{"id":480,"date":"2010-12-03T15:57:27","date_gmt":"2010-12-03T13:57:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.military-history.us\/?p=480"},"modified":"2010-12-03T15:59:20","modified_gmt":"2010-12-03T13:59:20","slug":"what-is-military-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/2010\/12\/what-is-military-history\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Military History?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is\u00c2\u00a0 probably a topic I should have tackled a few months when\u00c2\u00a0I started this blog;\u00c2\u00a0I have come to realize that i am in the minority when it comes to military history and my view of what it should be. \u00a0 I guess the best way to describe myself is that\u00c2\u00a0I am a macro-historian and not a micro-historian.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

What is Military History is a pretty good question from my perspective. \u00a0 The definition determines how military history is written in the first place and to what uses it is put. \u00a0 Modern military history arguably began with the reformers of the Prussian Army after 1805 and the creation of the Prussian staff system and most importantly the Prussian Kriegsakademie<\/a>. \u00a0 In its infancy, modern military history served a very simple purpose, to prepare military leaders for war by instructing them in the successes and failures of past military leaders. \u00a0 The Kriegsakademie excelled at producing what would today be known as drums & trumpets type military history. \u00a0\u00c2\u00a0In that vein military history had a definite purpose; to allow future leaders to learn lessons from the past. \u00a0 That is not all the Kriegsakademie did by any means but it is the most import thing for the purposes of this post. \u00a0 The Prussian type of military history was the template for most western military history until relatively recently; say the up to the 1970\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s.<\/p>\n

The “New Military History\u00e2\u20ac\u009d attempts to integrate social, economic, cultural and other factors into the telling of military history. \u00a0 To me it does so almost to the exclusion of combat itself. \u00a0 I guess I can buy the argument that all these factors play into the way a nation fights and the type of army a nation builds.<\/p>\n

My main concern with studying war is the practical, war-winning lessons to be learned from the study of past conflict. \u00a0 This does not mean that there is no room for “New Military History\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, only that I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think it should be the primary focus of military history.<\/p>\n

There is a good piece about the demise of academic military history here: “Rally Once Again”: The Embattled Future of Academic Military History <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is\u00c2\u00a0 probably a topic I should have tackled a few months when\u00c2\u00a0I started this blog;\u00c2\u00a0I have come to realize that i am in the minority when it comes to military history and my view of what it should be…. Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[48,1007,34,23,33],"class_list":["post-480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historiography","tag-academics","tag-historiography","tag-methodology","tag-research","tag-scholarship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}