Fireside Friday, November 15, 2024

Hey folks, Fireside this week! For the musing this week, I want to talk about, at least for a humanities field, what ‘research support’ from a university means and why it is valuable, but before we get to that, I just want to make a note going forward. In particular, there have been a few requests for me to revisit my “1933” post in light of the election; this I am not going to do. I set out my analysis there and I stand by it. Elections make presidents; they do not make bad ideas good. But this is a history blog and I have no intention of turning it into just another politics blog by belaboring the same point endlessly, so it is back to history-and-pop-culture we go. The next topic I expect to tackle is another ACOUP Senate vote winner on “the Problem with Sci-fi Body Armor,” particularly looking at rigid armors (‘hardsuits’) designed to resist projectile or contact weapons and how they compare to the history of attempts to rigidly armor the human body.

Ollie (top) and Percy (below) sounding the alarm for the Defense of the Pumpkin from the neighborhood squirrels. They petitioned loudly to be allowed to sortie outside, but alas, permission was not granted (they are indoor cats).

But on to this week’s musing I want to talk a bit about the role that universities fill in making research in the humanities possible. As I noted back with “How Your History Gets Made,” academic history research forms the foundation for basically all of the ‘history products,’ as it were, that you consume: it is the fundamental source of the knowledge school textbooks and curricula are based on and what popular history (be that books, podcasts, or videos) rely on – or at least in theory should rely on. And I’ve noted that with a few exceptions, the vast majority of that primary research happens within the institutional structure of the university.

Now one argument one hears is, “well, the past doesn’t change, so why do we need new historical research?” And there are two linked answers to that question. The first, of course, is that historical methods can improve over time. Regular blog readers will note that again and again we’ve come back in various ways to the archaeological turn in ancient history, for instance (the ‘revenge of the archaeologists’), because archaeology provides a new set of methods and new bodies of evidence with which to understand the past which, in many cases, has radically altered our understanding of it. The other answer is that as times change, the questions we ask of the past change too: we grow interesting in different aspects of the past, ones which older scholarship may not be well suited to answer. Fresh research is necessary to provide clear answers to those new questions.

But the question I really want to tackle is “why stick with the University as the institution for this work?” This question often comes up in the context of my own concerns about the priorities of many academic departments and my own struggles to find a permanent place within the academy. And the answer is fairly simple: there is really no other space in our society currently providing the resources for this kind of research can take place at any sort of scale.

This sometimes comes as a surprise to folks because they don’t generally think of historical research and publication as the kind of activity which requires resources. Unlike the sciences, we do not have large, visible laboratory buildings with expensive bespoke equipment and indeed it is the case that historical research is much cheaper than research in many other fields. But cheaper doesn’t mean free. So what are the major resources that universities, especially research universities, provide for historical investigation?

Well, the first is simply put, a steady job. Historical research is generally slow and painstaking. New primary research projects can often take years to complete, which means historians often need an institution which is willing to take a long view of their research work and accept, “this project will produce something in four or five years” as an answer. Of course in the university, the trade-off with this is teaching, but research-oriented institutions generally set much lower teaching loads than pure teaching institutions,³⁹⁷ which enables the long research times necessary to do original historical work. Research universities often provide research resources as part of the hiring package: often a mix of ‘startup’ funds, regular research and travel funds and sometimes teaching load reductions designed to allow for scholars to produce research; one simply doesn’t get those resources in most other sorts of jobs.

But that’s not the only think a university as an institution provides in order to make historical research possible. Most universities (again, especially research universities) also make research funds available. While historians don’t require labs (usually), a lot of the things we do cost money. Modern historians doing archive work generally need to travel physically to archives and do extended work there, which can be quite expensive. Presenting work at conferences likewise involves travel costs, lodging and conference fees; presenting a conference paper can pretty easily cost $1,000 or more once airfare (as cheap as possible), hotels and conference and professional association registration (often a few hundred dollars each) are accounted for.³⁹⁸ Research funds can also, of course, go to paying for research assistants, who might assist with things like sifting through large numbers of documents.

Publication can also be expensive. Humanities journals don’t charge fees to publish articles (as I am told some journals in the sciences do), but nor do they pay authors anything. That can become a complication is an article requires, for instance, diagrams or maps that need to be professionally produced or licensed images that need to be paid for: those costs are paid by the author, not the journal (under the assumption that the academic has a pool of research money they can access to handle those costs).³⁹⁹ The same is generally true for academic books: any images, maps or artwork will consume the generally very small ‘advance’ for a book almost instantly. The reason here is fairly simple: academic books have small audiences and small print runs (and thus, sadly, high costs), so the publisher simply isn’t making enough money to support the cost of acquiring the rights to lots of images or maps and so on.⁴⁰⁰ Consequently it is the university – through research funding – that supports those costs. Of course many universities also run university presses which specialize in publishing academic research, though one is not obliged (or even at all expected) to publish with their own university press.

But for a historian perhaps the most important component of the university’s research support and the least replaceable is the university library. Facilitating humanities research requires libraries to have massive collections, far beyond what any local library would stock. I currently have access to two university library systems (UNC and NCSU). The NCSU library is a solid, middle-tier research library with 4.4 million volumes; the UNC library is the 17th largest research library in the United States with just shy of ten million volumes. That huge sweep is necessary because academics of all kind build their research on the research that has gone before and without access to that sort of material it becomes difficult or even impossible to really do cutting edge research. Beyond the huge volume counts, university libraries generally run remarkably thorough inter-library borrowing (ILB or ILL) systems, so that even if they don’t have a book or volume, they can get it.

By way of example, one of my chapters in this book project is on Gallic (La Tène) weapons. But to be able to push our knowledge of these weapons, one really needs access to the publications of the largest collections of them, which are not going to be in most libraries in the United States, for the simple reason that they’re not in English (nearly all of them are in French). Many of those works were very limited run publications for a small number of specialists and are thus hard to find; so far as I know, for instance, T. Lejars’ La Tène: La Collection Schwab (Bienne, Suisse) (2013), what I’d argue is the best and most up-to-date publication on La Tène weapons, has exactly one library copy in the United States. So a historian working on this topic needs either a library willing to track down and buy a copy (expensive), a research budget which will allow them to go to the Library of Congress (where the copy lives) to look at it, or a library that can ILB the copy from the Library of Congress (which is what I did) so that they can look at it.⁴⁰¹ Simply put, your local library doesn’t have those resources.

Now you might ask, why not buy copies of these books yourself? Part of the answer, of course, is that I do; in any given year I spend around a thousand dollars or so on books. I can do that, of course, entirely due to the support of my fine amici over at Patreon; my adjunct teaching pay wouldn’t cover my basic cost of living, much less my book-buying. But even a low-four-digit book budget isn’t enough to cover all of the research needs of a large project. The running bibliography for my current book project is, at present, about 6-700 works long.⁴⁰² Many of those works are out of print, some are ruinously expensive (hundreds of dollars) and of course many of them exist as articles in journals with subscription fees also in the hundreds of dollars (or behind online subscriptions to things like JSTOR which also cost hundreds of dollars while being less comprehensive than the subscriptions a university library would have).⁴⁰³

And that doesn’t touch on the sorts of specialized resources university libraries might also have: collections of local documents and archives, access to huge repositories of old newspapers (often on microfilm, which of course requires specialized equipment to view), potentially rare books and manuscripts, or other specialized resources. UNC’s Davis Library, for instance, has a epigraphy room which not only has a bunch of important (and very expensive) multi-volume epigraphic series, it also has collections of ‘squeezes’ – paper impressions of inscribed stone surfaces which are both an important way to examine epigraphic texts but also an essential teaching tool for teaching the art of epigraphy.

There simply isn’t a comparable set of institutions that have these sorts of resources or the incentive to develop them. Now that’s not to say that this means all good history research happens inside of a university (though if you look, you will find many of your favorite independent scholars do in fact have some sort of university affiliation that gives them some access to at least library resources). But without that structure, it is hard to see more than a tiny fraction of historical work being done, which is part of why the decline of academic history is so concerning.

I suppose there is a bit of irony in me writing all of this because my own research, while by no means fully independent is mostly ‘self-funded.’ I have sometimes had access to small amounts of travel funds (almost never enough to pay even for a single conference trip, much less a research trip), but never research funds, nor any kind of supported research time since leaving grad school.⁴⁰⁴ Though of course I must note that this project would have been utterly impossible without the continued access to the UNC library system, kindly extended by the history department there.⁴⁰⁵ But I think this is a case where not having the thing brings home how important that thing is: self-funding research through online writing for the public is simply not an option for most academics. Indeed, the number of even minimally self-supporting public-facing history projects is extremely small (as in, this is the only self-supporting public ancient history project I know of). So if we want to keep the study of the past alive in a rigorous way, there aren’t currently any good alternatives to keeping history alive in the university.

On to recommendations:

First, some updates on the War in Ukraine. War on the Rocks has another pair of podcasts in their The Russia Contingency series (alas, behind the paywall!) where Michael Kofman, Rob Lee and Dara Massicot discuss the current state of the war, having just come back from a research trip to Ukraine. A shorter update between Kofman and Ryan Evans is outside of the WotR paywall. I’ll be frank, its grim listening: Russia is taking high losses but also slowly – very slowly – grinding forward. The Ukrainian front isn’t collapsing, but the Ukrainian Armed Forces are under a lot of pressure.

Meanwhile, at Foreign Policy, Marc R. Dovore and Alexander Mertens lay out an analysis of Russia’s ability to continue the war and conclude that Putin is rapidly approaching some hard limits in his ability to continue fighting. This is one of those cases where no matter which army you look at in the war, you are left thinking, “they can’t keep this up.” In Russia’s case, Putin’s tremendous war-spending is building up bills in the form of inflation and sky-high interest rates that will come due, while at the same time his war economy cannot replace the equipment or men he’s losing; it is unclear when the last of the old Soviet inheritance in vehicles, barrels, shells and so on will be spent, but it seems pretty clear that it will be some time in 2025 at the current rate. Likewise, a country putting 10,000 North Korean troops on its front lines is not one that is in a good manpower situation.⁴⁰⁶ At the same time British intelligence is estimating Russia’s offensives are costing them something on the order of 1,500 losses (KIA and WIA) per day, which is 50% higher than the Ministry of Defense’s reported recruitment rate and that recruitment rate is unsustainable.

Personally, my view is that Putin’s aggression here is both an effort to try to diminish support for Ukraine by convincing NATO the war is unwinnable and to set conditions in terms of territory held for negotiations if/when Ukraine is forced to negotiate. Instead, I think NATO ought to make clear to Putin that the aid that keeps Ukraine in the fight can outlast him by expanding aid, so that when negotiations come – and they are, I think, coming (slowly) – Putin is forced to bargain from a position of weakness to end a war he can no longer afford, rather than from a position of strength. Russia isn’t losing 1,500 men a day and putting North Koreans in the front line because they’re winning, but because they are not winning (albeit also not losing) and hoping to bluff their way to a favorable conclusion. Call the bluff, finish the job.

Via this month’s Pasts Imperfect newsletter, I also want to note the release of an open access translation of the Enuma Elishby J. Haubold, S. Helle, E. Jiménez and S. Wisnom. If you are unfamiliar, the Enuma Elish is the Babylonian creation myth, dating to the Bronze Age (scholars debate as to when in the Bronze Age, probably in the late second millennium) which narrates both the creation of the earth and humans and also the rise of the Babylonian god Marduk to be king of the gods. It’s a pretty classic text and some of its literary motifs (creation understood as a succession of gods, challenged by monsters, for instance) make it into later Hittite⁴⁰⁷ and Greek mythology. And now you can read a complete translation (it also has the original text, for those readers of Akkadian), with a bunch of scholarly apparatus in chapters afterwards, for yourself, for free.

Finally, for this week’s book recommendation, I’m going to recommend Kathryn H. Milne’s recent Inside the Roman Legions: The Soldier’s Experience 264 – 107 BCE (2024). This is a book I had greatly anticipated and had dearly hoped would realize its promise…and it did! Inside the Roman Legions presents pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: a conscription-to-dismissal portrait of what it was like to serve in a Roman legion during the Middle Republic. The chronological focus alone is valuable, because books on the Roman army for popular audiences tend to focus, when they treat the soldier’s experience at all, on the imperial period, but this is a book about what it was like to serve during the period of Rome’s great wars with Carthage, Macedon and the Seleucids, the periods of rapid Roman conquest.

Milne anchors this narrative around a single figure in Livy’s history, Spurius Ligustinus, who in the context of Livy’s narrative gives a fairly complete rundown of his military career (Livy 42.34). Ligustinus could be a literary invention (as, indeed, Milne notes), but he could well have been a real person and in any case Livy finds his career plausible. And precisely because his career, stretching from 200 to 167, sits in the period where we have Livy basically complete, we can match up all of his campaigns and enlistments with known campaigns and commanders. That in turn provides the foundation for a narrative that essentially walks through the experience of being in the Roman legions: pre-conscription social militarism, conscription, assembling the army, marching, training, discipline, three chapters on pitched battle and finally a chapter on dismissal. There’s even a conclusion which gives a good, nuanced discussion of how the Roman army changed in the first century, pushing back on the debunked notion of a single moment of ‘Marian reforms.’ In a sense, Milne moves beyond a mere ‘Face of Battle‘ treatment of the Roman army to something larger, a ‘Face of Campaign’ treatment and the book is richer for the expanded scope.

I have some quibbles with a few of Milne’s assessments – these will be more detailed in a Journal of Military History review of the book I have coming out – but they are quibbles and the quibbles are really few. This is a strong book I’d feel confident recommending to students or enthusiasts without reservation. I will note that while the book provides a really helpful table of Ligustinus’ career showing each campaign, it could have really used some maps and pictures (although the period-accurate Middle Republican legionary on the cover made me happy).⁴⁰⁸ The book is well furnished with notes and a strong bibliography too which reflect the solid expertise and research that went into producing it – a book produced by a real expert rather than a well-intentioned but blundering enthusiast.⁴⁰⁹ Overall, I think alongside Soldiers & Ghosts, Milne’s Inside the Roman Legions is going to be one of the standard books I recommend first to students looking to get a handle on the army of the Roman Republic.