So says Christopher Hitchins in "Beating a Dead Parrot: Why Iraq and Vietnam have nothing whatsoever in common," Slate, January 31.
Nothing whatsoever?
Apparently the rule in punditocracy is, Never make a reasonable point if you can possibly oversell it.
Blog Them Out of the Stone Age: Toward A Broader Vision of Military History and National Security Affairs
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
The Vietnam Analogy
to the current situation in Iraq haunts U.S. military analysts and policymakers so elementally that it is no longer even controversial, says a report in the January 29 New York Times.
Blogadoon - Part IV
But I guess between being busy and not really understanding blogs, I didn't grasp the point of Dimitri's email. (Worse, I'm not even sure I replied.) So I stuck with what I had, and not until mid-summer did I run across Blogger. At that point, for the first time, I began to read other people's blogs, but not very often (most of them suck bananas). Nor did I know any of the systems already in existence to locate the better, more informative blogs. Nor did I much care. I'd placed IPMH on hiatus back in early June and wasn't sure I'd pick it up again in the fall.
I might well have abandoned IPMH but for an email from my Australian friend Jeffrey Grey, who to my knowledge was its most faithful reader--indeed, IPMH is how Jeffrey and I came to meet. Jeffrey is almost the only practicing military historian who found the ideas in IPMH intriguing--at least, intriguing enough to send the occasional email prodding me to continue.
I did resume IPMH in September and found it a useful vehicle by which to gather my thoughts for a conference I was organizing on "The History of War in Global Perspective." At the same time, however, I worried about the amount of time required to prepare each entry. I thought a pre-packaged blog would save me time. For that reason, and really no other, I got a site on blogger in early December.
Ouwardly then, I looked (at last) like one of the blognoscenti. But mentally I was still keeping a web journal. I didn't think about the blogosphere and certainly didn't reach out to it.
Then one day, massively, it reached out to me.
Continue to Part V
I might well have abandoned IPMH but for an email from my Australian friend Jeffrey Grey, who to my knowledge was its most faithful reader--indeed, IPMH is how Jeffrey and I came to meet. Jeffrey is almost the only practicing military historian who found the ideas in IPMH intriguing--at least, intriguing enough to send the occasional email prodding me to continue.
I did resume IPMH in September and found it a useful vehicle by which to gather my thoughts for a conference I was organizing on "The History of War in Global Perspective." At the same time, however, I worried about the amount of time required to prepare each entry. I thought a pre-packaged blog would save me time. For that reason, and really no other, I got a site on blogger in early December.
Ouwardly then, I looked (at last) like one of the blognoscenti. But mentally I was still keeping a web journal. I didn't think about the blogosphere and certainly didn't reach out to it.
Then one day, massively, it reached out to me.
Continue to Part V
Blogadoon - Part III
Rereading it, something in Dimitri's entry struck me as familiar and I had a thought which, sure enough, proved correct. Dimitri did in fact email me last year at about the same time he composed that entry. A very generous note which at the same time had sensible advice:
Hi Mark:Continue to Part IV
Excellent blog; I intend to check in daily, which is my habit in reading blogs, whether or not there are daily postings. I heard about your journal this week in the unmoderated Usenet group (B[rooks D.] Simpson mentioned it).
I believe mine is the only other active ACW [American Civil War] blog. I use Sitemeter (sitemeter.com) to determine a few facts about the visitors, such as whether they arrived via searches or not. There tends to be a largish stable of readers a subset of which checks in during the day on their own initiative. More so this traffic than searchers.
Nevertheless, it seems a huge advantage to blog via Blogger (blogger.com) because the tool is owned by Google, which is constantly (overnight!) indexing one's pages and they show up in search results within a day or two.
I'll mention your blog in my space tomorrow and include a permanent link in my left margin - please keep the journal going and advise if you know of other ACW blogs.
Cyberpallishly,
Dimitri Rotov
http://cwbn.blogspot.com
Blogadoon - Part II
Thus, Dimitri Rotov of Civil War Bookshelf could stumble across IPMH last April and hover over my shoulder for months without me having any idea that either he or his blog existed. Just lately (thanks to a search on Technorati), I found his blog and not long after, this entry:
4.8.2004
Civil War author Mark Grimsley has started a military history blog.
I have long admired his Hard Hand of War and his judicious temperament. Look for example at the sentiments in this piece:
... North and South magazine has asked me to assess Robert E. Lee's generalship during his first campaign against Ulysses S. Grant the spring of 1864. [...] This isn't exactly a challenging assignment, yet I have found it difficult to write. I keep wondering what purpose it serves.
[You can't hear this, but the large staff of Civil War Bookshelf is applauding.]
Very often these assessments amount to little more than second-guessing, which seems not only intellectually sterile but also disagreeable.
[Shouts of Bravo.]
... withering criticisms are essentially ahistorical ...
[The crowd is on its feet now.]
I have tried to evaluate the principal leaders of this campaign as sympathetically as possible, always bearing in mind that they were intelligent men who operated under conditions and pressures I have not had to meet myself. True, to write is to judge, and ultimately I have made judgments that are sometimes harsh, but I have encountered few historical actors . . . for whom I could not muster at least some respect...
[Whistling and shouts of MORE! But wait ... the team is in trouble.]
But one referee for the press scored me pretty heavily for leaving out the distribution of praise and blame. On balance, I decided he was correct. Assessments of generalship are so much part of the campaign narrative tradition that readers expect it. So I rewrote the conclusion. It wasn't hard and, as far as it goes, reviewers seem to appreciate that part of the book.
[Groans.]
Still, I was never entirely comfortable with it, partly because I'm still not clear about what purpose it serves to critique generals who have lain in their graves a century or more.
[A polite smattering of applause.]
It's a good blog, much more diary-like than this effort, as you can see, and I recommend it highly.
I have long admired his Hard Hand of War and his judicious temperament. Look for example at the sentiments in this piece:
... North and South magazine has asked me to assess Robert E. Lee's generalship during his first campaign against Ulysses S. Grant the spring of 1864. [...] This isn't exactly a challenging assignment, yet I have found it difficult to write. I keep wondering what purpose it serves.
[You can't hear this, but the large staff of Civil War Bookshelf is applauding.]
Very often these assessments amount to little more than second-guessing, which seems not only intellectually sterile but also disagreeable.
[Shouts of Bravo.]
... withering criticisms are essentially ahistorical ...
[The crowd is on its feet now.]
I have tried to evaluate the principal leaders of this campaign as sympathetically as possible, always bearing in mind that they were intelligent men who operated under conditions and pressures I have not had to meet myself. True, to write is to judge, and ultimately I have made judgments that are sometimes harsh, but I have encountered few historical actors . . . for whom I could not muster at least some respect...
[Whistling and shouts of MORE! But wait ... the team is in trouble.]
But one referee for the press scored me pretty heavily for leaving out the distribution of praise and blame. On balance, I decided he was correct. Assessments of generalship are so much part of the campaign narrative tradition that readers expect it. So I rewrote the conclusion. It wasn't hard and, as far as it goes, reviewers seem to appreciate that part of the book.
[Groans.]
Still, I was never entirely comfortable with it, partly because I'm still not clear about what purpose it serves to critique generals who have lain in their graves a century or more.
[A polite smattering of applause.]
It's a good blog, much more diary-like than this effort, as you can see, and I recommend it highly.
Blogadoon - Part I
Longtime readers of this blog will have noticed that in the past ten days or so it has abruptly changed in tone. Gone are the long, discursive reflections on the state of academic military history. Gone, indeed, is much that resembles the "journal" style that used to define War Historian and its predecessor, Interrogating the Project of Military History (IPMH).
The new style reflects the so-called "filter" or link-based blog. "This type of blog," notes Paul McFedries, "consists primarily of links to other sites that have been pre-surfed and usually includes commentary about each link."
What happened?
In a word: Blogadoon.
Blogadoon happened.
One of the difficulties I have with the web experience (and so I gather do many others) is the poverty of language to describe its dynamics if the listener is not already more or less familiar with those dynamics. Tom Burke, in a recent, wonderfully intelligent and humane essay, touches on how hard it is to talk about blogging to people who don't keep or read blogs:
Most novice bloggers hop into the "cockpit," so to speak, of a ready-made blog constructed and serviced by a blog host such a Blogger, the host that runs War Historian. I didn't do that. I simply took the journal concept and applied it to the web pages I've been making, clumsily but enthusiastically, since I got my first web browser ten years ago. A web journal, it turns out, isn't really a blog. It lacks the hyperconnectivity of a blog, by which I mean the array of features that make it almost impossible to blog in isolation. People can comment on your posts. They can come zooming through your blog on a threaded tour by Blogger. (About ten percent of my visitors come from "the blog next door" so to speak: they're just surfing from blog to blog until they find one they want to stop and read. Most of all, they can use services like Technorati and Del.icio.us to do massively powerful searches of every blog, active or abandoned, that's still an organized set of electrons.
In short, if you're in something that resembles a blog, people are going to find you and you're going to know it.
But if you're keeping a web journal, chances are good that the only people who will find it are those whom you actively tell or who look you up for other reasons--and even then they usually read over your shoulder without a murmur, Otherwise you can type away for months with barely more than a breath of awareness that anyone is reading your stuff besides yourself.
Continue to Part II
The new style reflects the so-called "filter" or link-based blog. "This type of blog," notes Paul McFedries, "consists primarily of links to other sites that have been pre-surfed and usually includes commentary about each link."
What happened?
In a word: Blogadoon.
Blogadoon happened.
One of the difficulties I have with the web experience (and so I gather do many others) is the poverty of language to describe its dynamics if the listener is not already more or less familiar with those dynamics. Tom Burke, in a recent, wonderfully intelligent and humane essay, touches on how hard it is to talk about blogging to people who don't keep or read blogs:
I feel a little like the guy who goes to lectures by engineers and tries to tell them about his perpetual motion machine. Sometimes it’s like being under the spell of some alien intelligence, on the other side of an ethnographic divide, a native mumbling to the patient, civilized researcher about the inexpressible interior feeling of his own culture.My experience has been a little like that. But I think my experience has been unusual even for bloggers.
Most novice bloggers hop into the "cockpit," so to speak, of a ready-made blog constructed and serviced by a blog host such a Blogger, the host that runs War Historian. I didn't do that. I simply took the journal concept and applied it to the web pages I've been making, clumsily but enthusiastically, since I got my first web browser ten years ago. A web journal, it turns out, isn't really a blog. It lacks the hyperconnectivity of a blog, by which I mean the array of features that make it almost impossible to blog in isolation. People can comment on your posts. They can come zooming through your blog on a threaded tour by Blogger. (About ten percent of my visitors come from "the blog next door" so to speak: they're just surfing from blog to blog until they find one they want to stop and read. Most of all, they can use services like Technorati and Del.icio.us to do massively powerful searches of every blog, active or abandoned, that's still an organized set of electrons.
In short, if you're in something that resembles a blog, people are going to find you and you're going to know it.
But if you're keeping a web journal, chances are good that the only people who will find it are those whom you actively tell or who look you up for other reasons--and even then they usually read over your shoulder without a murmur, Otherwise you can type away for months with barely more than a breath of awareness that anyone is reading your stuff besides yourself.
Continue to Part II
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