by David Greenberg

Reading David Bell's post about military history, another thought occurs to me. Every day, social, political, and cultural historians pay heed to the importance of war. It's in what we call by the ungainly name periodization. In American history, for example, we almost all treat the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II as important ruptures in the flow of events, when war, directly or indirectly, brought about changes in government, in the size and power of the state, in America's world position, in laws about racial equality, in the place of women in society, in attitudes toward ethnic minorities, even in literary and cultural fashions. It's not a matter of historians liking or disliking war; in the very way we sculpt the American past, we pay tribute to its importance.