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IN times past, it was common to punish the bearer of bad news and reward the courier who brought good tidings, as if the messenger was responsible for what he or she reported. Since these pages bring both bad news and good, everything should balance out here, and neither punishment nor reward are expected. The message is, in short, that the future of academic military history is bound to be embattled, but it can survive through a creative adaptation to the best of recent historical currents.
Notice that the stress here is on academic military history, for there is more than one genre in our field, and these remarks apply only to the academic variety. Academic military history has special parameters and problems. Its primary goal is not practical in any immediate sense; rather it is to achieve, or at least to strive for, an understanding of the past as a value unto itself-a goal shared with the entire historical profession. And, critically, all but a few who write academic military history work within colleges and universities, where, at this time we face an increasingly hostile environment. This article addresses that hostile environment and ultimately our continued existence within the academy, so the subject here is both ideas and jobs.
But, you might ask, has not academic military history enjoyed a period of unprecedented growth? Mac Coffman traced the development of military history through most of the twentieth century-its rise, so to speak. Mac's consideration essentially breaks off when things seemed to be going well, so well that Paul Kennedy made what seem now to be foolishly optimistic predictions in a 1991 article.1 There Kennedy foresaw such demand for military historians within academic departments, that we would be unable to produce enough qualified graduate students to match it. Fate seemed to be smiling on us not too long ago: the Regius professorship at Oxford went to a military historian, Michael Howard; Yale, the top-rated history department in the U.S., created a chair in the field; the established program at Duke/University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill expanded and new ones emerged at the University of Illinois and at Alabama; and the field witnessed the birth of three new journals to join the revitalized Journal of Military History-War...