Military history
Military history is the study of armed conflict in the history of humanity, and its impact on the societies, cultures and economies thereof, as well as the resulting changes to local and international relationships.
Professional historians normally focus on military affairs that had a major impact on the societies involved as well as the aftermath of conflicts, while amateur historians and hobbyists often take a larger interest in the details of battles, equipment, and uniforms in use.
The essential subjects of military history study are the causes of war, the social and cultural foundations, military doctrine on each side, the logistics, leadership, technology, strategy, and tactics used, and how these changed over time. On the other hand, just war theory explores the moral dimensions of warfare, and to better limit the destructive reality caused by war, seeks to establish a doctrine of military ethics.
As an applied field, military history has been studied at academies and service schools because the military command seeks to not repeat past mistakes, and improve upon its current performance by instilling an ability in commanders to perceive historical parallels during a battle, so as to capitalize on the lessons learned from the past. When certifying military history instructors the Combat Studies Institute deemphasizes rote detail memorization and focuses on themes and context in relation to current and future conflict, using the motto "Past is Prologue."
The discipline of military history is dynamic, changing with development as much of the subject area as the societies and organisations that make use of it. The dynamic nature of the discipline of military history is largely due to the rapid change of military forces, and the art and science of managing them, as well as the frenetic pace of technological development that had taken place during the period known as the Industrial Revolution, and more recently in the nuclear and information ages. An important recent concept is the Revolution in Military Affairs which attempts to explain how warfare has been shaped by emerging technologies, such as gunpowder. It highlights the short outbursts of rapid change followed by periods of relative stability.
Popular versus academic military history
In terms of the history profession in major countries, military history is an orphan, despite its enormous popularity with the general public. William H. McNeill points out:In recent decades University level courses in military history remain popular; often they use films to humanize the combat experience. For example, Eugene P. A. Scleh, history professor at the University of Maine, has explored the advantages and problems of teaching a course of "Modern War and Its Images" entirely through films. Students said they found the documentaries more valuable than the dramas. However, military historians are frustrated by their marginal status in major history departments.
Academic historians concerned with military topics have their own scholarly organization, Society for Military History. Since 1937 it has published The Journal of Military History. Its four issues a year include scholarly articles reviews of new books, and a bibliography of new publications and dissertations. The Society has 2300 members, holds an annual convention, and gives out prizes for the best scholarship.
Historiography of military history
is the study of the history and method of the discipline of history or the study of a specialised topic. In this case, military history with an eye to gaining an accurate assessment of conflicts using all available sources. For this reason military history is periodised, creating overlaying boundaries of study and analysis in which descriptions of battles by leaders may be unreliable due to the inclination to minimize mention of failure and exaggerate success. Military historians use Historiographical analysis in an effort to allow an unbiased, contemporary view of records.One military historian, Jeremy Black, outlined problems 21st-century military historians face as an inheritance of their predecessors: Eurocentricity, a technological bias, a focus on leading military powers and dominant military systems, the separation of land from sea and recently air conflicts, the focus on state-to-state conflict, a lack of focus on political "tasking" in how forces are used.
If these challenges were not sufficient for military historians, the limits of method are complicated by the lack of records, either destroyed or never recorded due to their value as a military secret. Scholars still do not know the exact nature of Greek fire, for instance. Researching Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, for example, have presented unique challenges to historians due to records that were destroyed to protect classified military information, among other reasons. Historians use their knowledge of government regulation and military organization, and employing a targeted and systematic research strategy to piece together war histories. Despite these limits, wars are some of the most studied and detailed periods of human history.
Military historians have often compared organization, tactical and strategic ideas, leadership, and national support of the militaries of different nations.
In the early 1980s, historian Jeffrey Kimball studied the influence of a historian's political position on current events on interpretive disagreement regarding the causes of 20th century wars. He surveyed the ideological preferences of 109 active diplomatic historians in the United States as well as 54 active military historians. He finds that their current political views are moderately correlated with their historiographical interpretations. A clear position on the left-right continuum regarding capitalism was apparent in most cases. All groups agreed with the proposition, "historically, Americans have tended to view questions of their national security in terms of such extremes as good vs. evil." Though the Socialists were split, the other groups agreed that "miscalculation and/or misunderstanding of the situation" had caused U.S. interventionism." Kimball reports that:
Online resources
People interested in military history from all periods of time, and all subtopics, are increasingly turning to the Internet for many more resources than are typically available in nearby libraries. Since 1993, one of the most popular sites, with over 4000 members has been H-WAR, sponsored by the H-Net network based at Michigan State University. H-War has six coeditors, and an academic advisory board that sets policy. It sponsors daily moderated discussions of current topics, announcements of new publications and conferences, and reports on developments at conferences. The H-Net family of lists has sponsored and published over 46,000 scholarly book reviews, thousands of which deal with books in military history broadly conceived. Wikipedia itself has a very wide coverage of military history, with over 180,000 articles. Its editors sponsor Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history and encourage readers to join.Military and war museums
Military museums specialize in military histories; they are often organized from a national point of view, where a museum in a particular country will have displays organized around conflicts in which that country has taken part. They typically take a broad view of warfare's role in the nation's history. They typically include displays of weapons and other military equipment, uniforms, wartime propaganda, and exhibits on civilian life during wartime, and decorations, among others. A military museum may be dedicated to a particular or area, such as the Imperial War Museum Duxford for military aircraft, Deutsches Panzermuseum for tanks, the Lange Max Museum for the Western Front, the International Spy Museum for espionage, The National World War I Museum for World War I, the "D-Day Paratroopers Historical Center" for WWII airborne, or more generalist, such as the Canadian War Museum or the Musée de l'Armée. For the Italian alpine wall one can find the most popular museum of bunkers in the small museum at Olang / Kronplatz in the heard of the dolomites of South Tyrol. The U.S. Army and the state National Guards operate 98 military history museums across the United States and three abroad.Curators debate how or whether the goal of providing diverse representations of war, in terms of positive and negative aspects of warfare. War is seldom presented as a good thing, but soldiers are heavily praised. David Lowenthal has observed that in today's museums, "nothing seems too horrendous to commemorate". Yet as Andrew Whitmarsh notes, "museums frequently portray a sanitised version of warfare." The actual bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan became the focus of an angry national controversy with veterans attacking curators and historians when the Smithsonian Institution planned to put its fuselage on public display in 1995. The uproar led to cancellation of the exhibit.
Early historians
The documentation of military history begins with the confrontation between Upper and Lower Egypt c. 3150 BC and Sumer and Elam c. 2700 BC near the modern Basra. The Egyptian military scribe Tjaneni recorded the Battle of Megiddo which is accepted as the first battle in relatively reliable detail. Military details are abundant in heroic epics, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Fall of Jericho and Conquest of Canaan, Trojan War in Homer's Iliad, and Mahabharata. More credible records of the Israelite military history from the conquest of Canaan to the defeats by the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires are in the Biblical historical books following the Book of Joshua.Next were The Histories by Herodotus who is often called the "father of history", and the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. Despite being an Athenian, Thucydides' impartiality allowed him to take advantage of his exile to research the war from different perspectives by carefully examining documents and interviewing eyewitnesses. An approach centered on the analysis of a leader was taken by Xenophon in Anabasis, recording the expedition of Cyrus the Younger into Anatolia. And Anabasis of Alexander described the expedition in the reverse direction. Greek historians of the 2nd century BC, such as Polybius, and later Roman historians, such as Sallust, Livy, Appian and Cassius Dio, wrote about wars of the rise of Rome to the primacy over the Mediterranean. The memoirs of the Roman Julius Caesar enable a comparative approach for campaigns such as Commentarii de Bello Gallico and Commentarii de Bello Civili.
East of the Mediterranean world, Arthashastra in India and The Art of War, The Book of Lord Shang, and less known but not less rich in military records Guanzi in China present strategic doctrines during the Axial Age. Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian and Han Fei Zi describe the Warring States of China and the former also its culmination in the Qin wars of unification.