the suck at teaching regular history/revisionist history... i can't imagine what they'd do to Military history.
Posted on 04/30/2008 1:20:01 PM PDT by Braak
Five years into the war in Iraq, military history seems to be experiencing a golden age. Hollywood has been cranking out war movies. Publishers have been lining bookstore shelves with new battle tomes, which consumers are eagerly lapping up.
Even the critics have been enjoying themselves. Two of the last five Pulitzer Prizes in history were awarded to books about the American military. Four of the five Oscar nominees for best documentary this year were about warfare. Business, for military historians, is good.
(Excerpt) Read more at spotlight.encarta.msn.com ...
May be the right Reverend Wright can teach a course on terroristic activities perpetrated by our military. I’m sure someone will.
The same reason that patriotic Americans are few and far between in the State Department.
I went to Ole Miss which didn’t have a lot of popular military history but when I was there they had a great class on the Civil War taught by a conservative named James J. Cooke.
Additionally, the University of Southern Mississippi has the best military history program in the state. I have sat in on a few of their classes and the ones I attended they brought in veterans to tell their stories. The class I attended on Vietnam was very anti-communist and pro American soldier.
Perhaps Yale really doesn't care to have somebody on the faculty that knows and teaches the truth about the positive aspects of America?
The only practical way of teaching military history in most universities is an endowed chair and under strict rules.
An endowed chair is a bequest to a university, most likely of a million dollars or more, conditional on that university either assigning a professor, or specifically hiring a professor, to teach a narrow subject in a given department.
Importantly, universities don’t like endowed chairs, much preferring general endowments that they can spend any way they like. So any more, endowed chairs have to be created by a very hard nosed lawyer with an eye for detail.
A controversial chair, like military history, would be strongly opposed by liberal and leftist academicians on principle, unless one of their number won the chair, and could corrupt it into an “anti-military history” course.
Therefore, chairs also have to have rules as to who can be assigned them. For example, to a PhD who has previously held above a certain rank in the military on active duty.
They would also have to have tenure, so could not be threatened with a denial of tenure if they didn’t corrupt the course.
It is a good question how detailed the requirements of a chair could be, and how strict the auditing of the chair could be mandated. Most likely providing the endowment in annual portions instead of as a lump sum.
Chairs would have to be specifically “teaching” chair, not research chairs, and parameters to military history classes would also have to be measured.
However, if done with some degree of caution, such classes are very popular and well worth the money spent on the endowment.
But as other posters noted, the very field is antithetical to the "race/sex/class" orientation of most schools.
I have over a shelf full of the books, and they have provided me with not only hours of fascination, but an insight into the differences between the early AF, '80s AF, and today's AF.
/johnny
Not to worry, once in office, President B. (whose middle name must NEVER be spoken) Obama will push “BLACK LIBERATION THEOLOGY” as mandatory schooling instead.
There are hard prerequisites as well that students are less well acquainted with these days. One cannot understand the events of the Thirty Years' War outside of the context of the Holy Roman Empire, the history of the French Kings, and the Reformation, each of which constitutes an enormous educational undertaking of its own. That pushes the emphasis further on in the curriculum pipeline, which means that it is more specialized and studied by fewer students.
But it isn't likely to die out, because it's fun. And the very essence of a university is that one cranky old professor who carries on with an unfashionable topic, keeping the fire lit until a better day.
This wasn’t a problem at Gettysburg College.
But they have mostly been revisionist crap, Like Pearl Harbor, Platoon, Three Kings etc
Cause it's Icky? Besides too many in the Academy "loathe the military", most especially those who have been around since 1968 or a bit before.
Good for you. Check out my book, “America’s Victories: Why the U.S. Wins Wars and Will Win the War on Terror.”
H. Beam Piper, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen
Another fight like this.........., “The Kings War”, after H Beam Piper.
I had just started my master’s program many years ago, when a feminist jewish professor looked at me and said “I don’t want any military subjects!” How did she know? LOL
the suck at teaching regular history/revisionist history... i can't imagine what they'd do to Military history.
My personal opinion of academia and military history was secured when I was signing up for History 10 (required course in my major that I knew was going to be trouble when we had to use the MARXIST dialectic to analyze the plight of 19th Century female factory workers in New England). She asked what kind of history I was into, I said I was a military historian by predilection, she laughed and said "good god, get with the times..war is so over." (this was 2000, I had the last word a year later).
I appreciate the work you do.
I had some great professors in college. Most were lefties, but they tried to get the full story out there.
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