I'm currently a History Major in the process of obtaining my teaching certificate for secondary education. I'm in my Third year of schooling and have yet to have a history course that discusses anything to do with the military. The main topic most of my classes focus on is "people without history." I understand this is an important topic to learn and understand, but i feel like the university i'm attending is failing to educate students on extremely important events. I enrolled in a "Vietnam Conflict" course under the impression that it would cover the military side of things. Unfortunately I was wrong and the class only covered politics and policy surrounding the war. Could someone please shed some light on why universities don't teach/lack military history?
The short answer is that they do, but you haven't gone to the right institution.
The long answer is that the heyday of military history passed a very long time ago. The late British military historian, Richard Holmes, recalled that in the 1960s, when he began his career, the subject was extremely unpopular and that there was thought to be something "Prussian" about it (Yerxa, 2008, p. 93). However, as he noted, since then matters have improved and it is possible undertake entire degrees in military history alone.
That said, though military history has become respectable it is still a fairly rare breed of university historian who actively researches and teaches in it. As a result, such individuals tend to conglomerate into the individual departments and faculties of a relatively few institutions which offer military history as a selling point. Meanwhile, there are of course military historians dotted around in other departments across Europe and North America, but it does not surprise me at all that yours does not.
Personally I think it is a bit of a shame. I'm not a military historian myself, though I am a specialist in war, and I don't teach any military history to speak of. So, I guess I'm a part of the same problem that you've encountered.
Donald A. Yerxa (ed.), Recent Themes in Military History (Columbia SC: South Carolina University Press, 2008)
I asked one of my professors (American Civil War historian) why many academic historians seem to look down upon military history. She told me that one of the main reasons is that a lot of them think of it as a topic for popular history.