Drawing Back the Curtain, Part II: Yep, You Really Do Teach Military History
This article is aimed at the secondary teachers in the audience, those who labor in the educational trenches daily, wrestling with impossibly expansive curricula, impossibly diverse learning needs, and impossibly high expectations from parents, administrators, legislators, and from yourselves. This piece is an acknowledgement that many of you may not think about military history as something you actively “do” in your classes and an admission that none of you need something else to add to your impossible loads.
But what if it turned out that you already teach military history, whether you recognize it as such or not? And what if thinking about how the academic field defines itself could help offer your classes both a unifying thread AND new avenues of inquiry-based learning? Because this article argues just that. Teaching through the lens of military history is a manageable way to generate high-interest, high-impact learning experiences for students.
Anecdotally, military history in grades 6-12 has something of a bad rap. Everyone seems to have had a teacher who spent maybe just a little too much time on World War II battles or, alternately, who skipped battles all together, deeming them “irrelevant.” Either way, the unifying feature of these two approaches is that they take a very narrow view of what “military history” is and therefore distort it into something divorced from the larger themes of history as taught in secondary classrooms.
Academic historians today, on the other hand, see military history as something so broad that it’s sometimes hard to wrap our hands around. In an attempt to inspire brevity, I crowdsourced a definition from experts via twitter. Here are a few examples, all from practicing historians.
In other words, once you start, there’s a lot to unpack.
But let’s try, using an answer from Dr. Rob Thompson of the Army University Press. He simply used one word: “umbrella.”[1] I’d like to do a thought experiment using that image.
Picture a military engagement from a conflict of your choice. It can be on land, on sea, or in the air, and from any time period. Regardless of when it was fought, by whom, or how, operational military historians (those who, according to this 2018 White Paper from the Society for Military History, focus on the “the province of war, of campaign, and of battle”) would ask a series of related questions to learn more about what happened – who were the belligerents? What had happened (politically, economically, diplomatically, socially) that had led belligerents into conflict? What had happened that led them to that spot on that day?
And once belligerents were at that specific spot at that specific time, what did they do? What was each side trying to accomplish? What tactics or modes of warfare did they employ? How were fighters deployed? How did the reality of what actually happened match with commanders’ plans or assumptions? How were decisions made, and who made them? How was technology used? What role did the weather or terrain play in the outcome of the engagement?
And, of course, while thinking of outcome, operational military historians would think about winners and losers, but also about how to define those terms. Outcomes are not always immediately obvious, nor are the effects of a specific engagement on the larger conflict, a peace that follows, or on future conflicts. So military historians, like all historians, interpret events over the short and long terms. They also look for lessons learned, often to directly apply them to future conflicts.
To build a metaphor, however, their questions make up the handle of Dr. Thompson’s umbrella. They’re the foundation on which the field of military history was founded, and they are vitally important to understanding how and why wars are fought. They get at the concepts that many people think of when they think of “military history” – strategy and grand strategy, tactics and operations, technologies of warfare, death and diplomacy, and sometimes lines and arrows on a map. The field, however, is incomplete without its context, just as an umbrella is incomplete without its canopy.
Military history also encompasses the histories of the people who actively served, the institutions of which they were part, the civilians who supported or opposed military actions, and the governmental or non-governmental entities that directed warfare. An army cannot be extricated from the soldiers who fight within it or the society that constitutes it.
In other words, armies are both reflections of the societies of which they are part and, as large institutions, they can also be change agents.
Military history, therefore, because it encompasses histories of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, economics, politics, policy, social class, sexuality, technology, and the environment, can be used as a lens to focus these broad avenues of inquiry in classrooms.
Military history is one way to pull together the myriad threads teachers are supposed to weave into a big picture for their students.
And, students find military history interesting. Be they budding pacifists, the children of soldiers or veterans, war-displaced refugees, or simply fans of video games or movies featuring war, every student has an entry point in their personal lives that allows them to connect with this history. War is the quintessential exemplar of how ethical, tactical, and personal choices influence the flow of history.
As just one example, the U.S. Army could be used as a case study to understand the historical trends of the post-World War II United States. An inquiry-based unit focused around a question such as, “To what extent did the U.S. Army reflect Cold War America?” could get at all of the same historical issues as chronologically focused units could. But tight focus on the Army would buy time in the curriculum to allow students more space for deep learning, independent research, and curiosity.
After all, between 1945 and 1991, the Army deployed globally in conflicts large and small, with a range of goals, tactics, and outcomes. It is obviously, therefore, connected to the operational and diplomatic history of the Cold War.
But during these years, the Army also racially desegregated, integrated women, and dealt with changing sexual and social mores. As such, the institution and the soldiers who peopled it were deeply enmeshed in the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the sexual revolution, and the rise of the New Right. As the Army moved its manpower procurement system from a draft to an all-volunteer force, manpower became a locus of discussion about what, if anything, the citizen owed to the state and how the state could entice citizens to enlist. In this way, it served as a bellwether for the different possible meanings of liberalism and conservatism at the time. The growth of southern and western Army installations followed by base shutdowns and consolidations nationally typifies internal migration to the sunbelt and the economic consequences of deindustrialization. As the Army adapted – or hoped to adapt -- new technology, it exemplified both the hope of and the sometimes devastating environmental consequences of diving headlong into the newest thing. For example, planners expected defoliants like Agent Orange to help pave the path to victory in Vietnam, but that is far from what happened. I could keep going, but the point is that almost any historical theme can be tied to the umbrella of military history.
These questions and modes of inquiry are not limited to recent history or to U.S. history. They apply to almost any subject within any history course. For example, a unit on ancient empires could use the Qin army in China and the Roman empire’s army as examples for comparison in an inquiry framed around a question such as, “Does diversity stabilize or destabilize empire?” The various geopolitical and social meanings of World War I could be studied through the eyes of colonial soldiers stationed in Europe. Military clashes between Native Americans and the U.S. Army could be used to develop inquiries about media analysis or historical interpretation. After all, how does a military engagement become known as a battle, a war, a massacre, or an uprising?
My point is that military history is as multi-dimensional as war itself. It provides a much wider set of tools for historical analysis than is often acknowledged, attracts student interest, and offers a laboratory for understanding why the path events took are not and never have been inevitable. Military history is vital to secondary classrooms.
[1] https://twitter.com/DrRobThompson/status/1498844393083650048?s=20&t=cesA57IW9ndEezs6JPXSHg