You don’t have to be a military historian to do military history.

My alma mater, the University of Wisconsin, has finally filled its endowed chair in military history and I like the guy already. Read the whole article at Inside Higher Ed if your interested in his bio, but I’m primarily interested in this:

[John W.] Hall also said that there are limits to focusing on whether a professor is called a military historian. “The way I wrote my book defies easy categorization,” he said. He added that some of the “most insightful books about military history” in recent years have come from scholars who aren’t identified as military historians. He cited as examples John Dower’s War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, Patrick Griffin’s American Leviathan: Empire, Nation and Revolutionary Frontier and Jill Lepore’s The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of Identity. Dower, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is known as a Japanese historian. Griffin, of the University of Notre Dame, and Lepore, of Harvard, are both identified as historians of early America.

Compare this to K.C. Johnson, a guy I respect enormously, but who’s been on the wrong side of this argument for as long as I can remember:

K. C. Johnson, a historian at the City University of New York, characterizes the problem as pedagogical, not political. Entire fields of study, from traditional literary analysis to political and military history, are simply not widely taught anymore, Mr. Johnson contended: “Even students who want to learn don’t have the opportunity because there are no specialists on the faculty to take courses from.”

But what Hall tells you is that you don’t have to be a specialist to contribute to a particular sub-field. People who aren’t military historians can still write and teach military history. And people who aren’t labor historians can still write and teach labor history. And people who aren’t women’s historians…and so on and so on until you run out of sub-specialties.