Philosophical Historiography, Military History, and 2020s Crisis War

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Military Institutions, Weapons, and Social Change: Toward a New History ofMilitary Technology BARTON C. HACKER Why have we studied the history of military technology? The answer, I think, will do much to explain the current state of the field. Justifying study of the history of technology hardly seems necessary to readers of Technology and Culture, but why military technology? To that question my answer depends on a critical discussion of the traditional history of military technology, the first part of this essay. It will address what many have assumed to be the heart of military technological history— hardware studies. Not only do these go back a long way, they also in a real sense continue to define the field. But they have also long been contested, and I shall briefly discuss alternative approaches that pointed toward a new kind of military technological history before the Second World War. Although without immediate issue, they survived to inspire a later generation. I think another question—Why should we study the history of military technology?—is not only distinct but perhaps also more important. I will use it as the touchstone for my remarks on new developments and needed research, but first a word about the transformed study of history proper. In recent decades new approaches, new methods, new evidence have allowed historians to reclaim a broader range ofhuman experience than the older political-military history could encompass, to open new areas of study within, as well as outside, the Western tradition. Tradi­ tionalists remain skeptical, but the changes since World War II have been both profound and widespread.1 Military history and the history of technology also experienced a renaissance. The new history of military Dr. Hacker is historian at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. An earlier version of this article was prepared for the 1991 Madison, Wisconsin, SHOT/HSS Conference on Critical Problems and Research Frontiers in History of Technology and History of Science. 'See esp. Theodore S. Hamerow et al., “AHR Forum: The Old History and the New,” American Historical Review 94 (1989): 654-98. See also Peter Novick, That Noble. Dream: The “Objectivity Question’and theAmerican Historical Profession (NewYork, 1988); Eric Foner, ed., The New American History (Philadelphia, 1990).© 1994 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-l65X/94/3504-0005$01.00 768 Toward a New History ofMilitary Technology 769 technology drew on these vital changes, as it did on corresponding (and perhaps related) innovations in the social sciences and anthropology; these changes are the subject of the essay’s second section. In the final section I evaluate the achievements of this new history, discuss some recent trends, and offer a few suggestions about what still needs doing. Needless to say, I cannot hope to address every nuance of the field or cite every important study, but I will try to provide a framework for understanding the field’s current status and forjudging the directions it should take. Traditional Approaches Traditionally, the history of military technology shared the internalist viewpoint, the nuts-and-bolts approach favored by historians of technol­ ogy in general. Focused on the technology itself—weapons, accoutre­ ments, machinery, fortifications, all the physical relics of war making— the products range from the narrowest monographs to the broadest surveys. Such studies have a long history and still appear regularly without much reference to alternative approaches. Military technology seems persistendy to have fascinated Western minds since the Middle Ages, a curious preoccupation reflected in the long line of technical treatises devoted to, or prominently featuring, the tools of war, old and new, mundane and exotic.2 Intriguing hints suggest a parallel (though perhaps less fully developed) tradition in the Islamic world growing from the same roots. “Military engineering,” Donald Hill explained in 2For the narrowly military technological tradition, see E. A. Thompson, A Roman Reformer and Inventor (Oxford, 1952); A. Rupert Hall, “Guido’s Texaurus: 1335,” in On Pre-modem Technology and Science: A Volume ofStudies in Honor ofLynn White, jr., ed. Bert S. Hall and Delno C. West (Malibu, Calif., 1976), pp. 11-52; BertS. Hall, The Technological Illustrations ofthe So-called “Anonymous of the Hussite Wars’: Codex Latinus Monacensis, Part 1...

Wending Through the Way of War James Jay Carafano (bio) For starters, we ought to be speaking of "ways of wars." There is an underlying premise to this viewpoint for military history. How both state and non-state actors fight reflects their national character. Combatants enter conflict with assumptions, perceptions, and preferences that shape the way they intend to engage in warfare. These are shaped before the battle. They are unique to the competitor. They change over time. The three papers here argue for the utility of thinking about "ways of wars," though they all find problems with past efforts at mastering this approach. To me, weighing the good and the bad suggests at least three principles for applying the ways of wars perspective to the study of conflict. A first principle of war ways should be: think big and broadly. As Rob Citino points out, it would be too much to speak of the study of the ways of wars as a historiographical school. That said, what often purports to serve as the guiding idea for determining how militaries wage warfare looks mostly at doctrine and tradition. The more I study military history the more I have come to believe that that perspective is far too narrow. Click for larger view View full resolution From Berthold Laufer, Chinese Clay Figures: Prolegomena on the History of Defensive Armor, Part 1 (Field Museum of Natural History, 1914). The dynamic relationships between the civilian and military spheres of society can dramatically affect ways of going to war. This is not to suggest that New Military History is a good idea. In fact, I think that approach has turned into a historian's dead end. In 1991 Peter Paret heralded its arrival. "The New Military History," he wrote, "stands for an effort to integrate the study of military institutions and their actions more closely with other kinds of history." He saw it as a potent weapon that military historians could use to "fight the indifference or hostility of their colleagues on the one hand, and against the narrowness of much of military history on the other."1 Unfortunately, rather than enriching our understanding of warfare by studying issues of gender, culture, and social structures, it has for the most part done anything but. University departments continue to push military studies to the margin. Meanwhile, New Military History cranks out monographs that only tangentially inform our understanding of the conduct of warfare. New Military History's first cousin is national identity theory, which claims that cultural traits influence how nations act.2 Political scientists mimicked historians with their promises. The results, however, have generally been similar, with studies that tell us more about the authors' cultural assumptions and political and social axes to grind than how and why enemies confront one another. My favorite example is Natalie Bormann's National Missile Defense and the Politics of U.S. Identity: A Poststructural Critique (Manchester University Press, 2008). She starts out assuming that the desire for missile defenses is irrational. She dismisses all the feasibility and cost issues in two pages, citing only the opinions of outspoken missile defense critics. She then spends one hundred plus pages "creating" a national identity that explains why Americans would try doing something so stupid as to protect themselves from nuclear attack. If the study of ways of wars is going to better it will have to integrate the study of military operations [End Page 25] and activities with the wider world—not push them to the sidelines. This story can only be told by bringing together disparate brands of history that hardly ever get mentioned in the same breath: military history, the story of battle, blood, and bugles; the history of science and technology; and social, economic, business, cultural, and intellectual history, the exploration of how changes in beliefs and relationships among individuals and communities shape the way humans respond to the world around them. A second principle could be: don't think deterministically. No right thinking person would axiomatically assume that an economic historian would be the best person to give advice on a good 401K or predict the next move in the Dow Jones. Yet many, including...

In recent years, the environmental impact of warfare has made front-page news. Discussions about “ecocide”—a term first proposed in 1970 by Yale biologist Arthur W. Galston to describe the large-scale destruction of ecosystems during the Vietnam War—have come into the spotlight. The preparation and conduct of war, along with the social, economic, and scientific reorganisation that accompany it, offer rich topics for historians of science and technology interested in the environment. At the same time, since the turn of the 21st century, the study of war has emerged as a burgeoning subfield within environmental history. Edmund Russell's War and Nature (2001) inspired extensive scholarly research exploring the direct and indirect impact of military operations on the environment, as well as their legacies for human and non-human life. This review article focuses on how the development of the environmental history of war subfield has intersected with the history of science. First, it highlights how Russell's work has engaged audiences in both the history of science and the history of technology. In its early years, however, the field served as a bridge between environmental history and military history and delved into a classic theme of environmental history: conservation. Second, it discusses how studies on war and environment expanded beyond the battlefield to encompass militarised landscapes and the effects of military supply chains, among other topics. Third, it highlights how research on Cold War science provided a key site for intellectual exchange between environmental history of war and the history of science. Finally, it identifies several research avenues that could foster further collaboration between these fields, including: the concept of ecocide, the study of environmental infrastructure and envirotechnical objects, the epistemic foundations of military environmentalist discourses, and the significance of environmental data production and use in warfare.

Although it has been widely acknowledged that quite a high percentage of historical works in Taiwan contributed to the field of modern Chinese history, such understanding remains impressionistic. This paper gives a quantitative analysis in how such academic trend has emerged and changed over the years. The authors examines eight major historical journals, M.A. theses, and dissertations finished between 1945 and 2000 to see how the research trend has shifted during this period. The paper will, on the one hand, concentrate on describing the phenomenon in the field. It will also, on the other, analyze the distribution of works in each sub–field, e.g., econcmic history, political history, social history, etc. to compare with Works in Chinese history as a whole. The period between 1945 and 2000 can be divided into five time span s. In each of the five studies of modern Chinese history possesses the highest percentage among works in Chinese history. Moreover, there are more theses and dissertations than journal papers contributed to this field. By the fifth time span, however, the percentage of theses and dissertations contributed to modern Chinese history is close to that of journal papers. Of 627 theses and dissertations in this field 27.4% works on political and military history, 16.3% intellectual and cultural history, 15.6% international relationship, 14.5% social history, 13.2% economic history, 4.5% educational history, and less than 3% unidentifiable. The lowest percentage among the field are: institutional history (0.3%), history of science (0.5%), history of books (0.5%), art history (1.0%), historiography (1.9%). Of 1,010 journal papers on modern Chinese history, intellectual and cultural history possesses 30.8% of works, political and military history 28.2%, historiography 10.0%, international relationship 8.7%, economic history 8.7%, and social history 5.9%, unidentifiable less than 3.0%. The lowest percentage in the field are: history of women 0.5%, art history 0.6%, history of science (0.6%), history of books (0.6%), history of religion 1.3%.

Introduction - What is Military History - What is Political History - What is Economic History - What is Social History - What is the History of Science - What is Women's History - What is Diplomatic History - What is Religious History - What is Third World History - What is Intellectual History - What is the History of Art - What is the History of Popular Culture - What is European History - Bibliography - Index

N. F. Dubrovin’s research occupies one of the fundamental places in the formation of Russian military-historical Caucasian studies. It is on the works of N. F. Dubrovin that the official, “civilizing” history of the Caucasian War will be formed and spread. As one of his contemporaries will correctly write about him, “he, one might say, was the first, through the scientific development of archival documents that became available only to him (my italics), systematically described the wars: the Patriotic, Caucasian and Crimean, leaving at the same time a very noticeable trace in the description of the wars of Catherine’s reign” [49, p. 543]. Indeed, the thematic scope of Dubrovin’s works is extensive, and the corpus of documents from various depositories introduced by him into scientific circulation confirms the extensive opportunities provided to him as an official historian to work with the most important closed documents. Undoubtedly, N. Dubrovin holds a special place in the development of not only Caucasian studies, but also Russian history and archeography. An extensive list of his works can only cause respect and surprise to the creative potential of the author, who masterfully paid his debt to the Fatherland not with a bayonet, but with a pen. “The History of the war and the Rule of the Russians in the Caucasus” and “The Caucasian War” [35; 36]. N. F. Dubrovina are among the first official works in pre-revolutionary historical science with a systematic review of the annexation of the Caucasus to Russia. The publication of these publications was preceded by two monographs — “Transcaucasia from 1803 to 1806” and “George” [14; 15] and numerous articles by the author on Caucasian subjects. The first two “Georgian studies” monographs of Dubrovin are not considered at all as components of the above-mentioned “History of the War...”. Despite the fact that the publication of Dubrovin’s first work “Transcaucasia from 1803 to 1806” caused a great resonance in society and high ratings. In a brilliant review by E. Feoktistov, this work emphasized its importance for the history of coverage of “Russian domination in the Caucasus ...”. A high-ranking reviewer pointed to this work as the first result of the work being prepared by Mr. Dubrovin on the history of the Caucasus. [50, p. 354].

The published and unpublished scientific and journalistic works on the history of the World War II by the Odessa historian S. I.-Ya. Borovoy are considered in the article. An attempt was made to objectively analyze the data of scientific works, their significance for studying the history of the World War II, to identify positive and negative sides in them in the context of the development of Soviet historical science, to understand their historiographic and methodological value, influence on modern historical science and the current perception of the events of the World War II. The result of the active participation of S. I.-Ya. Borovoy in the scientific and organizational work on the study of the history of the World War II was the publication of his works, which were defined as a task of national importance, as evidenced by the fact that the work of the scientist was carried out on the basis of a special government decision to create Commissions on the history of the Great Patriotic War at the union, republican, regional and district levels with the support of the relevant levels of the Communist Party, which determined their activities political and ideological orientation. His first articles were written on the basis of collected materials, documents, testimonies of eyewitnesses and participants in the events. The content of these articles was aimed at raising the mass consciousness of society, which contributed to the manifestation of the patriotic spirit in the course of a fierce confrontation, the willingness to endure everyday hardships in order to protect the country, to sacrifice personal interests in the name of preserving and strengthening statehood. Particular attention was paid to the heroic struggle of the Soviet people at the front, in the ranks of the partisan movement, and selfless labor in the rear. The decisive importance of the activities of the Communist Party as a leading, inspiring force was constantly emphasized, which led to the formation of the fundamental ideological orientation of the Soviet era. The vices of ideological content in the works of S. I.-Ya. Borovoy were caused by the political situation that took place in the life of Soviet society, in particular in the studies of historians.

The subject of the article is the phenomenon of the falsification of the history of World War II in the political discourse of Western countries from 2023 to 2025, where the key role of the Soviet Union in the victory over Nazi Germany and militarist Japan is called into question. The article analyzes: the content of the official website of the U.S. Department of Defense regarding the origins, course, and outcomes of World War II; speech by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on the atomic bombings of Japan; the European Commission's position on the liberators of Auschwitz; the fabrication of former US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken about the attitude of the USSR and Russia to the tragedy at Babyn Yar; statements by former Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin and former U.S. President Joe Biden about the Allied landing in Normandy; and statements by current U.S. President Donald Trump regarding the winners of World War II. The research method employed in the article involves examining the phenomenon of the falsification of World War II history in Western political narratives from 2023 to 2025, which exclude the Soviet Union from the list of victorious countries, by comparing these narratives with historical facts based on the principles of holistic knowledge. The article makes a historical-political conclusion: Western politicians falsify the history of World War II deliberately, as it aligns with Western strategic interests regarding Russia and the world; therefore, for Russia to advance historical truth on the international stage, a systematic, comprehensive, and persuasive transmission of reliable knowledge about the key role of the Soviet Union in the victory in World War II, with an accurate assessment of the dangers of historical fabrications, is necessary. The conclusion emphasizes that truthful and holistic knowledge of the history of World War II will help strengthen the spirit of global cooperation among states in countering the resurgence and spread of Nazi and nationalist tendencies in global politics. The article also presents a philosophical-historical conclusion: preventing the falsification of history in science and education is possible through the theoretical and practical development and application of a holistic methodology of historical research, based on the principles of Vladimir Solovyov's philosophy of unity and Ken Wilber's integral approach, which will elevate historical research, education, and enlightenment to a qualitatively new level.

Historians have long recognized Matthew Fontaine Maury as an important if controversial figure in the histories of science and of maritime and naval affairs. These assessments, however, rest on scholarship that is by now more than a half-century old. It is therefore appropriate to look at Maury’s significance from fresh perspectives, incorporating recent historiographical trends in the history of science and cartography, environmental history, cultural history and military history. This article focuses on the ways in which Maury’s cartographic work reframed mariners’ understanding of the marine environment away from what he perceived to be a watery wilderness towards an ordered environment safe and favourable to American commerce. Maury was long known as ‘The Pathfinder of the Seas’, but I argue that his significance, in fact, lies in the ways he and his staff at the Naval Observatory organized the sea as a ‘common highway’, tracing paths, but also imposing narratives and constructing new meanings. Maury’s tool was the nautical chart and, particularly, his Wind and Current Charts series that by the 1850s reimagined the ways mariners, navigators and naval officers understood and harnessed the ocean environment. The article briefly considers these charts from three perspectives – method, process and representation – in order to see the ways in which Maury was pushing the boundaries of the cartographic medium to usher in revolutionary ways of envisioning the ocean environment. By quantifying winds, symbolizing whales and infusing the sea with ship tracks, among other things, Maury was imposing potent, if sometimes flawed, new ways of understanding and imagining the sea that were central to American maritime expansion in the antebellum era. In this and other ways, we can see Maury anew, a figure central to the growth of American commercial empire and to new ways of understanding and thinking about the sea.

Karen Masterson appraises the disease vector’s role in scientific and military history. Karen Masterson appraises the disease vector’s role in scientific and military history.

The article analyzes various methodological approaches and theoretical strategies applied to the study and understanding of the phenomenon of the 20th century. Realizing the breadth and semantic richness of the historical narrative of the past century, its multi-level temporal integrity, the author proposes following the logic of selectivity, focusing on the most significant events, trends, and processes. This focus on “significance” means that historical science remains true to its great humanistic ideals, striving to be a "teacher of life" and participate in the absorption of the most valuable experience of the past in order to apply it in the search for answers to the challenges of the future. Such nodal subjects of historiography should include demographic, economic, social, intellectual, cultural, military history, the history of everyday life of the 20th century. The author of the article notes that, summing up the results of the twentieth century, most historians proceed from the idea of the exhaustion of the Eurocentric approach to historiography. There is no doubt that all parts of the world and all peoples participated equally in the history of the 20th century, and therefore a retrospective view of the past century is possible only from the perspective of global history. The article notes that it is impossible to ignore the substantial contribution made to the understanding of global processes and relationships by numerous subdisciplines of history, such as the history of empires, history of international relations and organizations, urban history and the history of urbanization, history of finance, climate history, etc. The author notes that current perceptions of the 20th century are marked by massivization and commercialization. Their content is formed not only by the need to find historical truth, but also by the desire to hold the attention of the readership. More and more historical books today are written on the order of book publishers, which are guided by the demand of the reading public. The modern information society has created new challenges for historical science, but at the same time it has created new channels of communication between the historical science and society, scholars and authorities, intellectual and mass culture, individual and collective representations. The rapid increase in the volume of information, the development of mass media, the emergence of the Internet, and new means of communication in a certain sense led to the medialization and virtualization of historical knowledge. On the other hand, the vast information field has become a fertile ground for the cultivation and dissemination of historical рmyths, often archaic and primitive.

Reviewed by: Historia y Globalización: VIII Conversaciones Internacionales de Historia ed. by Francisco Javier Caspistegui Felipe Fernández-Armesto Historia y Globalización: VIII Conversaciones Internacionales de Historia. Edited by Francisco Javier Caspistegui. Pamplona: EUNSA, 2012. 328pp. $25.00 (paper). In his contribution to this collection from a gathering at the Universidad de Navarra in 2010, Jerry Bentley promises (p. 254) to go “beyond” the work of “philosophers and political theorists” to the importance of the everyday. This proposal alone makes his paper different from most other offerings in the volume, where the level of analysis is generally so high as to lose sight of real life. The occasion of the meeting was the seventh in a series called “International Conversations on History,” though the format seems to have consisted in a conventional exchange of papers: No procès-verbal is included in the volume, and there is no other hint of any conversation. The editor, Francisco Javier Caspistegui, should be congratulated on keeping contributors to the themes of “history and globalization” but not—as usual with such more or less random assemblages of texts—on getting them all to agree on what the title of the collection means, or what its remit should be, or almost anything else. Caspistegui’s introduction strikes an unpromising note. He refers to macrohistory, world history, global history, and the history of globalization without seeming sure about how or whether to distinguish them, or how to tell macrohistory from metahistory (he refers to Hayden White as if he were an adversary of the former). He falls back on an awkward formulation: “historia mundial/global” (p. 30) while insisting that global history must concern recent or current events (p. 17). Bruce Mazlish wielded the term “New Global History” to mean history of globalization, and at one time the World History Association explicitly excluded it from its remit (I hope the old disclaimer no longer appears on the association’s website). But few practitioners of global history accept limitation to the recent past or to the process of globalization, the Journal of Global History ignores it, and, in any case, globalization is an unhelpfully flabby concept, oozing obesely at edges so contested that it seems unhelpful to invoke it—a canard that needs to be canned, like confit, in its own fat. What some colleagues in the global history movement valorously try to do—to see the history of the world conspectually and seek to identify and understand what has happened all over the planet, or over almost all of it—does not seem to have occurred to Caspistegui or any of his contributors as part of their subject. The editor’s understanding seems excessively selective in other ways. Marxist historiography does not merit a mention. The exponents of Big History and Deep History [End Page 648] (in the sense popularized by Dan Smail and Andrew Shryock) get no mention. Caspistegui proposes “problems and questions around macro-history” as his theme, but they boil down to whether current work on “historia mundial/global” had precedents and whether it is practicable. On the former question, he is again selective to the point of misrepresentation, looking at no possible precedent earlier than Kant and omitting most of the fields in which scholars have tried to take in the whole planet, such as environmental history, art history, history of science, history of manners, history of religion, history of the body, maritime history, history of war, and history of material culture. The second question hardly seems worth asking any longer. We can embrace the globe in our work. Si monumentum requiris . . . Most of the rest of the book is equally disappointing. Alejandro Navas sets himself the task of analyzing the texts of thirty modern authors who have attempted to describe society globally or identify what is global about it, but then apparently forgets to mention any of them again. In a puzzling paper supposedly on “consequences and preludes” (of what is never clear), Frank Ankersmit assures us—I suspect, to widespread demurs—that we are in the grip of anxiety about a recurrence of “una catástrofe como el Holocausto” (p. 69). He asserts that historical writing and “conciencia...

In the recent years, historical science has increased interest in anthropological, social, cultural aspects of the war in general, the Great Patriotic War - in particular.
 The existential experience of man in war is a topic that allows researchers to look at the history of war from the standpoint of the humanitarian component. The article notes the role of diaries as sources of information about personal experiences, which after a certain understanding become an existential experience. The uniqueness of diary entries, which differ from other sources of personal origin - memories and front-line letters, is pointed out. First, they capture the momentary perception of events, undistorted by time; secondly, they accurately convey the atmosphere of the era through the description of life, nature, minutes of rest. The conclusion is made about the huge potential of front-line diaries as sources of studying the events of the Great Patriotic War.
 The article analyzes the existential experience of Lieutenant Z.S. Rudnitsky, generated by the extreme conditions of the war. The source of the study was the front diary of Z.S. Rudnitsky, previously unknown to researchers. The influence of the emotions experienced, the situation of mortal danger, the immediate environment on the formation of the identity of the officer of the Red Army and his fate is considered.