A question a little bit outside of the box, hopefully it won't be deleted. What is the current controversial discussion happening in academia, over your different fields of study. For example, in Linguistics, the recursion debate rages on, but the average Joe isn't particularly aware of it. Perhaps there was a recent archaeological finding? A new interpretation of primary sources? A breakthrough in deciphering an artifact?
For archaeology it’s probably the debates around the field itself, standards, harassment, ethics, colonialism, accessibility etc.
It’s something that’s been left to fester for a while and everyone looked the other way as things got out of hand.
Now we’re stuck in an even shittier situation between people who are finally acknowledging that things are going desperately wrong and those who, for some unknown reason, want to aggressively ignore the problem and claim everything is just fine.
Spoiler alert, the people who are in charge of all of our organizations, departments, journals, etc. are the ones who think everything is fine. Like that dog cartoon meme where he’s in the burning room saying “everything is fine”.
It’s not my field per say, but it’s field adjacent for me.
I’ve been reading a whole bunch on the Vietnam War and in the last 10-15 years there has been a lot of movement reassessing and recontextualizing the war. Part of it is rereading old American sources without the partisan lens that infected so much of earlier histories. Old histories of the American War typical fall into one of two categories, the Orthodox school which adopts the views of (and also lionizes) the ‘68ers and the peace movement. The revisionist school, on the other hand, tries to tear down the ‘68ers. Mark Moyar’s Triumph Forsaken should tell you everything you need to know about the revisionists. But even more ‘neutral’ histories, such as HR McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty or Lewis Sorely’s Westmoreland lean into alternating patterns of villainization and heroization. More recent works have moved past this binary, and have present a far more neutral view of the American war effort. A better understanding of what decisions were made when and by whom of course better fill out the narratives and undermine a lot of the claims of older scholarship.
More interesting, on the military side, is the work of Gregory Daddis. Old revisionist arguments were that William Westmoreland was a huge disaster, focusing on the body count and search and destroy even tho it didn’t work. His replacement, Creighton Abrams, came in and radically changed the war effort by shifting from search and destroy to pacification. This, they argue, worked and would have won the war but for the peaceniks who torpedoed the whole thing. You can also read shades of the Iraq war into this scholarship where the publication dates overlap. But in a pseudo-2 Vol history of the war, Daddis demonstrates that Westmoreland wasn’t as stupid or dull as many people say he was. Indeed his strategy was effective, and was deeper than just body counts. His aim was to establish security in the mountains so that ARVN and South Vietnam could build up the population centers (with American aid) on their own. Far from charting out a ‘better war,’ Abrams maintained many of the Westmoreland era policies. Abrams implemented US pacification in 1969, which was an expansion of a program begun by the US Marines and which Westmoreland wanted to spin out before Tet interrupted everything. Many revisionist scholars latch onto pacification, but then ignore that most US units stayed focused on fighting big unit battles and search and destroy missions. Another complication, Andrew Birtle shows that Abrams was far more creative at cooking statistics than implementing new strategies. This subtle data manipulation made it look like the war had changed and things were looking up while things didn’t actually change. What did change, as Daddis argues in his second book, is media coverage. On day one, before Abrams had even issued his first order, the AP ran a story about how Abrams changed the war and how things in Vietnam were better than ever. This continued through Abrams tenure, where the media had been suspicious of Westmorelands every word, they accepted Abrams and his funny data without question. According to Daddis this is the real origin of the Better War myth.
Further adding to this conversation is the new ‘internationalist’ school of scholarship. These bring in Polish sources, Chinese, and Soviet to show how those countries interacted with North Vietnamese and American actors. But even more exciting is the Vietnamese scholarship now being produced. For so long the story of the war, articulated by both the orthodox and revisionist schools, was that the war was an American tragedy. The emphasis is in American actions and American failure. But ultimately Vietnam was a civil war between two competing visions. Even without western backing, both sides would have at some point had to reconcile their futures. Scholarship on North Vietnam is much better developed, interestingly Vietnam is more free with their records than one might think. It’s possible of course to publish something that refutes the party line and gets a scholar banned, as apparently happened to Alec Holcombe when he published on the failure of collectivization and the famines of the late 1950s. There is too much to mention here, but incorporating North Vietnamese sources really changes our understanding of the war. In the west it was common to hear that the Vietnamese drove their strategy for western audiences, they fought battles to break public support in the US and fuel the peace movement. This is reinforced by the statement of a General like Giap, who we tend to see as the architect of the Vietnamese war, or the actions of North Vietnams own propaganda agencies. But really scholarship such as that by Pierre Asselin and Lien Hang Nguyen highlights that strategy in Hanoi wasn’t driven by a reading of western media, and sometimes not even battlefield realities, but by the dynamics of internal politics within the Communist party. Giap himself spent much of the war in semi-exile having been purged during the rise of Le Duan. These internal struggles tend to correspond well to renewed offensive. Really you cannot understand the war without understanding politics in the north.
The last great gap in scholarship is with the South. One unfortunate tendency of recent scholarship is to overbalance the US and North Vietnamese positions and to say “well the weak link must be South Vietnam, they lost the war.” But in my opinion that’s more of a cop out, a limitation of scholars aperture, rather than the reality. Interestingly most of the South Vietnamese archives were captured in 1975 intact. AFAIK they were moved to Hanoi but otherwise have been unchanged and, mostly, unused. Some of these records are quite detailed regarding political organization and internal assessments of the war effort. While poorly explored and understood, the little I’ve read that has come out of these archives really contradicts many American narratives of South Vietnam and ARVN. Some documents highlight that the GVN was far more popular, especially after Tet, than previously thought. Tet and the battle of Hue, specifically the mass murders and executions carried out amongst Southern student activists during the first days of the battle, galvanized support against the Communists. It helps to explain why the southern arm of the Vietcong was destroyed and never rebuilt (with southern manpower) after Tet. People didn’t want them to win.
The sole author I know of who has made extensive use of these sources is George Veith, whose two most recent books focus heavily on the southern government. The conventional narrative here is that the South after Diem was a carousel of dictators, none enjoying popular support and all embracing corruption. This filtered down to ARVN which was too corrupt and disillusioned to fight hard for the regime. That’s true before Tet, but Veith and others highlight that, basically, Vietnamization worked. As ARVN replaced US troops, they were forced to adjust into a more traditional and professional military. And Nguyen Van Thieu provided stability in the political realm, eh controlled the system for almost eight years and worked hard to protect his, basically, dictatorial regime. All this culminates in the mid 1970s. In 1972 the Easter Offensive (I believe 50 years this month actually) badly shook ARVN, but it also forced many of the political generals to resign and for soldiers to take over. There are also interesting conclusions that the field out to be taking note of regarding the changing nature of the war that I think, to this point, has been ignored.That offensive revealed that, when backed up by US air power, ARVN fought well and fought hard. Vieth argues that after ‘72 South Vietnam was in a pretty strong military position, with air power it could stop an NVA offensive on the ground by itself. It was dependent, though, on US aid. The Paris Peace Accords ended the U.S. war, but did little to stop the war in Vietnam (Asselin’s book in the Accords also reevaluates the role of strategic bombing in drafting the accords and suggests the Christmas attacks were probably more effective and decisive than we give credit). What the Peace Accords did though was let Washington forget about Vietnam. The first thing cut from the budget in the era of the ‘Peace Dividend’ was material aid to ARVN. First domestic air power was cut and the transfer of fighters canceled, then even basic necessities like artillery shells and bullets were restricted. This had tangible effects on ARVN battlefield performance, several NVA offensives in the Delta region obtained far more success than Saigon wanted, or Hanoi expected, and according to Veith was the result of ammunition shortages more than battlefield failure. They also emboldened Hanoi to try another knockout blow. By 1975 ARVN basically had nothing in reserve, it had been sucked dry already fighting off smaller incursions. What they had, they employed aggressively and successfully. Probably with material support and bombings ‘75 would have went the same way as ‘72. But US support never came, and after two periods of intense resistance ARVN collapsed. But this narrative is so provocative because it totally upends our understanding of when and why the war was lost. If it’s really the case that ARVN just needed material support and air power, what does that say about the successes and failures of what came before? I think one could draw a very interesting parallel here to the US war for Iraq, which is why the comparison with Afghanistan recently has frustrated me.
I don't know if this will be an acceptable answer, but it goes.
My field is World History history with an interest in Military history; during my Master's, I found two small but related debates about 'Military Revolutions.' A 'Military Revolution' is the idea that there was a rapid growth of military technology and tactics, which played an essential role in development. 'Military revolution' usually applies to the period between 1400- and 1800, when Europe rapidly developed its military technology and tactics in a series of large and small wars. Most Military historians like using this term, as it best describes what happened during those centuries. But there is a growing debate about whether or not that term is entirely correct. The idea is that it may have been a series of more minor revolutions, or it wasn't a revolution.
The second small debate is about whether or not Asia (China, Japan, India, etc.) had a 'Military Revolution' during the same period. Historian Peter Lorge believes it did, but his argument has many critics from both Military and World historians.
I study the Holy Roman Empire in the early modern period, and the number one question for political history remains: what on earth actually was it? This isn't a particularly new debate, and indeed you can trace it back to contemporary scholarship in the 16th and 17th centuries, particularly after the reception of the political thought of Jean Bodin in the Empire. (His big thing was talking about what sovereignty really was in a pretty radical, new way, but I won't go into that here.) Pretty much every imaginable position has been taken, from the Empire as an essentially fictive/symbolic unity with minimal political substance^(1) to an evolving set of semi-mediaeval associations with growing formalization over time.^(2)
It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Early modern thinkers didn't really know what to make of the Empire either, after all; you could get people who thought it was an aristocracy and ones who saw it as essentially monarchic,^(3) and of course it changed over time. What did it mean when Landeshoheit, or "territorial supremacy" was ceded by the Emperor to the Imperial Estates (princes, cities, and so on; Reichsstände) by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648? Did that destroy what was left of a state, or just loosen its internal bonds a bit? Or was it just a retrospective acceptance of what was already the case, that the polities that made the Empire up were essentially independent?
Answering these questions requires answering a load of other ones first. How far does contemporary opinion matter in the first place? How autonomous actually were the subunits of the Empire? How did that autonomy change over time? What are the necessary conditions for statehood, anyway? All of these are hard to answer.
To look at just one case from the pre-1648 period, Basel ended up joining the Swiss Confederation in 1501. This was in the aftermath of the 1499 Swabian War, and after a while the Emperor stopped bothering with trying to govern the Swiss.^(4) By 1648, they were declared legally independent of the Empire. When did Basel functionally stop just being a city in the Empire, and start being a city in the Swiss Confederation? How could it just slip into an organization so self-reliant it was effectively its own state in very little time? Indeed, was the Swiss Confederation a different state before 1648? If so, what does that mean for Imperial political organization?
There's a positively massive amount of stuff out there on it, and I'll provide a few extra pointers for what to read if you're interested below. As for myself, I think the Empire was essentially like other polities of the period; difference was probably in degree, not kind. In pretty much all European states/polities of this period, there was considerable local autonomy, and most centres of statehood were reliant on local groups and elites to rule - though less so over time.^(5) I think the main difference is that the Imperial centre was less powerful and more poorly located to maintain strong control than most of the others, and was highly reliant on a "constitution" rooted in princely oligarchy (the Golden Bull of 1356) in a way that stifled the breaking of that local elite base. That's quite a simplification, though, both for brevity's sake and my own uncertainty!
All in all, it's fascinating stuff. I thoroughly recommend having a look into it if you've got any interest in sociopolitical history and the nature of early modern statehood, or even statehood in general. It's a very telling limit-case, in my view.
References:
^(1) Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara. 2020. The Emperor’s Old Clothes: Constitutional History and the Symbolic Language of the Holy Roman Empire, trans. Thomas Dunlap. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
^(2) Hardy, Duncan. 2018. Associative Political Culture in the Holy Roman Empire: Upper Germany, 1346-1521. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
^(3) von Friedeburg, Robert. 2016. Luther’s Legacy: The Thirty Years War and the Modern Notion of ‘State’ in the Empire, 1530s to 1790s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
^(4) Brady, Thomas A. Jr.. 1985. Turning Swiss: Cities and Empire, 1450-1550. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
^(5) Bonney, Richard. 1991. The European Dynastic States 1494-1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Extra recommended reading:
Two debates that come to mind, given my own background in economic history is the concept of the 'Great Divergence' and then also the concept of the 'Resource Curse' (my own research is on the second argument. Whether or not the great Divergence is even a thing, whether it is an extremely Eurocentric and Western Centric concept devolved from faulty macroeconomic data from Asia or whether someone like Pommeranz and his ilk consider other factors rather than growth, quality of life, and gdp per capita in full as the be all and end all of the Conception.
The second argument around the resource Curse is specifically about the impact that commodities or economic boons in a traditional sense lead to a much lower adoption of democracy, lower quality of life etc etc. I'm currently investigating this concept and whether it is fit for purpose in my own work which tbh I'm extremely sceptical about. That being said history is full of arguments about all sorts of issues of methodology, source criticism as well as the whole concept of 'interlinking historical events' and whether they hold any water or not.
So yeah, academics are literally paid to argue their point in a more textual situation.
There’s a big debate* about usage and utilizing of non-European, non-traditional historical sources to draw conclusions and make arguments. Got into a little trouble on this sub about it before but I’ve experienced it my whole life.
Basically. The argument is about weather or not things like hadiths, oral traditions, and other forms of indigenous record keeping should be considered as valid as say, 16th and 15th century documents.
At first glance to most academics this seems like a no brainer. Obviously European record keeping is more honest and scientific etc etc.
However a large amount of work (my work included) has been going into debunking a lot of the old “established” sources and understandings that have become bedrocks of the way we look at some of these histories. For example clash of civilizations arguments all the way to borderline conspiracy theories. I’m talking as recent as this millennium too, supposed experts are giving really bad and easily disprovable takes about peoples and cultures they don’t know much about. For example I’ve noticed a fair amount of historians getting translations of Arabic text wrong, like they were given a paraphrase and ran with it. But there’s no accountability for this. Same with horrible and borderline hateful misinterpretations of eastern religions that are just taken as fact by the source and regurgitated by countless other sources stemming from it.
So the argument becomes: “if European written and otherwise recorded histories can’t be trusted with out critical consideration why should we not treat indigenous record keeping with the same level of consideration?”
Of course there’s a lot of work people are doing in quantifying and recording these histories (particularly the oral histories) but they are often seen as archeologists or sociologist and don’t have the respect of the history departments by and large.
One needs only peak at where the history of indigenous people is regulated too or tied into archeological or political classes. (usually it’s own special department separate from “real” history work)
This can also be seen in the way minority religions are studied. Usually either not given as a specific class or worked into a theology and myth section. Ignoring real physical histories and instead regulating entire histories into “make belief”.
This is of course not true for every university. But it for sure is in every one I’ve ever worked in or attended. it’s apparent that European history is seen as believable, set and understandable. While non-European history is seen as shrouded, poorly sourced and frankly borderline mythological. Classic othering.
*does it count as a debate if it’s just the ones in control setting the standards and rejecting even engaging with the argument?
For example, in Linguistics, the recursion debate rages on, but the average Joe isn't particularly aware of it.
I feel like linguistics is nothing but heated debates at this point — you bring up recursion (and presumably all the Pirahã stuff by extension), but we could easily replace that with one of the underlying assumptions/principles of Generativism like something relating to the "unique language faculty of humans", one of the scores of <Name>'s Problems, the psychological reality of phonological theories, practically anything in the philosophy of meaning, and so on.
Relevant to /r/AskHistorians, I'd put forward the Great Vowel Shift debate, and more broadly the Middle English period as a whole, as an alternative for linguistics. The Great Vowel Shift is a process in the history of the English Language in which all of the English long vowels apparently shifted, together, in a big chain: bite broke into a diphthong, and meet moved up to its articulatory position, then mate followed suit, etc. There are many charts you can find online for how it's supposed to work, but the general idea based on attestations and descriptive evidence is this: high vowels /i: u:/ (as in MEET, and GOOSE) dipthongised (producing BITE, and BOUT), and the middle-high vowels /e: o:/ (as in German geht, hoch or Geordie English mate, boat) raised up into the high vowel positions. Then, a little while afterwards^(this will be important later), the lower vowels followed suit, raising up one 'position' in turn.
However, there are a lot of problems with this account, largely centred on the inconsistent and incomplete nature of the data we have, hence the debate. One problem is that "a little while afterwards": some authors would suggest that it was centuries afterwards, which throws into doubt the entire concept of the GVS as a unified process. Beyond the time lag, there's also a location disconnect: while the high vowel changes happened first in the south, the low vowel changes seem to emerge in the north, and then later spread south. Then, within the first bit, we have a problem in determining whether or not the /i: u:/ changes happened before the /e: o:/ changes (a pull chain), or the other way around (a push chain).
In the field of early Judaism we have a number of hot debates going for the past twenty or so years, depending on subfield. But one of the most prominent is what Judaism actually is/was in our period (c. 300 BCE-200 CE). There are a number of related equally hot topics that derive from this: was Judaism of this period a single entity, or multiple? How do we account for Jews living in the diaspora, especially Alexandria and Babylon? What is the relationship between early Christ followers (until roughly 400 CE or even later) and Judaism? What does the category of Judaism have to do with the category of Hellenism? Are sects marginal Jews, or is the category of Judaism simply a hodgepodge of so-called sects?
All of these questions have fundamental impact on which sources we use, how we approach them, and what they mean for our understanding of Judaism as an entity at the time. Because so many of our sources for early Judaism tend to come from either the diaspora or the Dead Sea Scrolls (which are thought to have been preserved by a so-called sect), or from the early Jesus movement (including many/most/all of the texts in the New Testament) where one comes down on this issue radically changes our understanding of the extent and quality of Judaism, the development of holy writings as a concept, and the relationship between those writings and human practices in realms of justice, governance, cultic observance, etc.
I happen to come down on an expansive solution to this debate. If the source claims a Jewish voice, uses inarguable Jewish language and/or imagery, and does not otherwise separate itself from Judaism per se, it should be included in our evidence for Judaism of the period. But there are many other scholars who would argue for a very narrow definition, and hold that anything outside of that are outliers, evidence of marginal groups, or largely unimportant.
It's a bit old now--sort of died down in the last half-decade or so--but in the field German history 6-10 years ago, there was a significant (and sharp) debate about whether German colonialism (and colonial warfare, including genocidal colonial wars) led directly to Nazism, in the vein of Nazi racial thinking...and thus whether colonialism led to the Holocaust.
The argument for such a linkage (in abbreviated terms) goes like this: Germany acquired colonies in Africa (as well as the Pacific) in the mid-1880s, and this overseas imperialism helped to cement both ideas about German racial superiority vis-a-vis colonial subjects (whether Togolese or East Africans or Papua New Guineans), and also set in motion actual practices of racial discrimination (in law, warfare, domestic politics, colonial administration, etc.). German military officers in Southwest Africa even pursued a deliberate campaign of genocide against the Herero and Nama when those peoples rose in revolt 1904-7.
So these German historians have highlighted the linkages between idealized (and violently-imagined) plans to colonize Southwest Africa circa 1900 and plans to colonize Poland and 'the East' in the late 1930s, for instance. Others have pointed to more direct connections: Herman Goering's father had been a colonial governor of Southwest Africa, for example; while Carl Peters, a murderous racist hyper-nationalist sociopath who basically claimed German East Africa in the 1880s, was certainly a proto-Nazi (a Nazi before his time?) and was retroactively elevated into the Nazi Pantheon of "German Heroes" in the 1930s. And so on.
And many scholars of the history of race and racism see Nazi racial theory (and racist anthropology) as an outgrowth of colonial/imperial racial theory (and racist anthropology) of three decades earlier.
(The historians arguing these points include Jurgen Zimmerer, Shelly Baranowski, and many, many others.)
On the other hand:
Many German historians think these connections are stretched.
First, the Nazis--and especially Hitler--were completely disdainful of overseas "colonies" (decrying them as potential sites of race-mixing). The old German colonialists in the 1930s tried fruitlessly to hitch themselves to Nazi ideology in order to remain relevant... but failed utterly in this effort.
Moreover, the history of antisemitism in Central Europe is long--much older than the imperial/anthropological racism that it supposedly drew from. Scholars of racial thinking and/or racism also point out that the radical antisemitism that fed into early Nazi thinking was of a different order and degree than the racism of colonial/imperial hierarchy: radical antisemitism (that fed into National Socialism) was less about claims to cultural supremacy or practices of racial superiority and more about demanding the 'elimination' of (imagined) racial 'pollution'.
Most importantly, moreover, critics of the Windhoek-to-Auschwitz linkage argue that the scale and intensity of the Holocaust--an undertaking of mass murder that is of a magnitude difficult even for historians to grasp--is just not comparable to anything that came before.
(Historians in this camp include Birthe Kundrus, the late Wolfgang Wippermann, Robert Gerwarth, etc.)
My opinion? Everyone's right. On the one hand, there do seem to be definite, inescapable links between German colonial thinking/imperial racism and later Nazi racial thinking. On the other hand, there was nothing like (nor so horrifying) as the Holocaust--not even the most genocidal colonial wars. And there does seem something more 'endogenous' (for lack of a better word) to Central European murderous antisemitism... so it is not clear that we can draw such a direct line from Windhoek to Auschwitz.
In the world of Titanic studies, the current debate is what angle the stern reached before the split. For years, we viewed it was the roughly 45 degree tilt so commonly known, but more recent forensic evidence and computer simulations have labeled that impossible- claiming a list of 15-23 degrees is more likely. This seems to have taken hold as the new "official" version.
That, of course, flies in the face of hundreds of witnesses who say the opposite. Titanic researchers also have a history of telling survivors they were mistaken and then ending up with egg on their face- so I take all of this with a grain of salt. It's easy to poke holes in the new research.
What fuels all this is the ongoing debate of how exactly Titanic broke, which leads to a new revision of the final sinking, which circles back to how she broke- a cycle that's dependent on each other.
In the field of medieval studies, we're having VERY heated conversations of the use of the term 'Anglo-Saxon' to describe the peoples, period, and geography of early medieval (i.e. post-Roman, pre-conquest) England. After all, there is no documentation from the period that uses this designation nor do individuals of the period seem to classify themselves with that moniker. There are references to Angles, Saxons, and others (i.e. pagans, Christians, Romans, etc.), but 'Anglo-Saxon' is a wholly modern invention (and one that has some very unsettling historiographical perspectives). IMO, the debate is very much needed and speaks to how the field has long harbored white supremacist ideologies wrapped up as historical scholarship. For those who are curious on the matter, here are some sources:
- "Drop the term Anglo-Saxon as it is ‘bound up with white supremacy’, say academics"
- Statement on the Anglo-Saxon Discussion
- Medieval Studies Struggles Against White Supremacist Elements in the Field