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Where Do We Stand?A Critical Assessment of Civil War Studies in the Sesquicentennial Era Earl J. Hess (bio) The sesquicentennial is as good a time as any to evaluate the state of Civil War studies. In formulating an approach to the task, I wanted to get as broad a perspective as possible. This essay is therefore based on several threads of inquiry. I looked at dissertations completed in Civil War studies and scanned the topics of articles and book reviews in Civil War History and the Journal of the Civil War Era. I also have tried to read most of the articles and books relating to Civil War historiography in the past fifty years and to assess the type of books published by major academic presses in our field. And to gain some sense of what my colleagues thought, I sent a questionnaire to 129 Civil War historians across the country. The most important issue that emerged from each of these sources was the role of traditional military history in Civil War studies. In short, some [End Page 371] extreme views toward traditional military history have had major influences on how it is perceived; this, in turn, has the potential to seriously affect the future of our discipline. It is first necessary to clarify what I mean by the terms I use to organize my thoughts on Civil War studies. It seems to me that the whole can be divided into three major categories. The first, "traditional military history," is the oldest kind of military history and still the most fundamental way to understand the martial past. Most historians have a good idea what kind of books and articles fit into this group. It includes campaign and battle studies, tactical and strategic histories, studies of weapons, and biographies of major commanders. The general and erroneous impression is that these studies are relatively limited in scope, quite popular among nonacademic audiences, and very old fashioned in their methodology and interpretation. "New military history" is, I am aware, a term now old enough to make the word "new" almost comical. But it has stuck and still has descriptive power. There are many definitions of the work that fit into this category. For example, many define new military history so as to encompass any study of civilian society at war, which I believe is going too far.1 I define it as studies that attempt to explicate the social and cultural aspects of military service and the army-navy experience, including those of combat and campaigning in the field. Although new military history has been around quite a while, the number of studies published in the past twenty-five years or so is surprisingly small. It remains, however, an exciting area of discovery, with many opportunities for new approaches. Finally, a category I call "war studies" takes up the rest of Civil War literature. I am well aware of the drawbacks of creating such a large classification. But I do not believe books and articles that deal with American society in the 1860s and with the effects of the war on post-1865 America are examples of military history. Adding any book that seeks to explore the effect of war on civilian populations to new military history is not a convincing strategy. Since the late 1980s, war studies have been the burgeoning area of Civil War historiography, and they will likely remain so for a long time. One historian, who declined to answer the survey, pointed out in an e-mail that war studies could easily be divided into at least four subcategories. I agree, but all of those [End Page 372] subcategories still deal with the experience of civilian society during war and not with the organized military experience. Many Civil War historians today could divide war studies into these categories and write interesting and important discussions of them, and I leave that task to them. Although I have worked in all three areas, my main contributions are in traditional military history.2 I strongly believe that this category has an important role to play in our field without being watered down or altered to make it relevant to current or...
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