Read on Twitter
Another tiresome and utterly predictable jeremiad about the history profession that misses the innovation that has remade the field in recent decades. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-31/max-hastings-u-s-universities-declare-war-on-military-history
One reason that more American universities don't have "War Studies" departments is that the study of war is integrated into the subfields of political, social, economic, and cultural history in ways unimaginable forty or fifty years ago.
A few examples. Former Penn historian and Harvard president @DrewFaust28 (she of the department that Max Hastings singles out for its supposed lack of interest in war) redefined the field with her Journal of American History article "Altars of Sacrifice." https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/76/4/1200/896867?login=true.
In This Republic of Suffering, she offered a major reinterpretation of death and the Civil War, a project that Hastings's mentor, Sir Michael Howard, would surely have found worthy of the genre. https://www.google.com/books/edition/This_Republic_of_Suffering/0Ng-hNXC1P0C?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover
Consider yet another major historian of the Civil War, @smccurry3 at Columbia, whose brilliant reappraisal of the Confederacy and work on women and war has reoriented the field. https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780674064218
Moving forward into the twentieth century, @MittelstadtJen at Rutgers, has done innovative work integrating military history, the welfare state, and American politics. https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780674286139
Let's not forget Beth Bailey, whose book America's Army, published by Harvard University Press is a major contribution to modern American history. BTW, she is also coauthor of one of the most widely used American history textbooks. https://history.ku.edu/beth-bailey
I spent 24 years on the faculty at Penn, where my colleagues Walter MacDougall, Arthur Waldron, and Peter Holquist, to name three, regularly wrote about and taught military history. Intellectual historian Warren Breckman at Penn is writing a book on World War I.
My current department, @NYUHistory, offers courses on the Crusades, US Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Cold War, the Vietnam War and more. We have a two-year visiting position in military history that has brought some amazing scholars to our department over the years.
I could pile on and on, but just off the top of my head, here are a few scholars of military history whose work I admire, Fred Logevall, Harvard; Mark Bradley, Chicago; Monica Kim, Wisconsin-Madison; Richard Immerman, Temple; Brian DeLay, Berkeley.
One example of how military history has reshaped domestic history: @stschrader1's Badges Without Borders, shows how American counterinsurgency in Latin America, Asia, and Africa reshaped policing on the home front. Military history matters. https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780520295629
