at San Francisco State, published "Political History and the History of Sexuality." Stein, who writes on sexuality, decided to criticize the essay from the perspective of his specialization. "Here I want to offer a perspective rooted in my little corner of the world, which is filled with historians of sexuality who work on politics and historians of politics who work on sexuality."  He began the essay by complaining about the language that the two used.  "More problematic, from the perspective of my little corner of the world, was the fact that their formulation erased the work so many have done to integrate political history with the history of social movements and the history of race, gender, and sexuality."  He began by listing the books on his shelves that were political history.  Like many other critics, he confused political history with other topics.  I noticed one book was about strategic bombing in World War II.  He then discussed the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which excluded, in the words of the act, "sexual deviations."  Stein observes, "But in my little corner of the world, which includes a large number of US political historians, this law was also a political manifestation of larger dynamics that established, maintained, and strengthened the supremacy of family, heterosexuality, and marriage in the United States. And if we cannot recognize that this is and was political, the future of political history is dire indeed."

Logevall and Osgood responded with a lengthy essay—which is in fact, longer than their original New York Times piece—entitled: "US Political History—Alive and Well?"  The two note: "Reasonable people can differ here, and Marc Stein is more apropos than perhaps he realizes with his repeated references to the view from his 'little corner of the world.' The challenge for us all is to take a broader perspective, to take stock of the good and the bad, and to have an open dialogue about the state of the field as seen from all points on the compass, not just our own."

They are clear on who and what political history should be studying: "Those who have held predominant power in American society—presidents, Congress, state governments—the elections that brought them to office, and the formulation and impact of policies that resulted from the exercise of that power." There reasons are fairly simple.  "In our daily lives, we take for granted the importance of these manifestations of our politics, but—as several correspondents rightly noted—too often we lose sight of it in our research, at least pre-tenure, and in our decision making on matters of curriculum design and faculty hiring."

A number of people have contacted them to either express support or disagreement.  Many have argued there is little academic history on both Congress and state government. "We agree. To a large degree, we’ve ceded this territory to our colleagues in political science. For the past quarter century, history grad students who express an interest in pursuing a dissertation centered on high politics have usually been gently steered in other directions. It’s old-fashioned and elite-centered, they’ve been told, not sufficiently cutting edge, too—egad—'traditional.' And 'it won’t get you a job.'" 

That point is exceptionally important.  After having been part of a couple of search committees, I can tell you that a  dissertation topic can play a powerful role in determining who advances in the search.  Letters of recommendation help, sure, but the dissertation topic is far more important.  In the end, Logevall and Osgood candidly observe that "the savvy grad student who wants to maximize her chances on the job market would still be well-advised to steer clear of a topic on high politics."

Stein responded with an essay that was longer and more insightful than his original piece.  He noted, "Self-proclaimed guardians of political history have regularly issued jeremiads about the decline of our field." He is direct in his criticisms of Logevall and Osgood on this matter: "One clue about why they do so can be found in their discussion of my 'little corner of the world.' Apparently, they missed my sarcasm; my point was that my corner is actually pretty popular. Instead, they urge us to 'take a broader perspective' and examine 'all points on the compass, not just our own.' I couldn’t agree more." 

He then argues that historians writing history in his field are doing impressive work: "Sarcasm alert: I sure do wish that political historians who focus on class, gender, race, and sexuality would stop looking at things from provincial and parochial points of view and focus on larger political issues like capitalism, colonialism, democracy, equality, justice, war, and peace. As for their efforts to provide further evidence for the decline of political history, I am not convinced that their research methodology is up to the task, primarily because of the questions they are not asking."

Stein's essay becomes quite powerful when he starts asking some significant questions: "First, do most US history textbooks and survey courses still privilege political history? If so, what is the relationship between this and the patterns that Logevall and Osgood have identified in history specializations and job advertisements?"

He get at a really important issue in his next point: "Second, how do we measure the changing popularity of political history."  He notes that the boundaries between topic such as "diplomatic, legal, and military history" are nebulous.  That point is particularly strong, but I would argue that the boundaries are clearer to people in the fields than those outside of them.

His next two points are interesting: "Third, is it possible that more and more dissertations integrate political history with other approaches? Has there been a generational shift whereby new historians are less invested in older field designations?" He follows with: "Fourth, while quantitative studies of job advertisements are interesting, is it possible that political historians are favored in job searches that do not mention politics (such as searches in US history, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and chronologically defined subfields)?" 

Stein's last point is perhaps his best, "All of this begs the question of how we should define “the political.” It is sometimes said that if everything is political, the concept of politics as a distinct conceptual domain loses its utility. But surely we can come up with a definition that encompasses less than everything but more than national elections, political parties, and a small set of individuals and institutions."

My response: that is a reasonable question.  My assessment based on anecdotal evidence is a simple: no.

Political history has serious issues to discuss that other fields are going to have a difficult time addressing.  These include questions like:

• Why does the United States have a binary political system when most other industrial, democratic societies are multi-party?
• Has the United States had a radical element in its political tradition? On the right?  The left?  Why? Why not?
• Has Congress been an active force in national politics? Or is it more passive,  responding to special interest groups and the executive branch?  Does Congress initiate significant policy proposals, and national agendas?
• Do people vote on the basis of issues?  Partisanship?  Or image/emotion?

I am sure someone could come up with even more, but these are kind of big.

This point gets to another that I notice when I was writing Blog CCXXII (my first assessment of the Logevall and Osgood debate).  There appears to be a lot of bait and switching going on among the critics of Logevall and Osgood.  Historians often try to pass off one type of history as another particularly in job searches when they are having to fill a position in a field that they do not like.  (You also see this phenomenon in fellowship applications).  Put another way, if a political historian wrote a biography of Margret Chase Smith—she spent nine years in the U.S. House of Representatives and then was a U.S. Senator from Maine for four terms—would that individual be a viable candidate for a job teaching women's history?  Probably not, but a lot of people think that if that historian specialized in gender studies and wrote the biography that he or she could pass them self off as a political historian. 

Blog CCXXVII (227): Debate Prequel

This post is one that I really wish I had written before Blog CCXXII (222): The Logevall and Osgood Debate.  In May of 2011, Perspectives on History had a special issue on political history "Political History Today."  There were seventeen articles that studied various aspects of the topic.  In many ways, this special issue was a prequel to the Logevall/Osgood guest column in The New York Times last August. 

The articles are eclectic.  Three articles are about teaching, and another three are about research resources available to historians interested in U.S. political history.  Although it is clear the intention of the editors was to focus on U.S. political history, there are essays on South Asia and Early Modern Europe. 

The more important articles in this issue are those that are "think pieces" on the direction of the field.  Of these the one that is probably the most important is the one from Julian E. Zelizer of Princeton University.  His article "The Interdisciplinarity of Political History" is a condensed version of the first part of his book Governing America: The Revival of Political History (2012).  Political history is seeing a Renaissance, he argues, because it has become interdisciplinary.  Historians

must be certain to explore the full range of scholarship that exists outside history departments to see and profit from all the possible partnerships. For example, in political science there are subfields like public opinion that have important findings for political historians, such as the difficulty presidents have encountered in actually changing public opinion. Larry Bartels has produced some intriguing findings using historical data to show that what matters most to voters—even in landmark elections like those of 1936—are the immediate economic conditions, which determine what happens at the ballot box. His work has also raised significant challenges to conventional history that we have on how working class whites abandoned the Democratic Party after the 1960s. Psychologists are producing stunning findings about how voters make their decisions based on first physical impressions rather than speeches or policy arguments. Sociologists have also been developing extremely important work on the role of networks in spreading information and shaping the reputations of particular actors. 

The good news is that an interdisciplinary approach is in the bloodstream of any good political historian.

On the other hand, Steven Pincus of Yale University and William Novak of the University of Michigan in "Political History after the Cultural Turn" state: "Traditional political history is dead and is still dying. Over two decades ago, Lynn Hunt observed, 'Social history has overtaken political history as the most important area of research in history.'" They also add:

Practitioners of both the new social history and the new cultural history have been at one in denouncing (and moving speedily past) the traditional techniques, narratives, and perspectives of the old political history. Tony Judt, certainly not an uncritical advocate of either the new social or the new cultural history, captured a widespread contempt for political history after the social-cultural turn. "Traditional political history continues on its untroubled way," he observed, "describing in detail the behaviour of ruling classes and the transformations which took place within them. Divorced from social history, this remains, as ever, a form of historical writing adapted to the preservation of the status quo; it concerns itself with activities peculiar to the ruling group, activities of an apparently rational and self-justifying nature." Whatever their internecine differences, practitioners of most new historical subdisciplines have come to view traditional political history as an essentially conservative and crabbed way of approaching an increasingly rich and diverse range of historical material.

All of this comes in the first paragraph. 

Pincus and Novak are not dismissing the study of public affairs.  "Recent events have made the importance of 'the political' even more manifest," they concede. "Post 9/11, no one can seriously doubt any longer that state activities—domestic as well as international—deeply affect our everyday lives."  They also issue a call for action:

What we are calling for, then, is not a return to a political history of elites making decisions which affect other elites. The last generation of social and cultural history has successfully cut off the king's head, and the future history of the political refuses to be confined to the conventional terms of critical elections, high-profile politicians, and official action. The political history that we would like to see elevated in the next generation of historical scholarship is precisely a place of constant interaction and interconnection between state and society—a space where issues of national identity and belonging, democratic participation and exclusion, state-building and state-resistance, discrimination and equal protection, and competing visions of the good life are ceaselessly brought into focus, debate, and often coercive resolution. The political does not constitute itself independent of and external to society—but is a place of almost continuous sociopolitical interaction and conflict. It marks a distinctive site of collective action where the terms of the life in common—whether local, regional, national, or international—receive a particularly comprehensive (and not infrequently coercive) form of articulation (for better or for worse).   

That is all well and good, but—and this is a big but—state activities are not always political.  Pincus and Novak conflate law enforcement, military affairs and foreign policy with politics.  There is overlap, but they are distinct topics.  I also think there is an odd disconnect at play here in the dismissive attitude they hold towards historical investigation of high ranking politicians and elections, and the reactions in academia to the elections of 2008 and 2016.  Scholars seem to care about who is in the White House—at least those during their lifetimes.

Part of the problem with this debate is that many people are confused about what is and is not "political history." This reaction was clear in the early, negative reactions to the Logevall/Osgood  op-ed.  It also becomes clear in reading all the articles in this special issue. 

Case in point, four of the articles in this issue, focus on diplomatic history.  While diplomatic history and political history might seem the same thing to people outside of the two fields, they are distinctly different. Diplomatic history has a been a well-defined sub-field of U.S. history for roughly a century, focusing on the making and execution of policy, or to be more specific, U.S. foreign policy.  Although politicians play important roles in these studies—54 of our 66 secretaries of state have been lawyers/politicians.  Many people outside of the field assume diplomatic history is limited to the activities of how diplomats talk to one another.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Diplomatic historians often focus on professional diplomats, but they also look at pressure groups, businessmen, demographics, economics, and public opinion.  They have also been "internationalizing" U.S. history for a very, very long time. 

All of these points become clear in looking at the career of Samuel Flagg Bemis (1891-1973).  Bemis was president of the American Historical Association in 1961.  He won his first Pulitzer for his book Jay's Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy (1924), which was the product of research in archives in the United States, but also those in the United Kingdom and France—which was no easy thing to do in 1916; his ship was hit by a German U-boat. More to the point, his book and research makes it clear that politics and policy are distinctly different topics.  There is no real reason for a political historian to look at developments in France or Britain, while there is a very strong reason for a diplomatic historian to do so. 

Bemis's career also shows how diplomatic and political history overlap.  He won his second Pulitzer for the first volume of his biography of John Quincy Adams.  That book focused on Adams and his diplomatic career.  The sequel covered his presidency and post-White House life as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Returning to the main topic of this essay, this special issue makes for interesting reading in light of the Logevall/Osgood debate.  These articles show, for better or worse, what they two of them were pushing against when the went to The New York Times with their essay.  In many ways the issue helps their cause.  If you disagree with that assessment, despair not.  I suspect there is a lot more coming in this debate.

Blog CCXXIII (223): The Quit Litters

Apparently there is a whole new genre called "academic quit lit."  Basically these are essays from college professors--usually younger ones--who have decided to leave the profession in which they explain their reasons why.  Colleen Flaherty of Inside Higher Ed wrote an article on the genre: "Public Good-byes: Recent Dear John Letters from Academics Leaving Higher Education Signal a Resurgence in 'Quit Lit.'" They were not the only media outlet interested in the topic.  The Atlantic published several essays on this topic.  Ian Bogost's article makes his position clear with his title: "No One Cares That You Quit Your Job."  It is a short, but strong easy and well worth the read.  Megan Garber wrote another article on the topic: "The Rise of 'Quit Lit.'"  She notes that there is a strong theme in this literature: "'I quit,' goes the text. 'And you should, too,' goes the subtext."

All of these articles referenced an article that Oliver Lee, an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington, wrote the Vox news and opinion website: "I Have One of the Best Jobs in Academia. Here's Why I'm Walking Away."

I spent six and a half years living in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex; I have been to UT Arlington; I even spent some time looking up Lee's background, and I would never agree with his title.  But it is probably a bit unfair to pick on one professor, even if his essay got a lot of attention.  The Flaherty article makes it clear that a lot of others are quitting academia, and writing about it.  My read of the article is that the people who are going public often have very good options.  Lee, for example, has a law degree, and is apparently starting a legal career.  Others are going into the corporate world where they make much more than a college professor, even one at a very good school. 

Bogost in his article noted: "Why should anyone be impressed that somebody can quit something? Much more impressive is figuring out is how to live with it. More staypieces please." 

That request was easy to fulfill.  James Nikopoulos, an assistant professor of languages and literature at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan--which is probably no easy gig--wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education that the authors of "quit lit" remind him of Arsenio Hall's character in Coming to America objecting to doing manual labor: "I’m badly in need of a manicure."  He offers an important observation: "The fact is that no profession is perfect. Young architects dream of erecting museums but spend more time redesigning kitchens. Even the 'dream' professions are not immune: Aren’t movie stars always complaining about having to answer inane questions in pointless interviews?"

Matthew Pratt Guterl, a professor of American studies at Brown University, wrote a post on his blog entitled: "What to Love."  He decides to take a the-glass-is-half-full approach: "Other realities are out there. Other landscapes for you to inhabit. Or to create. These other landscapes feature faculty who are supportive colleagues and even friends. Students who have big brains and bigger hearts, who are peers and not subjects, consumers, or products. Administrators who spend every single waking moment trying to make everyone’s life easier."  Don't quit.  "Stick around. Fix the place. For others.

You have to build this idyll."

Ann Little responded on her blog as well: "Here’s what I tell myself when I get frustrated:  I work in what used to be called a 'helping profession.'  That is, my job isn’t ripping people off or selling them garbage they don’t need.  My job is offering education and critical thinking skills to students."

Those are good rejoinders to the quit litters.  The basic idea behind the In the Service of Clio blog is trying to offer some advice to younger scholars on how to do things better, and that mostly rejects quit lit.  People quite for all sorts of reason.  A lot of it happens in grad school, where it should happen: "This just isn't for me," etc.  Reading the Flaherty article, I get the impression that the reasons for leaving are often quite petty.  I know of one case where a younger scholar received an AHA book prize, but hated working and living in a small, provincial city like New Orleans, and quit.  On the other hand, life is short and if you are not happy, you only get one shot at life.  Nor should those of us that remain behind dismiss the reasons people have for leaving an academic career: if they have an opportunity to make a lot of money, or do something that is also fun, exciting, and rewarding all to the good. Those are very understandable reasons that can pull someone into something else, rather than getting pushed out of academia.  

The simplest piece of advice I can offer if you are considering quitting comes in the form of some questions:

• Why did you want a Ph.D.? 
• What do you want to do with your career? 
• Can you do that using a university as a platform? 
• Can you use another career as a platform for those objectives? 
• Are these objectives worth the opportunity costs?
• Will another career make things better?  Will it resolve the grievances/shortcomings you are facing in academia?

Blog CCXXII (222): The Logevall and Osgood Debate

Earlier this year, Fredrik Logevall of Harvard University and Kenneth Osgood of the Colorado School of the Mines started a public debate about the status of political history.  They published an editorial in The New York Times: "Why Did We Stop Teaching Political History?"  Neither of these guys is a slouch, complaining about how the profession has passed them and their field by.  Logevall won the Pulitzer Prize for his book on the French war in Vietnam, and Osgood's book on Eisenhower's propaganda campaigns won the Herbert Hoover Book Award, which is less well-known but still quite difficult to receive.  They noted that at one time political history had real influence and pull with those that ran for office.  That has changed in the years since.  The two also argued:

Perceived “traditional” types of history that examined the doings of governing elites fell into disfavor, and political history suffered the effects (as did its cousins, diplomatic and military history). The ramifications extend well beyond higher education. The drying up of scholarly expertise affects universities’ ability to educate teachers—as well as aspiring lawyers, politicians, journalists and business leaders—who will enter their professions having learned too little about the nation’s political history. Not least, in this age of extreme partisanship, they’ll be insufficiently aware of the importance that compromise has played in America’s past, of the vital role of mutual give-and-take in the democratic process.

One measure of the decline in political history is the decline in the number of jobs advertised as political history. 

Although Logevall and Osgood are historians, neither teaches in a history department.  (I should clarify a bit; Logevall has a joint appointment with the Kennedy School; how much time he devotes to each probably varies from semester to semester).  They did not publish in The New York Times for its prestige.  Their recommendations for reform make that clear:

Change will not be easy, and will not come from history departments facing tight budgets and competing demands. What is needed, to begin with, is for university administrators to identify political history as a priority, for students and families to lobby their schools, for benefactors to endow professorships and graduate fellowships and for lawmakers and school boards to enact policies that bolster its teaching—and without politicizing the enterprise.

Since many universities in the United States are public institutions—think of schools like the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, or Florida State University—and receive their funding from states run by politicians and you might start to realize what a powerful call to action Logevall and Osgood are making.

Days later—actually two—Julian Zelizer of Princeton University fired back with an essay on the blog of the Organization of American Historians: "Political History is Doing AOK."  He argues: "Over the past twenty years the field has experienced nothing short of a renaissance."  It is a very diverse field with many new approaches.  He also adds: "While there was a period in the 1970s when we did move away from 'elections, elected officials, policy and policymaking, parties and party politics,' this is not the case today."  He also disputes many of the arguments made by Logevall and Osgood: "In terms of the lack of jobs, that is a different story. The meager number of jobs in political history is not unique to the field. Everyone in the history profession currently faces a job market that isn’t there."

The OAH then sponsored a forum staring four relatively junior political historians: "What is the State of American Political History" and asked them their thoughts about the Logevall and Osgood article.  From my perspective, if they want to call themselves political historians, fine.  But I am not sure a lot of others would describe them that way.  Their description of what they wanted the field to study would also be difficult to characterize as political history.  With those two points in mind, it is no surprise that they are skeptical about Logevall and Osgood's positions.

They were not the only ones.  Mark Graber of the University of Maryland Law School responded on the Balinization blog with a post entitled: "Rumors of Our Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated."  He argued, "There may be a lot to be said about what happens when political history is done by political scientists rather than historians (we call it "political development"), but calling the field dead is confusing what may be happening in one discipline with what is not happening in the academy at large."

There was also a lot of push back on Twitter.  I am not sure how much deep thinking you can do on Twitter, but the legal historian Mary L. Dudziak does a good job of summarizing the various reactions in a post: "Political History is Alive and Well, and Matters More than Ever" that also appeared on the Balkinization blog.  In summary, she states "the op-ed’s argument fell flat."  I am not sure that is true.  I get that most digitally minded historians pushed back on it—even those that consider themselves political historians—but I think Logevall and Osgood were playing for the long haul.

Roy Rogers, a Ph.D. candidate in American History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a writing fellow at the New York City College of Technology, and a contributor to The Junto group blog that focuses on early American history, wrote an essay that while negative towards Logevall and Osgood's arguments, did more to confirm them than deny them.  In "The Strange Death (?) of Political History," he stated that the two were addressing the field from their perspective as historians working on Twentieth Century topics.  "Perhaps political history is dead, but it died a strange death. It is certainly true that, from a certain point of view, political history has declined over the last several decades. But that perspective is partially a matter of definitions. Logevall and Osgood have a very constrained definition of what constitutes political history."  Developments in the historical profession "forced a fundamental change in what it means to be political. The search for politics moved out of the state house and into the streets, the fields, the parlor, and even the bedroom."  My take: that is something, but it ain't political history.

Gabriel Rosenberg of Duke University and Ariel Ron of Southern Methodist University wrote a post for the blog Lawyers, Guns & Money with a title that makes their thesis pretty clear: "Chill Out. Political History has Never Been Better."  Their essay is similar to Rogers' in that it basically does more to confirm rather than deny Logevall and Osgood arguments even though its purpose was the exact opposite.  They make the same basic argument as well: Logevall and Osgood have to narrow a definition.  They offer up a number of titles that they claim are political history—but really aren't—to refute Logevall and Osgood.  Rosenberg and Ron  also make the mistake of conflating policy history with political history, citing the relatively healthy Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations which has well-attended conferences and a thick journal.  SHAFR is the main organization in diplomatic history, and their arguments are basically correct about the organization.  But I would argue that diplomatic history is very different from political history.  (Logevall and Osgood make this point explicitly in their essay).

Logevall and Osgood were hardly dissuaded by these type of arguments.  They appeared on the podcast of The American Interest roughly a month after their essay appeared in the Times.  Logevall did clarify that they did not pick the title, and that it was a bit misleading, but other than that they held firm.  They discussed how many historians were uncomfortable discussing "high politics," When asked about Zelizer's arguments about diversity, Logevall explained,  "I don't think he is wrong, but what I said to him is that something has been lost."

So, what are we to make of all this bleeding of digital ink?  I am not sure anyone is totally right in this debate.  First, I do not think historians are every going to be turned to as policy makers or advisors just because they are historians.  Some will find positions of influence in government, but that will be because of their personal efforts and connections. 

Next, I actually think political history has been strong, even if not popular.  There is a clear public audience for this type of historical literature.  But even within the profession historians have done well producing this type of history.  Stephen Ambrose, Robert Dallek, and H. W. Brands come to mind immediately, but there are others: Alonzo Hamby, William Leuchtenberg, and Sean Wilentz.  As the history book review editor for the academic journal Presidential Studies Quarterly, I am swamped with titles.  Even those on the presidents we do not care that much about like Millard Fillmore or Chester A. Arthur.  Writing on presidents consistently seems a great way to get a lot of attention within the profession. 

But there is the rub and that gets to my third point: political history seems to be focused on the executive branch.  The legislative and judicial branches get far less attention, so there is some real merit to what Logevall and Osgood argue.  This executive branch bias also appears to be the case when historians look at state level politics.  There are a number of reasons for this emphasis.  There are fewer presidents and governors and it is easier to focus on them.  Presidents of the United States—at least those in the Twentieth Century—have presidential libraries, which makes research easy compared to trying to track down the personal papers of the 10 or 15 Senators that sat on the Armed Services Committee.  They might be at institutions on opposite sides of the country, making travel and research expensive.  (The best case scenario is that they are at the Library of Congress, which happens a lot, but not enough).  Then there is the question of quality of organization.  I have looked at the papers of some senators that were still sitting in the boxes in which they were mailed to the archives three decades before.  Then again I have found others that were organized beautifully.  There is also the question of how important is any one senator.  There are a hundred of them; more than 1,100 since 1789.  All of them "matter," but some of them a lot more than others—the Henry Clays, John C. Calhouns, Daniel Websters, Henry Cabot Lodges and Lyndon Johnsons of the world are better known than those they served with in the Senate, or those that held their seats in the years since for a reason. 

Moving on to point four: policy history is a new development, but even if it incorporates new subjects and perspectives, it is not political history and it still tends to be executive branch centric.  How much influence did the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have in the development of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War?  "Don't know" is the short answer, because no one has written on the committee as a institution.  There are biographies of individual senators, but that is a bit of a narrow focus, much like trying to watch a film by looking through a straw.  How influential are the Speakers of the House?  How much influence do they have on legislation, policy, and the political direction of Washington?  Are they the equal of presidents, or in a relatively junior position?  Political scientists have spent a lot of time answering these questions, but their answers have to be tentative given the imbalance in coverage.  Case in point, how many books are there on Sam Rayburn?  (Some of you are probably wondering who is Sam Rayburn? Answer: he set the record for longest tenure as Speaker of the House of Representatives.)  There are four books on Rayburn.  Now, think of how many biographies—and just biographies—are out there for Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy—the presidents he interacted with as Speaker.

Here comes point number five: there is still a lot of good work to be done.  Elections—which are purely political—are topics that have seen less attention than the deserve.  What do they tell us about the American people?  Actually a lot if we pay attention.  Polling data is quite informative, but there is still a lot of information that we can utilize from elections before this practice became widespread and dependable.  Again, political scientists do a lot on this topic, but the focus seems to be on the second half of the Twentieth Century, and on the presidential elections. 

This is the last point: Logevall and Osgood might not be getting much agreement from their peers, but that is not the audience they were really addressing.  I would not be surprised if this article has some long-term reverberations in the historiography of American history, but also on other higher education related activities like appropriations and fund raising.