Men at War: Politics, Technology, and Innovation in the Twentieth Century

by Christon Archer

Overview

The growing number of books on military history and the lively interest in military history courses at colleges and universities show that the study of war is enjoying considerable popularity. The reasons for this are arguable, but of immediate interest is the kind of military history that is taught and written. Here the student of war comes across an interesting division of opinion as to how military history should be written. Military history, lying as it does on the frontier between history and military science, requires knowledge of both fields. This fact often presents a difficulty to the history teacher.

Generally speaking, history is a discipline by virtue of its subject matter, not by virtue of a particular methodology such as is characteristic of the sciences and of some social sciences. The perspective of Men at War is a cross between a professional internalist approach and a civilian contextual view. This separation is not unique to military history, for the same dualism tends to occur in those areas of history, such as law and medicine, that can be written both by members of the profession concerned—lawyers and doctors—and by those outside the profession.

The problem is that at one extreme the contextual view can take the emotional content out of war, while at the other extreme the internalist view can put too much in. Men at War seeks to locate a military history that combines the professional, internalist method and the civilian, contextual method by showing that these are two fundamental sources from which a war derives. Seen in this way, this volume breaks new ground in defining the sources of twentieth-century power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781412814980
Publisher:	Transaction Publishers
Publication date:	10/30/2010
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	238
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Timothy Travers is professor emeritus of history at the University of Calgary. He is the author of numerous books including The Killing Ground: The British Army, The Western Front , and the Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900–1918 and World History of Warfare. Christon Archer is professor of history and director of the Latin American Research Centre at the University of Calgary. He is the co-author of A World History of Warfare and editor of The Birth of Modern Mexico.

Table of Contents

Exerting control / Desmond Morton — Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and the crisis of German society, 1916-1918 / Martin Kitchen — Mutiny in the mountains / Reginald Roy — Sans doctrine / Dominick Graham — Aircraft versus armour / Brereton Greenhous — Secret operations versus secret intelligence in World War Two / David Stafford — Psychological warfare and newspaper control in British-occupied Germany / Frank Eyck — The Royal Air Force and the origins of strategic bombing / Sydney Wise — The development of air raid precautions in Britain during the First World War / Marian McKenna — The challenge of the eighties / Kenneth Taylor — Learning military lessons from Vietnam / Joseph Ellis.