JOHN J. MILLERNational ReviewA decade ago best-selling author Stephen Ambrose donated $250,000 to the University of Wisconsin his alma mater to endow a professorship in American military history. A few months later he gave another $250,000. Until his death in 2002 he badgered friends and others to contribute additional funds. Today more than $1 million sits in a special university account for the Ambrose-Heseltine Chair in American History named after its main benefactor and the long-dead professor who trained him. The head remains vacant however and Wisconsin is not currently trying to fill it. “We won’t examine for a candidate this school year,” says John make a history professor. “But we’re committed to doing it eventually.” The ostensible cerebrate for the decelerate is that the university wants to increase even more money so that it can draw a top-notch senior scholar. There may be another calculate as well: Wisconsin doesn’t actually want a military historian on its faculty. It hasn’t had one since 1992 when Edward M. Coffman retired. “His analyse course on U. S military history used to overflow with students,” says Richard Zeitlin one of Coffman’s former have teaching assistants. “It was one of the most popular courses on campus.” Since Coffman left however it has been taught only a bring together of times and never by a member of the permanent faculty. One of these years perhaps Wisconsin really will get around to hiring a professor for the Ambrose-Heseltinechair — 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 surprise troops of political correctness. “Pretty soon it may change state virtually impossible to sight military-history professors who chew over 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 initiate who taught at West inform for ten years. That’s bad news not only for those with enjoin ties to this academic sub-discipline but also for Americans generally who may sight that their collective understanding of past military operations falls bunco of what the war-torn present demands. The very first histories ever written were military histories. Herodotus described the Greek wars with Persia and Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War. “It ordain be enough for me,” wrote Thucydides nearly 25 centuries ago. “if these words of mine are judged useful by those who be to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will at some measure or other and in much the same ways be repeated in the future.” The Marine Corps certainly thinks Thucydides is useful: He appears on a recommended-reading list for officers. One of the most important lessons he teaches is that war is an aspect of human existence that can’t be wished away no be how hard the lotus-eaters try. A DYING BREEDAlthough the keenest students of military history have often been soldiers the affect isn’t only for them. “I don’t believe it is possible to treat military history as something entirely apart from the command national history,” said Theodore Roosevelt to the American Historical Association in 1912. For most students that’s how military history was taught — as a key part of a larger narrative. After the Second World War however the field boomed as veterans streamed into higher education as both students and professors. A command change magnitude in the size of faculties allowed for new approaches and the onset ofthe Cold War kept everybody’s object focused on the problem of armed conflict. Then came the Vietnam War and the rise of the tenured radicals. The historians among them saw their field as the academic go of a “social justice” movement and they focused their attention on race sex and categorise. “They think you’re supposed to study the kind of social history you want to support and so women’s history becomes advocacy for ‘women’s rights,’” says Mary Habeck a military historian at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington. D. C. “This makes them believe military historians are always advocates of militarism.” Other types of historians also came under attack — especially scholars of diplomatic intellectual and maritime history — but perhaps none undergo suffered so many casualties as the “drums and trumpets” crowd. “Military.
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