Wither Military History

National Review tells us military history is in big trouble and goes into detail about the University of Wisconsin's vacant military history chair:

One of these years, perhaps Wisconsin really will get around to hiring a professor for the Ambrose-Heseltine chair — but right now, for all intents and purposes, military history in Madison is dead. It’s dead at many other top colleges and universities as well. Where it isn’t dead and buried, it’s either dying or under siege. Although military history remains incredibly popular among students who fill lecture halls to learn about Saratoga and Iwo Jima and among readers who buy piles of books on Gettysburg and D-Day, on campus it’s making a last stand against the shock troops of political correctness. “Pretty soon, it may become virtually impossible to find military-history professors who study war with the aim of understanding why one side won and the other side lost,” says Frederick Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who taught at West Point for ten years. That’s bad news not only for those with direct ties to this academic sub-discipline, but also for Americans generally, who may find that their collective understanding of past military operations falls short of what the war-torn present demands.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/218838/sounding-taps-john-j-miller

Tell us about it.

Back during our professorial days we worked a lot of military history into World Civ. Students learned about the Persian Wars and Alexander, the Punic Wars, Hastings...We spent one day on WWII in Europe and another on WWII in the Pacific.

When our professorial career blew up the department at Raritan Valley Community College said we were teaching too much military history. Well they probably shouldn't have hired a military historian.

Yeah, the subject is interesting and fun and students really payed attention. Who would want that?

We fell into the field more or less on accident, but were probably destined to study it. We'll go into more detail on that later in the week.