A complaint from a history professor–and a leading authority on “the aryanization of hairdressing salons in Vichy France”–about my article on military history:
I do not much appreciate being the straw man in John J. Miller’s half-informed (the half that suits his political biases) attack on the social history of war. Two points: First, he is correct that military history of the sort he seems to like is out of fashion on history faculties in favor of broader histories of war. This is a good idea or a bad one, depending on taste, and I can imagine that, had Mr. Miller taken the time to inform himself on the subject, instead of just following his prejudices, he might have written an intelligent defense of the need for technical military histories—not just because they’re popular classes, which they are, but because they teach students important historical lessons. To tell the truth, I have some sympathy with that. Of course, one of those lessons would undoubtedly be the so-called law of unintended consequences, about which those who started wars that turned out badly—Jeff Davis, Conrad von Hoetzendorff, Hitler, and George W. Bush, to name the most obvious candidates—could offer useful testimony. But I can understand that Mr. Miller prefers not to head down that road. Second, I object to his implication that I am personally suckering students in to a popular course on war and then filling them up with socialist-feminist-fashion propaganda, instead of blood and guts. It is true that my research sometimes addresses the social and cultural history of war, although I’m not sure my chapter on the aryanization of hairdressing salons in Vichy France–in Fashion, Work, and Politics in Modern France (Palgrave-Macmillan 2006)–would fit even Mr. Miller’s definition of “soft” history. In any event, that’s not principally what goes on in my World War I class, which he calls one of my “teaching fields”–the sarcastic inverted commas being merely an egregious swipe at my honesty. In fact, we have just finished reading Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel, discussing the battle of Verdun, and seeing the great G.W. Pabst film on the war Westfront 1918. Next we will talk about John Keegan’s chapter on the Battle of the Somme in his brilliant military history The Face of Battle. I believe that Mr. Miller would like those classes, filled with trenches, generals, and Big Berthas. If he had bothered even to check with my students, he would have discovered that the class fits very well with his own conception of what a college class on war should look like. Mr. Miller, however, like a soldier dispatching wounded enemies on the field, seems to have more ardor than integrity.
Yours,
Steve Zdatny
Professor of History
West Virginia University
Just to set the record straight, I used the term “teaching fields” in quotes because that’s the phrase Prof. Zdatny himself uses on his webpage, where you can get the full citations for his groundbreaking work on French hairstyles.