The State of Military History?

O.K., this quote below sounds familiar doesn’t it? Many a conservative apologists have spewed something similar. So when do you think this article was written? I have provided the first page or so below. Please offer up a guess (NOTE: don’t bother doing a Google search by copying and pasting a sentence of two, it will not come up.)

During the past twenty-five years there has been a marked change in the content of the courses in history as given in our schools and colleges. One of the results of this change has been the almost complete elimination of the military phase. Whereas in former years the greater part of the course in American history, in the schools at least, consisted of rather detailed accounts of the wars in which our country had become engaged, in recent years these wars have been dealt with in such reduced form as to make them constitute only a very small part of the course. The fascinating accounts of Schenectady, Louisburg, Quebec, Saratoga, Yorktown, New Orleans, Chapultepec, Bull Run and Gettysburg that adorned the pages of our earlier text-books have disappeared altogether, and in their place we have a few brief statements outlining the different campaigns with little or nothing of incident or detail.

Political history, by the way, has been dealt with in the same summary fashion. We no longer proceed through the pages of our history by presidential administrations, noting in chronological order the events that occurred in each, whether they were of great importance or not. Indeed we have come to such a state as to ignore the existence of some of our worthy chief executives and to pass them over without even the mere mention of their names. A recent text-book for the seventh and eighth grades that has found ready favor fails to mention the names of four of our presidents. Such a thing as this would have been an impossibility when presidential administrations were mistaken as the indispensable mile-posts in American history, and when politics was given equal emphasis along with wars.

What has happened in American history has also happened in ancient, medieval and modern and English history. We no longer study at great length the Greco-Persian, the Peloponnesian, and the Punic wars. Neither do we go into detail concerning the Hundred Years War, the War of the Roses, the campaigns of Frederick the Great and of Napoleon, and the Franco-Prussian War. Marathon, Syracuse, Cannae, Crecy, Bosworth Field, Rossbach, Austerlitz, and Sedan take but little of our time, and have come to be scarcely more than mere names in a diminishing catalogue of military engagements that are still allowed to find a place in our text-books. Likewise we have discontinued to recount the personal deeds and exploits of kings and princes, and many of the heroes that once stood out very prominently in our earlier histories are now passed over in absolute silence. If we turn for an explanation for this tendency to eliminate the military and the political phases from our courses in history, we shall find it in the widespread desire to consider in some detail the social and the economic phases of history. We have lost interest in military and political strifes because we have become more concerned in finding out how men lived, what institutions they created and developed, and what ideals and motives controlled their actions. We have been pleased to let the common man crowd the ruler and the warrior off the stage of history in many of its scenes, and to make the conditions in which he lived the chief topic of our study in history.

This interest in the social and the economic phases of history that has arisen in recent times has been due primarily to the increasing interest that we have been taking in our present-day problems. Under the leadership of the sociologist, the economist, and the political scientist we have in the last few years thought more on the welfare of society than ever before. As a people we have been going through a process of socialization. It was therefore perfectly natural that our growing interest in the social and the economic conditions of to-day should react upon our interest in the past and should lead us to attempt to approach the past from the same point of view as that of the present. It is no wonder, therefore, that we shoved the purely military and political phases of history to one side and made room for these newer phases. Not to have done so would have left us out of harmony with ourselves.

In taking into account this shifting of interest from the military and the political to the social and the economic phases of history, we must not ignore the influence of the pacifist and the socialist. Their hatred of war and their repeated declarations and assurances prior to [date removed] that there would be no more [word removed] wars not only lulled us to sleep and made us feel secure against the probability of the renewal of war…