Military history today is in the same curious position it has been in for decades: extremely popular with the American public at large, and relatively marginalized within professional academic circles. Its public profile continues to expand apace, and it has a particularly imposing media presence, whether it be on television in the form of the History Channel, or on the screen in a steady diet of war-themed movies such as Clint Eastwood's pair of 2006 releases, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, or the Thermopylae epic 300. While military history dominates the airwaves, however, its academic footprint continues to shrink, and it has largely vanished from the curriculum of many of our elite universities. It has been this way for a long time, and frankly, there seems little chance that things will change any time soon. No military historian should be pleased with the situation. At the same time, there seems little point in obsessing about it. It helps no one and does nothing to advance understanding on either side of the academic divide.

Luckily, most scholarly military historians seem to agree, and have little interest in spending a career pondering the academic equivalent of “Why do they hate us?” Instead, they do what they have always done. Whether in or out of season, military historians continue to pursue a research agenda that in its breadth and sophistication takes a back seat to no other area of historical inquiry. In recent years, moreover, this research has taken the field into areas that should have a great deal of appeal to broader segments of the profession.

The truth is that scholarly military history has developed over the past few decades into the very epitome of the big tent. At the very least, three major groupings …