Summary Of Citino's Essay 'Military Histories'

Reflecting on “Military Histories” Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction by Robert M. Citino is a dense explanation of the depth of the field that is military history. Citino explains that despite being on the academic decline, military history continues to remain a popular genre in the public. Without attention to details Military Histories might have read a bit like a melting pot of book reviews. However, this essay covers an array of important details in this field. One of the first things discussed, and the framework of the essay, is that there are three groupings or approaches to military history. The first focuses on war and society, is called new military history, and actually is not all that new. The next would be traditional
It seemed to me that most of the works focused on post-war life or the lives of minorities. Called the “dominant and integral” focus of new military history and it is no doubt when it can pull an average reader into an academic piece of work. The most intriguing examples were that of the Civil War where Citino explains how historians are changing the dialogue by incorporating race, gender, and other popular topics to their work. Particularly impressive was that two pieces could display the lives of African American soldiers in two different branches of the military and how their experiences were so wholly different and yet both pieces ended with the same point: people of color not only had to fight to participate in the Civil War but to have their stories told. With such a demand for the untold stories of lower class citizens and marginalized people it is fantastic to know that they are being told around events that shaped countries, especially the roles of people of color and
Military affairs incorporates history of memory, culture, and some other aspects, to create a dialogue on how warfare is viewed by the public and why it is viewed in that manner. The big focus here seemed to be erasure and it is fantastic to know that there are historians working to bring to light such wrongdoings, particularly in terms of American history where it causes such turmoil. Upon learning that our course would focus on immigration and a classmate mentioning Angel Island, which I had never heard about, it truly showed that the scope of erasure is not only a Civil War issue either, though popular media would try to present it as