Save Historiography for the Last Year?

by Scott Manning June 14, 2013
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In trying to understand why students dread historiography, I came across several works by Jeremy Black, a prolific military historian. In his recent Historiography: Contesting the Past; Claiming the Future, Black describes the current approach to teaching the subject and why it often fails. The conventional pattern at present is that of a compulsory first-year [...]

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Bud Hall’s Brandy Station Battlefield Tour

by Scott Manning June 11, 2013
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This past Saturday (June 8), my buddy Brian and I had the privilege of attending a tour of the Brandy Station battlefield to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the battle. The Loudoun County Civil War Roundtable set up the whole thing and had Bud Hall on hand to lead the tour group of over a [...]

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Montgomery on Cromwell’s Military Legacy

by Scott Manning June 6, 2013
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If Americans could get over his depiction in Patton (1970), they might learn to like British General Bernard Montgomery (1887-1976), or at least find him endearing.1 I got over my hate and I read his works every now and then. In A History of Warfare, he provides a chronological overview of war, sprinkled with his [...]

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Getting Past Memorizing Dates for History

by Scott Manning May 30, 2013
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A friend shared this with me, because I am a historian or something. In history, there is what happened and then there is how cultures interpreted what happened. The former tends to be straightforward, but the latter is murky. In terms of our interpretation, we struggle with the availability of information and popular belief. Again, [...]

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When History Becomes More Like Professional Wrestling

by Scott Manning May 16, 2013
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“FDR was a piece of shit. If you disagree, you don’t know history.” That is what someone said to me during a stream of articles last month about President Roosevelt’s attitude and policy toward Jews during World War II. While everyone piled on the president, I pointed out that his attitudes toward Jewish people was [...]

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Book Review: The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam

by Scott Manning May 11, 2013
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Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. In The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, Jonathan Riley-Smith has provided a succinct, powerful work that helps us understand the historical memory of the Crusades in both the Western and Islamic worlds. Given the sensitivities over the Crusading era with both Christians and [...]

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Norfolk, just one cemetery in the Somme

by Scott Manning May 8, 2013
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There are three predominate features of the Somme—farms, woods, and cemeteries. The French and British took a different approach with this massive battlefield. Instead of having one giant cemetery, they have numerous “small” ones. When you consider that the Allies suffered nearly 700,000 casualties in a mere 4 and a half months of fighting in [...]

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The Bastogne Mardasson Memorial

by Scott Manning May 8, 2013
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While in Luxembourg, a Belgian coworker harassed me, “You’re an American and you’ve never visited Bastogne?” It was true. I was visiting the Low Countries for the third time and I had zero plans to visit the famous town from the Battle of the Bulge. To redeem myself, I showed him a picture of the [...]

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Luxembourg’s Bourscheid Castle

by Scott Manning May 6, 2013
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On the way to Bastogne, I passed a sign pointing to a castle. I was feeling adventurous, so I went 10 miles out of my way to visit the Bourscheid Castle. It was well worth the detour. As you approach the castle, there is a superb spot for panoramic shots of the castle and valley. [...]

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Connecting with the Chancellorsville Battlefield

by Scott Manning May 1, 2013
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After 150 years, the Battle of Chancellorsville (1863) remains a textbook example of maneuver warfare, of Sun Tzu’s maxim to avoid strength and attack weakness. Quite literally, it was one of several examples in my maneuver warfare course at AMU a few years ago. Battlefields always require some imagination, but few battlefields offer visitors such [...]

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