History is dying on college campuses. At least, that’s the assessment of some leading historians. Majors are plummeting and students are leaving college without a firm grasp of the foundations of the modern world. The cause of this decline is hard to pin down. Some scholars believe the fall-off can be ascribed to an aversion toward political history, while in a January 2021 opinion piece, the distinguished author Max Hastings declared that the very study of war has been killed off on college campuses.
In his provocative essay titled “American Universities Declare War on Military History,” Hastings argues that the study of war in U.S. universities is in “spectacular eclipse.” Historians today, averse to military affairs, are concerned principally with, in his words, “culture, race and ethnicity.” So great is this “revulsion from war history,” Hastings believes, that scholars refuse to teach, “or even allow their universities to host,” courses on war. Hastings rues the alleged decline of war studies because he believes in the old adage that the best way to avoid conflict is to study it.
Hastings is a great military historian, but the portrait he paints in his article is inaccurate. Whatever the cause of the decline in history majors, it is not due to a lack of classes on war-related themes. Indeed, the evidence we have collected shows the enduring presence of courses on war in leading American history departments. Based on a detailed examination of course offerings over a six-year period, we conclude that the teaching of war and conflict is doing quite well in history departments across the United States. Furthermore, courses in the field are taught mostly by tenure-track faculty; they are taught at both the survey and advanced level; and even using a fairly narrow definition of what constitutes “war studies,” the subject matter covered is wide-ranging across the modern era. The American Revolutionary War, the U.S. Civil War, the two world wars, regional conflicts like the Vietnam War, and even the “Global War on Terror” all appear consistently in history department offerings across the country, as do courses in the general category of “military history.” Surely, those of us who work in the field would welcome even more course-offerings. But in no way have historians “declared war” on this field.