Gleanings off the web

Jeremy Black and Francis Fukuyama provide two essential readings for my students on the web this week. Black’s piece on ‘Why teach military history’ is reprinted by Mark Grimsley on his blog – the piece says nothing very new but is a very good start point which covers most of the bases but manages to skip over the key point that war, the continuation of politics by other means, is still a phenomenon which can radically change the curse of history very quickly. Francis Fukuyama reflects on the old 1952 TV series Victory at sea on the editorial blog of American Interest Online, a publication about which I know nothing. It is a piece which touches on a frequent topic in my HI2002 class – the changing representations of war in print and film since WWII, and it has drawn a good deal of comment, some of which is worth reading.