In the last chapter, we did not consider explicitly the status of military history at the nation’s most prestigious history departments. The top-twenty history departments are the largest and, arguably, the most diverse departments in the country in terms of faculty and course offerings. But does “diversity” include substantial representation of military history in its traditional or newer forms? To answer this question, we conducted an inquiry into the status of military history in the top-twenty history programs in the United States during 2008 and 2009. Looking at the top-twenty history departments gives us greater insight into the status of military history in the higher echelons of history departments, and also provides a comparison to the surveys discussed in the preceding chapter, which covered a broader swath of higher education.

We selected the departments from the 2008 U.S. News & World Report list. U.S. News & World Report lists are notoriously subject to criticism and second-guessing, but this is not important for our purposes; where a department stands on the list is immaterial to our inquiry, for we are interested in the group as a whole, not how the respective departments rank vis-à-vis one another; and the inclusion or exclusion of a few schools does not affect our inquiry. Furthermore, if some departments on the list should be replaced by other departments, a similar claim could be made about the new list. Our only requirement is that the U.S. News & World Report list approximates the upper echelons of research departments, even if the list is not infallible or definitive. The schools on this list are, in rank order (some are tied): Yale; Princeton; Berkeley; Harvard; Stanford; Chicago; Columbia; Michigan; Johns Hopkins; UCLA; Cornell; Wisconsin; North Carolina; Pennsylvania; Brown; Duke; Northwestern; Rutgers; Indiana; and Texas.