World War I and Federal Military History

Abstract

AMERICANS HAVE WRITTEN military memoirs, autobiographies, historical reports, and histories for more than two hundred years, but the establishment of military historical offices is a relatively recent development. Between the Civil War and World War I, the rise of the American historical profession and the U.S. military officers' recognition of the usefulness of historical studies for their profession provided a fertile environment for the first steps in this direction. The United States's declaration of war in 1917 was an important additional catalyst for the creation of these offices. The relations between federal military history and its consumers were reciprocal from an early date. To judge the production and varieties of federal military history by its current use is deceptive. Justifications of the government's increasingly complex military history programs come from civilian and military officials who desire not only to learn from the successes and failures of the past but also to promote the heritage of their favorite service. It is not widely acknowledged that the civilian scholarly community repeatedly urged the military to collect and utilize the historical records of their own profession. That all of the armed services history offices now fully embrace this philosophy is significant as a sign of the times and for the coming of age of history in a military environment. Modern military history offices in the United States have two principal sources. One may be found in the popular demand for publication of historical documents and records drawn from government military archives. This was related to the lack of accessibility of these records before the founding of the National Archives. The State Department provided an early precedent when Secretary of State William H. Seward began to