War in History and Memory
Since the Iliad, war has inspired stories – mixing fact and fiction – which reveal as much, if not more, about the realities of conflict as academic studies. John E. Talbott examines writing about ‘the human condition at its most extreme’.
Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary and architect of the Soviet Red Army, supposedly said: ‘You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.’ All of human history has scarcely seen a time when there was not a war going on somewhere. Still, in American universities, the study of war had few students during the 1960s and 1970s. The Vietnam War cast a cloud over all things martial. Academics were among the conflict’s most influential and prominent critics and many of their students followed them into academic careers. Critics of US policy in Vietnam were of no mind to study war. But time passed, passions cooled and veterans of the antiwar movement faded away. Interest in military history and the study of war was reawakened. War came off the list of unseemly subjects.
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