Heheh.

We Military Historians have a long and difficult time ingratiating ourselves within the academy. It also extends to how we define ourselves. Brief lowdown on what has happened in the field, politically, from an academic perspective:

Until the 1960s historians wrote mostly about politics, great men of history, white guys, diplomacy, tactics, battles, and campaigns. Around the 1960s / 70s we started seeing various 'turns' in the historiography. There was the social turn, the cultural turn, the gender turn. All of these new inquiries and new fields of thought and questioning for historians opened up fields of history that had until that time either been entirely ignored or misrepresented in awful, awful ways (the happy slave mythology, for instance).

Because historians during this time who embraced this turn away from previously done modes of history, some forms fell out of favor in academic circles. I would argue that military history was hit the hardest by these developments. From the 1970s until, I'd say, about 2010, you saw fewer and fewer listings for posts that catered to military historians for tenure track positions in the academy. With tenure track positions diminishing over time as a whole, that really put the squeeze on military historians. Talking to military historians who are in their late careers now often speak bitterly of their coming of age in the field of history. They were shunned for not doing serious history. Amateurs, buffs, who dabble in history frequently do so in military history. Not only that, but the evolution of historiography in the United States put a premium on these new modes of analysis I referred to earlier, and there became this perception that military history was only about battles, campaigns, maybe some technology, and a bunch of people pointing fingers at each other about who screwed up whatever battle. Part of this also stems from the public perception of military history (the History Channel) and how many depictions of it in popular culture come from talking heads about the heroism on Omaha Beach or how Stalingrad was 'the turning point of WW2' or how trench warfare was the worst. They speak frequently of "needing to look out for each other." As a result, military historians, especially the annual conference of the Society for Military History, is one of the most friendly and inclusive events a historian or interested member of the public can engage. This brings about its own problems, that I will get to later.

There are solid critiques of this presentation of military history both in the popular form and academically. John Keegan's The Face of Battle (1976) made an important critique of the presentation of military history. He argued that in order to understand the battle and the contexts in which generals made tactical and operational decisions, we need to understand the ground-level conditions (weather, ground, the weight of gear, sounds) to both not only understand how chaotic battle is, but how individual soldiers experienced it too. He did so by analyzing three distinct battles from three periods: Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. It was a revolutionary text that would help define how military historians write military history today.

But, of course, military historians also evolved with the incorporation of new modes of analysis into history. The problems with military historians today and those who don't define themselves as such, is that we all too often talk past one another. Cultural, gender, and social historians will speak of how they've made major breakthroughs in understanding the military because the groups they converse with don't incorporate the military into their groups of analysis. So too do military historians get in trouble with inadequate understandings of the societies that produce the soldiers that fight in the wars. Most obviously, you can see this in the Vietnam War historiography, where "the hippies and liberals lost us the war." Dissecting American society into such black and white analyses miss the ways in which Americans became more skeptical of American interference abroad throughout the course of the 1960s.

So, today, there are three broad fields of military history we can count, and military history, I argue, is the most inclusive and diverse field of history. The three modes are: 'war and society,' which seeks to understand the nexus of peoples and the militaries that come from them. There's the "traditional" mode of military history that focuses on warfighting, and lastly, those engaged in memory and culture (how do we remember military events through time and why do we remember them that way at that specific moment in time? IE, why did we remember the Civil War the way we did in 1920 (see Blight's Race and Reunion for that answer)).

You asked, though, about the 'New Military History.' That coincides with the first listing I made, 'war and society.' Largely, I'd say that coining the term was a way for military historians to reincorporate themselves into the academy. The efforts have been largely successful. We've seen a revival in listings for military history positions in schools across the nation. Also, a lot of government agencies hire military historians. Wrongly, people in academia see this as a lesser form of professional service, and contributes to divides we still see today between military historians purusing alt-academia careers and academics in universities.

From a historiographical article that outlines the development of the field:

"It has been a generation now since the "new military history" rode into town, promising to save military history from itself by moving the field beyond narrow battlefield analysis in order to concentrate on the interface between war and society.1 The social composition of armies and officer corps, civil-military relations, the im- pact of war on race, class, and gender (and vice versa) - these were the questions that excited this school, and still do. In fact, it often stood accused of being interested in everything about armies except the way they fought, interested in everything about war except campaigns and battles. Once controversial, and still the occasional subject of grumbling from a traditionalist old guard, the new military history is today an integral, even dominant, part of the parent field from which it emerged. It has been around so long, in fact, and has established itself so firmly, that it seems silly to keep calling it "new.""

This goes from books such as Fred Anderson's Crucible of War (2000) to Dennis Showalter's Railroads and Rifles (1976) to Susan Carrthur's The Good Occupation (2016). All of these works can be easily classified as the 'new' military history, and all are less focused, per se, on warfighting than on the mechanisms that exist within militaries and the societies that produce them.

For a much better explanation, see Rob Citino's (the senior historian at the National World War II museum) historiographical article on the subject, " Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction" in the American Historical Review. There he outlines all of these broad trends much more coherently than I do. He wrote in 2007, so a lot has changed in the twelve years since its publication, but it's still one of the best starting points for someone looking to see how the field has developed over the past fifty years.

For contemporary "New Military History" books that have come out, I'd check work by Jacqueline Whitt, Kara Dixon Vuic, Robert Engen, Jonathan Fennell, and I mean literally dozens of others who have come out with groundbreaking work that advances our understanding of military history and how governments and people think about and fight war.

Sources:

Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. New York: Vintage, 2000.

Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Carruthers, Susan L. The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.

Citino, Rob. "Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction." American Historical Review. No. 4. Vol. 112 (Oct, 2007).

Keegan, John. The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. New York: Penguin, 1976.

Showalter, Dennis. Railroads and Rifles: Soldiers, Technology, and the Unification of Germany. Hamden: Archon Books, 1976.

There's already a great answer by /u/HistoryMystery12345 and I don't doubt that their analysis of the recent development of academic military history is sound. I just thought it would be worth adding a different perspective. The very notion of a 'New Military History' presupposes that there was an 'old military history' that had lost relevance and prestige. The common narrative, and the one presented by HistoryMystery, is that of a once-great field that had fallen from grace and needed to reinvent itself. But this raises the question: when was this supposed heyday of academic military history?

It is easy to say that this golden age would have been before the 1960s, when academia began to go through its cultural and linguistic turns and began to look past the stuffy confines of politics and war. But where are the professors of military history in the 1960s? Or the 1950s? They aren't there. In the 20th century only Oxford consistently offered a chair in military history. Of the most famous writers of military history in 20th-century Britain - Fuller, Liddell Hart, Keegan - not one was an academic historian. In Germany, where an interest in military history had acquired some understandably negative connotations after WW2, there were no professors of military history until 1969.

Perhaps we need to go further back. Military history would be one of those subjects that defined the ultra-conservative, traditional, all-male academy of the 19th century, right? But there were no military historians at the academy. In fact, when Hans Delbrück (1848-1929) professed his desire to become the first such historian, effectively the entire German academic establishment told him no. Ranke discouraged him; Mommsen dismissed his work; in 1881, Droysen told him to his face that military history "does not belong in the university". Delbrück kept on pushing for military history to be given a space at the academy, but he never got his wish. He was eventually made professor of world history, but never of military history. Not a single one of his 75 doctoral students had that honour either. The man who became professor of military history at the University of Westphalia in 1969 was the first person to hold such a post in the German-speaking world. Ever.

But then what is old military history? Does it even exist? Was there a military history before the New Military History?

The answer is yes - but it was not done in university history departments. The organisation that defined 'modern' scientific military history and shaped the modern perception of traditional military history was not the academy. It was the pithily named Kriegsgeschichtliche Abteilung des Grossen Generalstabes: the War History Section of the Great General Staff.

By the second half of the 19th century, the organisation that had begun as the archive of the Prussian army had established itself as the world's foremost producer of high-quality, in-depth historical accounts of recent wars. Their multi-volume record of the Franco-Prussian War was translated and read all over Europe and beyond. Other states modeled their staff historical sections after the Prussian example, and soon every national army worth its salt was churning out staff military history of its own. They still do.

Staff military history, however, is not what academic historians would write. The War History Section was often criticised for its lack of schooling in sound historical method, its lack of source references, its deliberately nationalist slant, its narrow interest in the battles and campaigns and great leaders of the Prussian past, and its tendency to bend over backwards to protect the reputation of serving generals and ruling kings. But the War History section's response was always the same. First, academic historians didn't know the business of war, and should shut up when the grown-ups were talking. Second, of course staff military history didn't meet the standards of the academy; it wasn't meant to. The officers of the War History Section wrote to instruct officers. The facts of history were less important than the lessons they wanted to teach. Military history wasn't studied for its own sake; it was a tool, and a tool that didn't work would be useless.

This, in a nutshell, is the 'old' military history. It was written by soldiers for soldiers and it has never been acceptable to academic historians. On the one hand, historians simply weren't satisfied with its scope and method; they were interested in bigger questions, and tended to dismiss technical details as antiquarianism. On the other hand, they recognised that they lacked the expertise to do better. When Ranke and Droysen discouraged Delbrück, it was because they acknowledged the superior authority of the army in these matters, and deferred to the General Staff. Even if, they said, even if they did have any interest in establishing a chair in military history, it would have to go to an officer trained in the methods of the War History Section.

Delbrück, despite his professional failures, is often called the first modern military historian. He is considered the ancestor of proper, scientifically rigorous, historical research into military history, and the first to be interested in the context of warfare rather than just its sound and fury. His most famous work is the 4-volume History of the Art of War in the Framework of Political History (1900-1920); the title already suggests that its interests are broader than those of the War History Section. In short, he is seen as an early forerunner of the New Military History, simply by virtue of being an academic historian doing military history.

But he wasn't even really the first. Back in 2008, Robert Larson published an article arguing that much of Delbrück's sociological theory of warfare was anticipated by Max Jähns (1837-1900) - a prolific cultural historian who was actually a professional soldier lecturing at the War Academy in Berlin. The calls are coming from inside the house. Many officers in the Prussian general staff appreciated Jähns for his uncommonly broad approach and his insistence that officers should learn more than just the narrative of the most recent conflicts; they admired the breadth of his reading and his ability to place military methods in their social and political context.

But Jähns himself made no claim to revolutionary approaches. He was not a historian by training, and had to justify his efforts by citing powerful patrons like Helmuth von Moltke the Elder as well as important literary predecessors. And indeed, in the introduction to his 4-volume magnum opus, Delbrück announced that there were two scholars at the foundation of everything he was about to write. One was Max Jähns. The other was Wilhelm Rüstow (1821-1878) - an exiled Prussian army engineer who had made a career writing military history while in exile in Switzerland. All German authors after Rüstow (as well as French, Italian, Hungarian and others) acknowledged his groundbreaking historical accounts of current and past wars. One of Rüstow's great strengths was his insistence that war did not happen in a vaccuum, but that it was an expression of social and political relations and structures, and that warfare could not be understood without a grasp of these structures. In other words, he was doing New Military History. In 1850.

What is the point of all this? Military history seems to spend more time navel-gazing about its place in the academy than any other subfield, and it would be useful to bear in mind a couple of things that I think are true (but feel free to disagree):

1. Military history has never been welcome in the academy. There is no past golden age. In fact, it would be easy to argue that the presence of military history in the academy begins in the 1960s, rather than fading from then on. It has certainly never been more popular, more widely practiced and widely read and well funded than it is today.

2. Because of the strange position of military historians - considered outsiders by soldiers and historians alike - the subfield has inherited a profound prosecution complex. It is always in crisis. It is always complaining that it doesn't get respect. It is always complaining that it needs to be something else to survive. It is doing fine.

3. New Military History is the only kind of academic military history. There has never been another. All other kinds of military history are done outside the academy. Even before military history came under the umbrella of the university, New Military History is what almost everyone agreed military history should be.