Michael Livingston

Are there people in academia who dislike military history? Of course. For years we’ve been wanting to start a War Studies program at The Citadel. We have the personnel. We have the interest. 2/

But one reason it hasn’t happened is a thinking out there, as Hastings rightly observes, that War Studies means War Glorification. (Nothing could be further from the truth, of course: To know war is to want no part in it.) 3/

Do I think it’s a mistake that we haven’t built War Studies, especially when it could be a funding nexus? Sure. Is it a sign of the End of Military History, as Hastings would have it? Hell no. 4/

Let’s take a quick look at what I think Hastings gets wrong here. I’ll have to make this brief, since I’m tweeting this between writing chapters on my next military history book. (So much for the field’s death!) 5/

First, let’s set aside the false claims Hastings makes — like the only history class at Harvard being about pets. Not hard to rip this to shreds by actually fact-checking the history (go figure) of Harvard’s course catalog. 6/

Second, Hastings appears to have missed how milhist as a field has moved beyond leaders-and-maps to a more encompassing view of the past that reflects culture, society, religion … or, as I like to call it, reality. 7/

One result of this change has been the fact that milhist is taught in wider contexts. Even without specifically milhist courses (though they exist! I teach them!), students might be getting *more* milhist in a wider variety of courses across disciplines. 8/

Third, I’ve seen no causation data that the drying up of jobs — a point Hastings makes that *can* be supported — is in any way concentrated on the sub-field of milhist. History jobs are drying up in seemingly *every* sub-field. 9/

A “demise of military history” is simply a finger-rattle of the larger death throes of the humanities themselves, which have been relentlessly attacked and defunded for decades. THAT is the problem, Sir Hastings, and this hot take ain’t helping. 10/

I don’t see military history as under any greater threat than job prospects in medieval studies or classical studies — just to grab from the pools of research I interact with the most — much less any other funding-endangered fields across the humanities. 11/

Sir Hastings seems to think that the root cause of all this is within the halls of academia, as if angry calls to history departments will fix this. They won’t. Angry calls to legislators and education-as-business modelers *might* be better served, but… 12/

More important is for us all to look in the mirror — me, you, Sir Hastings, @bopinion — and ask how we are working to renew a social awareness that education is a public good … and that public good is a good thing. 13/

Because THAT is what’s been lost, folks. 14/

So that’s my $0.02. And, hey, if you like military history, you might want to enjoy one of my three new books on the subject coming out this year in what is obviously the flatlining of the field.

Also: Twitter doesn’t have an ‘edit’ function. So I can’t fix ‘Sir Hastings’ to the more proper ‘Sir Max’. Alas.