In the first
semester we discovered the evolution of historiography and the many
different methodologies historians incorporated to further their
specific field of study. Although my current field of study is
American history, what speaks most to me is military history.
Military historians have always studied the great generals, their
tactics and philosophies that they used to win battles and wars.
Over the past 100 years a transformation within the study has
occurred. Instead of the traditional top-to-bottom approach,
historians conducted a bottom-up approach. Historians
incorporated more social and cultural elements into their study,
going from the great men and great events, to the study of the
ordinary people and incorporating
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He utilizes
literature in his analysis to discuss the relationship between
social and cultural systems and how those systems experience
war. He argues
that the wars that are being fought by the soldiers are not just
noteworthy for the individual soldiers thoughts and feelings, but
also it is important to look at what is being done back at home and
how that can influence the individual. Joanna Bourke supports the
new
militaryhistory or new social history views. She argues that
traditional historians narrowly focus on battlefields, commanders
and issues of strategy which seriously distorts what really
mattered. She argues what really matters are the different
influences that occurred on the individual soldier and ultimately
what they left behind for historians to discover, based upon their
experiences. Instead of studying what traditionalist accomplishes,
they study the rest of
military
history that is fascination with the recruitment, training,
and socialization of personnel, combat motivation, and the effects
of service and war on the individual soldier, etc. They take ideas
and methodologies from the other sciences: sociology,
anthropology, economics, psychology, and
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The study of
regional history assists historians in discovering who lives in
particular areas and why. They learn how the environment plays a
part in what people grow and what jobs are supported in the region.
After studying a region, historians can expand their focus to
sectional history where they can learn how different regions relate
to one another. Here an extensive study of ethnicity, race, class,
gender, and culture occurs. However, just as social history
affected military history, so too has it affected regional history.
Richard White in his study of Western History discusses the
danger of the new social history of the West has been the
incremental creation of a portrait of a region so subdivided by
ethnicity, race, class, gender, and culture as to make the West
itself seem less a region that a sort of social aquarium in which
separate social species come into accidental proximity with one
another. He asserts that it fragmented the history of the
region. For clarification, he adds: Complaints about
fragmentation have ignored the way mid-range generalizations began
to emerge as scholars focused on questions of race, class, and
gender. Like region itself, race, class and gender are comparative
categories. They are markers of differences; they make on
comparative sense; they
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