Second Blog Post

In Robert Citino’s Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction, Citino highlights three main approaches to military history: new military history, traditional operations history, and a newer approach that focuses on memory and culture within military history. The major points about new military history are that it better covers marginalized groups and that it is much more storied an approach than its name puts off. The longevity of new military history is seen as Citino writes, “Until fairly recently, historians of the medieval and early modern periods were much more in touch with the symbiosis between war and society” (Citino). Citino’s big point about operational history is important because essentially people like to read it, as seen when Citino writes, “Millions of people continue to read these books, and someone is going to be writing them” (Citino). He then goes on to further exemplify his superiority complex over popular history authors because why not? Citino’s major point about the newest military history approach is that by looking at what societies choose to remember and what they choose to forget, a greater snapshot of their culture is provided. This stance is evident as Citino writes, “Standing alongside these histories of memory, and intertwined with them, has been a growing recognition of the determining role of culture in military affairs” (Citino). I found Citino’s need to constantly hold himself over the popular history interesting and amusing. He just kept coming back to it. You’d think winning awards as an author would quell all that insecurity, guess not.