Military and Historical
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Wikipedia-Article "Military"
A military or military force (n., from Latin militarius, miles "soldier") has seen many different incarnations throughout time. Early armies may have been just men with sharpened sticks and rocks, through time they have included advancements such as men mounted on horses, men wielding swords and other metallic weapons, the bow and arrow, siege weapons, to the advance of the musket which form the roots of the armed force of most nations we know today. In modern times people use vehicles and guns.
While military can refer to any armed force, it generally refers to a permanent, professional force of soldiers or guerrillas—trained exclusively for the purpose of warfare and should be distinguished from a sanctioned militia or a levy, which are temporary forces— citizen soldiers with less training, who may be 'called up' as a reserve force, when a nation mobilizes for total war, or to defend against invasion. The term military is often used to mean an army.
The doctrine that asserts the primacy of a military within a society is called militarism.
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Meaning of the word
- Also see: Armed forces
As an adjective, "military" is a descriptive property of things related to soldiers and warfare. It also refers to such context dependent terms such as military reserves which may indicate an actual unit deployable on command or the general sense, of a Nation States reserve troops available to or eligible for duty in its armed forces.
In formal British English, "military" as an adjective refers more particularly to matters relating to an army (land forces), as opposed to the naval and air force matters of the other two services.
In American English, "military" as an adjective is more widely used for regulations pertaining to and between all the armed forces like military procurement, military transport, military justice, military strength and military force.
Military procurement
Military procurement refers to common regulations and requirements for a ship or a detached unit to requisistion and draw on a base's facilies (housing, pay, and rations for detached personnel), supplies (most commonly food stocks or materials, and vehicles) by the service running a primary base; e.g. Army units detached to or staging through an air base, a vessel calling at a port near an army or air base, an army unit drawing supplies from a naval base.
Military transport
Military transport would pertain to an equipment trans-shipped via a sister service, or an individual detached for a technical school operated by a sister service, or the travel orders and authorization of such an individual to procede via a sister services vehicles, as well as the drawing (loan of) transportation assets (staff cars, Hum-Vees, military trucks) operating from the primary base command.
Military Justice
Military Justice, as in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Most nations have a separate code of law which regulates both certain activities allowed only in war, as well as provides a code of law applicable only to a soldier in war (or 'in uniform' during in peacetime).
The statutory laws set down by the United States Congress to apply to the individual conduct within any military force of the United States— these are the specific articles under which a soldier or sailor would be tried for infractions ranging from minor (Late Return, petty theft; ) to severe (Rape, Murder); this code is usually referred to by the acronym UCMJ.
Military strength
Military strength is a term that describes a quantification or reference to a nation's standing military forces or the capacity for fulfillment of that military's role. For example, the military strength of a given country could be interpreted as the number of individuals in its armed forces, the destructive potential of its arsenal, or both. For example, while China and India maintain the largest armed forces in the world, the US Military is considered to be the world's strongest.
Military Force
Military Force is a term that might refer to a particular unit, a regiment or gunboat deployed in a particular locale, or as an aggregate of such forces (e.g. "In the Gulf War the United States Central Command controled military forces (units) of each of the five military services of the United States.").
Military history
- Main article: Military history
Military history is often considered to be the history of all conflicts, not just the history of proper militaries. It differs somewhat from the history of war with military history focusing on the people and institutions of war-making while the history of war focuses on the evolution of war itself in the face of changing technology, governments, and geography.
Military history has a number of purposes. One main purpose is to learn from past accomplishments and mistakes so as to more effectively wage war in the future. Another is to create a sense of tradition which is used to create cohesive military forces. Still another may be to learn to prevent wars more effectively.
Military reserve
- Main article: Military reserve
Military reserve refers to specific trained pre-organized forces operating as an on call basis from the main military force.
In the United States, the Reserves forces such as the qunit mission profile (e.g. Many 'Military Police' trained regular reserve units and ' National Guard units' were mobilized during the Iraq war, as were units specializing in supply, transport, engineering, et al.) These various volunteer manned units are always 'on call' and refered to as the ready reserves but might be augmented by the Inactive Reserves in time of dire emergency or total war under the United States model— the inactive reserve is composed of all former serving members of any of the US Armed Forces of military age. Individuls in this class are former members of the regular and ready reserve forces, that have opted to discontinue service in any of those organized bodys; in general, the inactive reserves are not an organized force, but a resource of trained manpower that can be mobilized similar to calling up a levy but in theory with the training of a militia. Individuals in the inactive reserves with specialized talents are from time to time also recalled into service, albeit rarely, one exception being the ongoing current need for Military Police and Quartermasters in Iraq.
Military science
- Main article: Military science
Military science concerns itself with the study and of the diverse technical, psychological, and practical phenomena that encompass the events that make up warfare, especially armed combat. It strives to be an all-encompassing scientific system that if properly employed, will greatly enhance the practitioner's ability to prevail in an armed conflict with any adversary. To this end, it is unconcerned whether that adversary is an opposing military force, guerrillas or other irregulars, or even knows of or utilizes military science in return.
Specific militaries
See also Category:Militaries.
Military Alliances
See also
- Jane's Information Group provides contemporary info on Trade in Military Equipment.
- Martial art
- Militaria
- Military rule
- Special Air Service
- Stratfor provides analysis of geopolitics.
- Army
- List of countries by military expenditures
- List of countries without an army
Reference
Major books for understanding the role of the military, and the civilian leadership of the military.
- Why the Allies Won (WWII} by Richard Overy ISBN 0-393-03925-0
- Many books about WWII, and other wars, focus on the military battles and campaigns. This one focuses on support roles that gave the Allies the edge when the Axis seemed to be ahead in so many senses.
- There was a structure of Scientific Management in the USA, unheard of in the Axis Powers.
- Russia relocated their industry far from the front.
- Axis nations military, particularly in Japan, had an adversarial relationship that was more important to them than the best interests of their nations.
- Allied interception of coded radio signals, and strict secrecy of what they learned from this.
- Allied sophisticated deception.
- Misleading Germany about the Normandy invasion.
- Commando raids were exceptionally successful, such as in figuring out how German Radar functioned, so as to get the correct dimensions for Chaff to Spoof it, but they were trumpeted as failures so as not to tip off German Military Intelligence about the purpose of the raids.
- In Nazi Germany no reputable Aryan wanted to have anything to do with science that had been invented by a Jew. This is one reason why Hitler never developed the Atomic Bomb.
- The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Pentagon by "Jeff Cateau" and Michael Levin. An entertaining explanation of the U.S. military and how it is run.
- Get Yamamoto by Burke Davis, Published by Random House in 1969. During WW II, the USA intercepted top secret communications about a tour of forward bases to be conducted by Admiral Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese Navy. This led to a successful mission to intercept his flight and kill him, the theory being that the Japanese would be handicapped without his leadership.
Periodicals
Wikipedia-Article "Historical"
- For other uses, see History (disambiguation).
- History studies the past in human terms. For the science of locating events in time, unrelated to humans, see Chronology.
History is a term that refers to information about the past. When used as the name of a field of study, history refers to the study and interpretation of the record of human people, families, and societies. Knowledge of history is often said to encompass both knowledge of past events and historical thinking skills.
Traditionally, the study of history has been considered a part of the humanities. However, in modern academia, history is increasingly classified as a social science, especially when chronology is the focus.
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Classifications
- Main article: Historical classification
Because history is such a large subject, organization is crucial. While several writers, such as H.G. Wells and Will Durant & Ariel Durant, have written universal histories, most historians specialize.
There are several different ways of classifying historical information:
- Chronological (by date)
- Geographical (by region)
- National (by nation)
- Ethnic (by ethnic group)
- Topical (by subject or topic)
Some people have criticized historical study, saying that it tends to be too narrowly focused on political events, armed conflicts, and famous people and that deeper and more significant changes in terms of ideas, technology, family life and culture warrant more attention. Recent developments in the practice of history have sought to address this.
Historical records
Historians obtain information about the past from various kinds of sources, including written or printed records, coins or other artifacts, buildings and monuments, and interviews (oral history). For modern history, primary sources may include photographs, motion pictures, and audio and video recordings. Different approaches may be more common in the study of some periods than in others, and perspectives of history (historiography) vary widely.
Historical records have been maintained for a variety of reasons, including administrative (such as censuses, tax records, commercial records), political (glorification or criticism of leaders and notable figures), religious, artistic, sporting (notably the Olympics), genealogical, personal (letters), and entertainment.
History and prehistory
Traditionally the study of history was limited to the written word. However with the rise of academic professionalism and the creation of new scientific fields in the 19th and 20th centuries came a flood of new information that challenged this notion — archaeology, anthropology and other social sciences were opening new historical perspectives. Some traditional historians questioned whether these new studies were really history, since they were not limited to the written word, and thus a new term was coined, prehistory to separate these fields from history.
In the twentieth century the artificial division between history and prehistory was proving problematic. Historians were looking beyond traditional political history narratives with new approaches such as economic, social and cultural history, all of which relied on various sources of evidence. Additionally, "prehistorians" such as Vere Gordon Childe were using archaeology to explain important events in areas that were traditionally in the field of history. The distinction was also criticized because of its implicit exclusion of certain civilizations, such as those of Sub-Saharan Africa and pre-Columbian America from the historical record. In recent decades the barriers between history and prehistory have thus largely disappeared.
Today there is no generally accepted definition for when history begins. In general history is today seen as the study of everything that is known about the human past (but even this barrier is being challenged by new fields such as Big History). Sources that can give light on this past such as oral history, linguistics, and genetics, have all become accepted by mainstream historians.
Etymology
The term history entered the English language in 1390 with the meaning of "relation of incidents, story" via the Old French historie, from the Latin historia "narrative, account." This itself was derived from the Ancient Greek ἱστορία, historía, meaning "a learning or knowing by inquiry, history, record, narrative," from the verb ἱστορεῖν, historeîn, "to inquire."
This, in turn, was derived from ἵστωρ, hístōr ("wise man," "witness," or "judge"). Early attestations of ἵστωρ are from the Homeric Hymns, Heraclitus, the Athenian ephebes' oath, and from Boiotic inscriptions (in a legal sense, either "judge" or "witness," or similar). The spirant is problematic, and not present in cognate Greek eídomai ("to appear").
ἵστωρ is ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European *wid-tor-, from the root *weid- ("to know, to see"), also present in the English word wit, the Latin words vision and video, the Sanskrit word veda, and the Slavic word videti, as well as others. (The asterisk before a word indicates that it is a hypothetical construction, not an attested form.) 'ἱστορία, historía, is an Ionic derivation of the word, which with Ionic science and philosophy were spread first in Classical Greece and ultimately over all of Hellenism.
In Middle English, the meaning was "story" in general. The restriction to the meaning "record of past events" in the sense of Herodotus arises in the late 15th century. In German, French, and indeed most languages of the world other than English, this distinction was never made, and the same word is used to mean both "history" and "story". A sense of "systematic account" without a reference to time in particular was current in the 16th century, but is now obsolete. The adjective historical is attested from 1561, and historic from 1669. Historian in the sense of a "researcher of history" in a higher sense than that of an annalist or chronicler, who merely record events as they occur, is attested from 1531.
Historiography
See full article: Historiography
Historiography is the study and analysis of history through a belief system or philosophy. Although there is arguably some intrinsic bias in historical studies (with national bias perhaps being the most significant), history can also be studied from ideological perspectives, such as Marxist historiography.
A form of historical speculation known commonly as virtual history ("counterfactual history") has also been adopted by some historians as a means of assessing and exploring the possible outcomes if certain events had not occurred or had occurred in a different way. This is somewhat similar to the alternative history genre of fiction.
Historical methods
Historians of note who have advanced the historical methods of study include Leopold von Ranke, Lewis Bernstein Namier, Geoffrey Rudolph Elton, G.M. Trevelyan and A.J.P. Taylor. During the 1960's historians transitioned from epic nationalistic narratives that tended to glorify the nation or individuals to more realistic chronologies. French historians introduced quantitative history, using broad data to track the lives of typical individuals. American historians, motivated by the civil rights era, focused on formerly overlooked ethnic, racial, and socio-economic groups. In recent years, postmodernists have challenged the validity and need for the study of history on the basis that all history is based on the personal interpretation of sources. In his book In Defense of History, Richard J. Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University, defended the worth of history.
The lessons of history
In addition to being an interesting topic of study in its own right, historians often claim that the study of history teaches valuable lessons with regard to past successes and failures of leaders, economic systems, forms of government, and other recurring themes in the human story. From history we may learn factors that result in the rise and fall of nation-states or civilizations, motivations for political actions, the effects of social philosophies, and perspectives on culture and technology.
One of the most famous quotations about history and the value of studying history, by Spanish philosopher, George Santayana, reads: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The German Philosopher. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel remarked in his Philosophy of history that: "What history and experience teach us is this: that people and government never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it." This was famously paraphrased by the British statesman, Winston Churchill into: "The one thing we have learned from history is that we don't learn from history."
Winston Churchill alluded to another philosophy of history when he quipped, "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." Churchill's joking comment is a variant of the famous: "History is written by the victors." In this view, the winners in human conflicts get to put their own spin on historic events.
An alternative view is that the forces of history are too great to be changed by human deliberation, or that, even if people do change the course of history, the movers and shakers of this world are usually too self-involved to stop to look at the big picture.
Yet another view is that history does not repeat itself because of the uniqueness of any given historical event. In this view, the specific combination of factors at any moment in time can never be repeated, and so knowledge about events in the past can not be directly and beneficially applied to the present. This approach is challenged in less meta-historical terms with the notion that historical lessons can and should be drawn from events, and that careful generalizations of unique events is useful. For example, emergency response to natural disasters can be improved, even though each individual disaster is, in itself, absolutely unique.
See also
- Historian: A person who studies history.
- Pseudohistory: term for information about the past that falls outside the domain of mainstream history (sometimes it is an equivalent of pseudoscience).
Methods and tools
- Contemporaneous corroboration: A method historians use to establish facts beyond their limited lifespan.
- Prosopography: A methodological tool for the collection of all known information about individuals within a given period.
- Historical revisionism: Traditionally been used in a completely neutral sense to describe the work or ideas of a historian who has revised a previously accepted view of a particular topic.
Particular studies and fields
- Archaeology: study of prehistoric and historic human cultures through the recovery, documentation and analysis of material remains and environmental data.
- Archontology: study of historical offices and important positions in state, international, political, religious and other organizations and societies.
- Art History: the study of changes in and social context of art.
- Cultural history: the study of culture in the past.
- Diplomatic history: the study of international relations in the past.
- Economic History: the study of economies in the past.
- Futurology: study of the future: researches the medium to long-term future of societies and of the physical world.
- History painter: painters of historical motifs and particularly the great events.
- Military History: The study of warfare and wars in history and what is sometimes considered to be a sub-branch of military history, Naval History.
- Paleography: study of ancient texts.
- Political history: the study of politics in the past.
- Psychohistory: study of the psychological motivations of historical events.
- Social History: the study of societies in the past.
Other
- Changelog: log or record of changes made to a project, such as a website or software project.
- Human evolution: process of change and development, or evolution, by which human beings emerged as distinct species.
- Social change: changes in the nature, the social institutions, the social behavior, or the social relations of a society or community of people.
Lists
References
- Asimov, Isaac; Asimov's Chronology of the World; Harper Collins, 1991
- Durant, Will & Ariel; The Lessons of History; MJF Books, 1997, ISBN#1567310249.
- Durant, Will & Ariel; The Story of Civilization; 11 vols., Simon & Schuster.
- Evans, Richard J.; In Defence of History; W. W. Norton (2000), ISBN 0393319598
- Gonick, Larry; The Cartoon History of the Universe; Doubleday, vol. 1 (1990) ISBN#0-385-26520-4, vol. II (1994) ISBN#0-385-42093-5, W. W. Norton, vol. III (2002) ISBN#0-393-05184-6.
- Wells, H. G.; An Outline of History; Reprint Services Corporation (1920), ISBN#0781206618.
- The World Almanac and Book of Facts (annual); World Almanac Education Group; 2004 ISBN 0-99687-910-8.
External links
- American Historical Association official website
- History Forum Simaqian Studio - Online community for world history discussion
- History Forum - A world history discussion community
- History Forum - A history forum for teens, focusing on modern history as well as debating.
- History Forums - History is Happening -Discuss all historical topics, as well as current events, in an academic setting.
- "Timelines of History" - A collection of timelines organized by time, location and subject matter
- Internet History Sourcebooks Project See also Internet History Sourcebooks Project. Collections of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use.
- History Article from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
- History of Nations - Offers a history of every nation in the world.
- World History Web Resources: An Annotated Guide - Librarian Michael Lorenzen gives advice on history searching on the Web.
- Free History - A search engine that indexes sites that deal with history
- An example of Family History
- Wikibooks:History
- World History - a very large database of articles covering most time periods, with a single unified timeline of historical events worldwide.
- World History Blog - Blog that features different aspects of world history