The Role Of Military History In The Contemporary Academy

SMH works assiduously to bring military history to a broad audience both within and outside the academy and is expanding its role in the broader historical community through alliances with other professional organizations. The Journal of Military History, SMH’s the quarterly journal, is the preeminent scholarly publication in the field of military history. The journal has published scholarly articles on the military history of all eras and all geographical areas since 1937.

The prize recognizes outstanding essays that use rigorous academic historical study to understand issues relevant to current policymakers. Rob Citino and Tami Davis Biddle, first appeared in print in November 2014 under the auspices of the Society for Military History. Its purpose was to generate discussion of the key role that military history should play within college and university history instruction. Tami Davis Biddle’s views are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Army, Department of Defense, or US Government. The program committee will consider proposals on all aspects of military history, especially encouraging submissions that reflect on this year’s theme,Landscapes of War and Peace. We were established in 1983 as a member-based, charitable 501 nonprofit organization.

Please be patient as it will take some time for Matt to process the refunds. I don’t think it is news to you that the conference was hanging by a thread, with conditions worsening on a daily basis. States have turned the recent CDC recommendations on limiting group gatherings to 50 persons or less for eight weeks into mandates, along with closing bars, restaurants, and other non-essential businesses. My email to the governor of Pennsylvania that liquor stores ought to be considered essential businesses has yet to be answered.

The cross-fertilization in these realms has been extensive in recent years, and each one has influenced the others in salutary ways. Stimulate and advance the study of military history, especially that of the United States of America and to diffuse knowledge thereof by publications, displays and otherwise. A couple colleagues and I are trying to put together a panel proposal for the 2019 Society for Military History conference on either military deception or intelligence and information in World War I. At this point, we have a chair/discussant and two papers. My paper reassesses the deception and security efforts by the American Expeditionary Forces and the French in support of the St. Mihiel Offensive in the light of deception theory. The Society for Military History and the CSIS Project on History and Strategy are pleased to announce the annual Graduate Student Prize in Applied Military History for 2020.

Wariness towards the field persists despite its evolution in recent decades. Other historians—for instance those who study slavery, or the history of Native Peoples, or the dictatorship of Josef Stalin—work in fraught spaces without finding themselves the object of suspicion or stereotype. Part of the problem stems from the way that military history is, and has been, identified and categorized inside American popular culture. In addition, combat sheds light on the civil-military relationship within states, and the way that societies are able to leverage technology by setting up organizations and processes to take advantage of it. What happens on the battlefield also influences, and sometimes crafts, key social and political narratives. For instance, the tactical and operational reasons for stalemate on the Western Front matter precisely because this stalemate shaped the human experience of the war, burdened its settlement, and shaped its legacy.

The Program Committee will organize panels from excellent individualpapersubmissions.Posterswill be presented in a separate poster session during the conference. Students whose submissions have been rejected in the regular CFP are welcome to re-apply for the Young Scholars Sessions. Thanks to the National Defense University’s Joint Forces Staff College , your source for joint professional military education, for hosting this year’s conference. The Society for Military History annual meeting is happening in Norfolk, VA from May.The Society will hold a Live or in-person meeting at the Hilton Main on Main Street, Norfolk and will provide a virtual link to registrants who cannot attend due to COVID concerns or travel restrictions. In addition, civilians need to understand how consistently and tirelessly one must work to align means and ends in war.

Indeed, many of our young people have no idea of how the US military came to exist in its present form, what tasks it has been called upon to carry out in the past , and what tasks it may be called upon to carry out in the future. Popular television also complicates the lives of academic military historians. “Info-tainment” via commercial media shapes ideas about what military history is, and how its practitioners allocate their time and energy. The academic subfield struggles also to free itself from association with popular writing and popular film that grasps too readily at “great man” theories, triumphalism, nationalism, gauzy sentimentality, or superficial tales of derring do. We face a suspicion that those drawn to the field are mesmerized by the whiz-bang quality of arms technology, or the pure drama of organized violence.

The stalemate also changed the way that European power was understood and interpreted by those peoples under the yoke of European colonialism in the early part of the 20th century. Some of it will cover esoteric topics that appeal to those with highly particularized interests, such as military uniforms, weapons types, or aircraft markings. Popular military history varies immensely in quality, and there is a great gulf between the best and the worst it has to offer. Outside the subfield, all this work tends to be lumped together, however, and academics with little exposure to serious scholarship in the field may assume that it is a discipline defined by the weaker side of the spectrum. The members of the Society for Military History have a broad and inclusive sense of our work and our educational mission. Our mission encompasses not only traditional studies of battles, but also of war and public memory.

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