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19 Army Hist. 1 (1991)

handle is hein.milandgov/aryhsy0019 and id is 1 raw text is: A R MY HISTORY THE PROFESSIONAL BULLETIN OF ARMY HISTORY P120-91-3 (No. 19) Washington, D.C. Summer 1991 Military History and the Academic World Ronald It. Spector A nd this I write that young men may learn, if they should mcl wiith such tnals as we met with there, and vm not opportunity to ut off their enemies; yet they mnay. wih such pretty prank, presrve themce hmm danger or poicy Is needfu In wars as wel as Mrengtb' So wrote Lion Gardner Im his 1638 Hrory of he l'equor Wars, pertaps the earliest military his iry Wfrttefl in America. T'lw writing of military history thus has a long tr.Adilon in the United Staes, and soiC of the most iWisinguished American hsorians. from William H. Prescott to henry Adams to Samuel Eliot Monson have turned their hand to It. Yet it has not been an academic tradition. If we accept Walter Millis' ddeinit Lon of a military historian as ra technically trained rofesi a hi torian lwho1apphcsthe interessand techiques of the general historian to the study of warfare then it must be said that until the last three decades the academic historian of war hardly existed in the United States (1) I rom the emergence of moder historical research inAm rica, rund thelatc 188 ,tili the end o the iri World War, kt fthe seiots writingonmili- ur itor in heUnie Stae was the work of r fessonat officers such as Alfred Thayer Mahan, au- thor of the famous Infuence of Sea Power Up on History, and Emory Upton. an Army officer who completed the manuscript of his pioneering work, The Mihiary Policy of the UniedSurres, in 1881. In 1912 when the American Historical A'ssociation held a conference on military hisory in conjunction with its annual meeting, only two of the participants were pro..snal historians. (2) Far from stimula ting Amercan Iterest in military a t airs, World W ar 1 ledt o a widespread reaction in the 1920s and '30 against all things military. Duing this pXeriod historians whose specialties were in other areas nevertheless carried on a fair amount of research in military history. The American aHswrca Re'iw, t Ft example, carned fifteen artcle or notes on miiary history between 1920 and 1930 ard eighteen betw een 193O and 1941, a respectable number in a joumal in wh h somany fields are p tlrseed. A bout 6 perce of doctoral dissertations written in these two decades were also on military topics. Yet few professional historianscould or wished to concentrate primarily upon the history of war. Some of the most important work in the feld was, in tact done by persons without formal historical urdining. such as the journalist Walter Millis and the poical scienist Harold Sprout- In 1926 at the University of Chicago. scholars from a number of discipiines., mn eluding histry. cooperated in a massive study under the guidance of political scientist Quincy Wright on the causes of war. The Chicago project produced a large number of monographs, articles, and books ,ul minating in Wright's own work, A Study of War Although Wnght's study contained tnuch to interest hehistonian itwasin no.es hiry (3) Wrgh himself had Tittle use for milhuary history. which he bclie vedto be less hi. orical thant iein purpose and usually designed to assist the pn utioners of the art. (4) Like many academies of the 1920s and 30s. Wright believed that war in general could be under stood without detailed study of any particular war. During the inlerwar penod, officers-urned-histo- rians continued to provide much of what little military history was written in the Uited States Authors such as William A. Ganoe, John McAuley Paler, and Oliver L Spaulding, all frmier Regular officers. con- tri buted the first modern comprehensive instirutioak istories of the U.S. Army and of American military

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