In 2001, after four years being a college dropout we went back to school.
Rather than return to our former university we did something which in 2001 was entirely new. We went to school online. We enrolled in American Military University (now American Public University). This wasn't a college in the traditional sense, which we didn't want to do (and will never to again for any reason whatsoever) and we could study military history.
Online school in 2001 was a radical idea. How radical? Napster was still a thing. We completed our BA on a dial-up modem.
In our case we majored in Land Warfare.
That first semester these included:
-Introduction to Military History
-Ancient Warfare
-Medieval Warfare
We studied the wars of the Egyptians, the Ancient Greeks and Romans and Alexander, William the Conqueror, the Swiss Pikes, and on and on. It was fun.
In the second semester we took Gunpowder Warfare.This meant a lot of Marlborough and Napoleon. We also took The Wars of the Ancient Greeks. Of course we took German Military History. This started with Frederick the Great, the Prussians vs Napoleon, Moltke and the General Staff, and the World Wars.
We were also lucky enough to do a couple of independent studies, one exclusivity on Medieval Warfare that produced a 15,000 word paper that we will publish next year.
One winter morning in 2002 Professor Brian Todd Carey gave me an 'A' on my paper and suggested I submit it to a history magazine.
We've been submitting ever since.
William Stroock (as in Stroock's Books)
Showing posts with label Military History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Military History. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Monday, October 30, 2017
Our Path to Military History
We've always liked military history.
We suppose we started leaning it at an early age by watching war movies on NY area channels 5, 9 and 11 which showed them every weekend.
We learned more military history by getting into tabletop war games.
By the time we were starting to flunk out of college about 1995 we expressed an interest in studying the subject for real.
In response our grandfather got us these three books:
Those are JFC Fuller's classic Military History of the Western World Vols I, II &III. They served as a decent enough introduction during the summer of 1995.
Now, precipitously we interned at the US Senate that summer and discovered Borders Books and Music. Hard as it is to believe, 40 minutes north of New York City the only book stores we had were B Daulton and Walden Books at the Jefferson Valley Mall.
But at Borders, well, we'd never seen so many military history books in our life. The MH section must have had a thousand titles.
From then on we were hooked and spent the next several years reading up on World War Two, the wars of the British Empire, the Napoleonic Wars, etc. Napoleon was particularly fun as being a Yank, we know nothing of the 25 year struggle with France.
Our biggest problem back then was time. When to find time to read the dozens of books we wanted to read? Eventually we learned to turn off the TV and put down the video game controller. But at first we simply read at bed time, as we always had.
As we dropped out of college and had trouble finding work we had more time on our hands, unfortunately. So we read a lot of military history.
A few years later military history would change out life.
We suppose we started leaning it at an early age by watching war movies on NY area channels 5, 9 and 11 which showed them every weekend.
We learned more military history by getting into tabletop war games.
By the time we were starting to flunk out of college about 1995 we expressed an interest in studying the subject for real.
In response our grandfather got us these three books:
Those are JFC Fuller's classic Military History of the Western World Vols I, II &III. They served as a decent enough introduction during the summer of 1995.
Now, precipitously we interned at the US Senate that summer and discovered Borders Books and Music. Hard as it is to believe, 40 minutes north of New York City the only book stores we had were B Daulton and Walden Books at the Jefferson Valley Mall.
But at Borders, well, we'd never seen so many military history books in our life. The MH section must have had a thousand titles.
From then on we were hooked and spent the next several years reading up on World War Two, the wars of the British Empire, the Napoleonic Wars, etc. Napoleon was particularly fun as being a Yank, we know nothing of the 25 year struggle with France.
Our biggest problem back then was time. When to find time to read the dozens of books we wanted to read? Eventually we learned to turn off the TV and put down the video game controller. But at first we simply read at bed time, as we always had.
As we dropped out of college and had trouble finding work we had more time on our hands, unfortunately. So we read a lot of military history.
A few years later military history would change out life.
Sunday, October 29, 2017
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:
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.
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.
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