View from the Ranks: Social and Cultural History of the American Armed Forces

Abstract

Military historians have begun to draw freely from the methods and interpretive frameworks of social and cultural history to learn more about the American military past. As a consequence, teachers no longer must rely solely on confusing maps marked in profusion with blue and red rectangles and squiggly arrows to teach about the nation's major armed conflicts. While this “moving block” method for teaching about campaigns and generals always will prove useful, a shift in focus to the individuals comprising those blocks—a “war and society” approach that occasionally is still called “the new military history”—offers a particularly compelling way for students to learn about the millions who served in the ranks of all the American armed forces during eras of both war and peace. Eschewing the well-blazed path of traditional institutional studies that emphasize units, doctrine, armament and equipment, battles, and leadership, many recent works about the American armed...