Historiography and Military History

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the idea of justification for the notion that military history may in fact be a genre of the discipline of history in its own right. The author finds that there is certainly a lexicon of expressions, terminology and acronyms unique to its study and writing. He sees that military history is unique on many levels, and there are some curious aspects and juxtapositions within the genre that seem to defy the rules of historical scholarship that are applied elsewhere within the history discipline. It is a genre that seems to cross historiographical boundaries and be bound only to its own set of rules and regulations.

From the Paper:

"There is also some level of expected knowledge in much of it, for instance a given familiarity of the grand naval strategy ideas of Alfred Thayer Mahan and Sir Julian Corbett in works of naval history. Overall it also seems expected that one will have read and digested Von Clausewitz (and to have had curiosity to reach back further and read Jomini) as a prelude to any military history written after the 1850s. There certainly seems to be some higher levels of "given" knowledge than in other sub-disciplines of history. There is also perhaps another perception - that much of what is written as military history is simply categorizing under accepted and rigid categories of the genre. A perception that analysis only goes as deep as the last great analysis of a particular topic. Yet that may also be true of many other forms of writing history, genres of history and, indeed other disciplines as well. It is perhaps because military activities are some of the most meticulously documented events that are at the same time bound up in human contradiction that makes this so."

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• Research Paper # 107779 : "Oral History and Historiography"
• Descriptive Essay # 117428 : "The Greek Hoplite Phalanx"

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