Flanking Maneuver
John J. Miller has an excellent article in the October 9 National Review about the decline of military history in the higher education curriculum. Titled “Sounding Taps,” the article also has the subheads of “A Dying Breed” and “Taking Cover,” all of which speak to the pessimistic tone Miller takes regarding the study of war in our nation’s universities.
As someone who once made a (pretty poor) living writing military history, I don’t subscribe to Miller’s pessimism. As he describes, military history is popular with students when it’s offered, the bookstores overflow with military histories, and we have a large supply of cable television channels that do a fine job with the subject. And the expertise of “armchair scholars” – Civil War buffs and their equivalents – is vast and lively. There are otherwise normal people out there who can show you how to build a trebuchet. You won’t get that kind of knowledge at Dartmouth.
In short, the market more than compensates for the lack of formal instruction in the halls of academe.
In this, military history actually has a great advantage over other aspects of history (not to mention other academic subjects). If college doesn’t teach about Napoleon, a student has a large menu of alternate avenues of knowledge. He or she doesn’t have the same options when it comes to the Congress of Vienna, or iconoclasm, or the caste system, or the invention of the clock.
