I’ve been idly searching for a class explicitly concerning military history for some time now, and keep falling up short. There seems to be precious little armed combat involved in course offerings, unless it’s against minorities or women. Princeton will certainly teach you about the Armenian genocide, or Berkeley about rape in World War I, but judging from course catalogs, all wars are simply cultural now. You know, just variants on the age-old ACLU- Christian Coaltion struggle. Here are a few courses: Reading In The Cultural History Of The First World War (Yale) War and Society in the Modern World (Harvard) Cultural Reverbebrations of World War II (Harvard) The Second World War in Experience and Memory (Stanford) Culture and Society in the First World War (Berkeley) World War I in Experience and Memory (Berkeley) Without “culture”, “society” or “memory” there seems to be little occasion for the study of armed conflict. These items are surely important, and certainly deserve courses, but nearly every offering that I’ve seen appears to focus upon culture and society principally and war almost secondarily. I found one course in looking at about ten institutions that actually seemed directly concerned with conflict, as opposed, to say, the wartime experience of gypsy sutlers during the Franco-Prussian war, or anarcho-syndicalist prostitutes during the Russian civil war. Although such topics are clearly both more relevant and interesting, Duke for some reason has offered a course that seems actually about conflict: Western Warfare Since 1789. The instructor’s name, however, is listed as Dirk Bonker, which I can’t believe is real. I think they’re putting us on.