Rethinking Military History

The ‘Map Girls’. British women geographers’ war work, shifting gender boundaries and reflections on the history of geography

“…This was not unique to geography, for example the graduates of modern languages and the sciences were also incorporated (on geology see Rose et al . 2006); but to paraphrase Black (2004, 2) cited above, ‘it is necessary to appreciate the pluralistic nature of geography and then build this into theoretical discussions about the process of the development of geographical knowledge’.…”

Why a nineteenth-century study?

“…As one US general remarked in 1970 regarding the US military's failed strategy in Vietnam: 'I'll be damned if I permit the US army, its institutions, its doctrine and its traditions, to be destroyed just to win this lousy war'. 20 US officer academies today will generally not engage with military history before the Second World War, because US military doctrine is so wedded to the centrality of technology.- 21 There was an appealing 'Whiggishness' to this obsession with military modernity. Whereas Early Modern and Modern European 'state-building' wars had many positive side-effects (extension of state machine/protection, enhanced popular participation in the state, technological innovations), the twentieth-century era of 'privatised' wars, especially those after 1945, were only destructive (not even productive economically given the reliance often on imported weapons).…”

Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection

“…The scope of military history changed and broadened in the 20th century with the introduction of "new military history", which moved the field beyond narrow battlefield analysis towards studying the interface between war and society [44,46], which has grown to be an integral part of modern military historical research [25,21].…”

“…Of the WW1 projects, the Europeana project relies on ingested collection metadata, which already conforms to its standards. In addition, a process is used to semantically enrich ingested metadata by linking them to GeoNames 25 for places, GEMET 26 for topics, Semium ontology 27 for time periods, and DBpedia 28 for people [100]. CENDARI extracts texts from documents, and uses NER and semantic disambiguation to create links to related information [28].…”

“…The first group has the widest range of needs regarding the data, but often has the best skills to handle and refine the data by themselves. The focus of academic researchers seems to be shifting from a macro level towards studying individuals and the social aspects of war [25,21].…”