Military History and Related Matters

by Cliopatria

Over at Open University, they've been holding a symposium on the subject broached by Mark Grimsley's rebuke to National Review's John Miller: military history and the academy. There are contributions by David Greenberg, David Bell, Greenberg, Michael Kazin, and Eric Rauchway.

Those of you who teach World History in ten weeks may find Maps of War's 90 second history of the middle east useful for covering lots of material briefly. And, on the contemporary front, our colleague, Chris Bray, breaks two months of silence to poke his sardonic head up out of his fox-hole in Kuwait with a couple of observations from those who are currently blessing the middle east with the American dream.

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Kurt Niehaus - 10/9/2006

And one could continue about the losses, shortcomings, and over- foci. However, for a brief start (say 90 seconds) it is fun; and for the everday person, it might help put things into perspective. (I am constantly picking on my friends fo knowing a lot about individual moments in history, say the French Revolution, and not knowing where it fits in with everything else (US Rev, Napoleon, War of 1812, for example))

Ralph E. Luker - 10/7/2006

Of course. I think it's only fun. It does help to make the point that compression in history necessarily means the loss of detail, even major detail, loss of nuance, even major nuance, loss of substance, even major substance.

Ben W. Brumfield - 10/6/2006

It's fun, but it's shockingly inadequate -- presenting a picture of ancient near eastern history that might have been painted in 1800, informed only by the synthesis of the Bible and a smidgen of the Classics.

Look at Mesopotamia: Where's Sumer, or Akkad, or Ur III, or the Kassites or Amorites?

Where are the Elamite kingdoms, the Mittanni, Ebla, Ugarit, or any of the complex kingdoms and city-states that predate the dark ages of 1200? Where is Crete? Where is the Delian League?

It's probably worth studying for the sake of the historiography, however, as well as how to lie with maps. Look at how the kingdom of Israel carves itself out of an Egyptian empire that was apparently unaffected by the catastrophe of 1200. In fact, the only suggestion of the catastrophe and the onset of a new dark age is the disappearance of the Hittites. Empires don't fall apart in this video, they are consumed by younger, more vigorous empires. Furthermore, their post-expansion boundaries remain fixed in time until they are superseded by a successor state.

Yuck.

Jonathan Dresner - 10/6/2006

It was fun. I'll have to share it with my World History students.

Kurt Niehaus - 10/6/2006

Thanks for posting interesting finds like this, Ralph. I likely never would have seen it otherwise.