When I was an undergrad I wanted to study military history. My instructors just rolled their eyes. I get that now.
dapeters:
There has been and still is a very real bias against military history in the academic social sciences. In the 1975, this same Jay Luvaas of Allegheny College wrote in an anthology New Dimensions in Military History, his chapter opening with this sentence:
Military history, to echo Alexander Pope's description of women, "at best a contradiction still."
He details how the military, up until 1970s, pushed for military history to be taught in universities, only then to back away from it altogether, considering such curriculum "liberal arts" and not useful. After 1985, your experience wasn't at all unique, dapeters. University history departments, lacking any military men, still influenced by the Vietnam War culture, looked down on it. I know one eastern university academic who, while teaching the ACW put on a wargame on Gettysburg. His academy senate told him he shouldn't--and couldn't--because it was "teaching students to like war" and such battles were an "unimportant and unattractive aspect of history."
By then the Military felt they had wargames and simulations and didn't need to know anything from the past. [These are generalizations of course.]
Wargamers who read military history have this practical view of history: "How and why was it done" and search for 'magic bullets' like the military. I am sure you all have been frustrated to read a narrative of a battle and still have no idea why battlefield decisions were made… they just were.
The outcome of this evolution between the military and academia is: Historians were writing military history knowing little of the military and how they operated and used history, then or now, while military men were writing/using history knowing little about historical methodologies or research.
So, today, what are some of the problems with military history, particularly for wargamers?
1. As Luvaas notes: It is also true that no other field of history is under as much pressure as military history to provide "practical" answers to some current problem. If military history cannot provide such answers, why study it?
Because military men often fail to understand how history is developed or the methodologies, they fail to understand how any 'practical' answers are derived. Wargamers suffer from this lack too. Lavuus points to the possible solutions at the end of the article, but doesn't go far enough, only hinting at them with very one-note examples. Col. Hughes' Firepower is a great example of a military man failing in his historical analysis because of this lack of historical knowledge.
And because academics have this bias and often aren't military men, they fail to provide history that is useful to military men. They often provide a battle or campaign narrative that leaps over the whys and hows of an event because they don't understand what the military is doing.
2. Another current problem is the huge gap in access to sources between the pre and post internet world. Up until 1990, if anyone was going to do research they had to either go to a library or where the source was located or buy it. So did Chandler when he wrote his Napoleon's Campaigns in the 1966. He listed some 200 sources in his Bibliography. I have all those at my fingertips in PDF on my computer, plus hundreds of other primary and secondary sources…free for the most part. This has radically changed the nature of research, not only in the amount of, until now, unavailable sources, but in easy of access and sear volume. That situation makes Chandler's work, not bad or poorly done, but outdated in that much more information than he had is now available.
3. This actually has changed how military history is written or can be written. Unfortunately, like all technology, what it provides often takes a long time to utilize fully. I see that issue on TMP. We are only twenty years into this historical sources bonanza provided by the internet.
Lavuus wrote the article referenced here nearly thirty years ago. Lots have happen in military history over those three decades.