LogFAQs > #931632198

Pop history:
-doesn't have footnotes/endnotes
-isn't published by a university press
-is not critical of his/her own sources because the point is to sell a narrative

On the topic of military history...from historian Peter Paret who himself is an incredible historian specializing in politics, warfare, and strategy succinctly describes the problem with people who only focus on military history:

Is there another field of historical research (military history) whose practitioners are equally parochial, are as poorly informed on the work of their foreign colleagues...and show as little concern about the theoretical innovations and disputes that today are transforming the study and writing of history?"The events of a battle tell us nothing more than what happened, but never why. It serves to highlight an event but fails to place it in the contextual framework of the time. The decisions of one man on the battlefield tells us even less. It shines nothing on the society from whence the army came from, nor its enemy, and this is an important point. A military institution, its leaders, and its culture do not exist outside of the society it represents but is in fact informed and supported by it. To understand military actions, armies, soldiers, civilian contractors, writers, politicians and war we as historians must look past the drums and bugles of the national masculine rhetoric of organised state violence and great leaders, and instead focus on the societal constructs that made such actions successful. Conflict an integral part of social history is part of society and is, if we believe Clausewitz, an extension of a groups enforced cultural and political will over another. The generals, and the military institution they are a part of exercise that will and are influenced by it. Yet, they do not create it.
Thus, to understand the actions of armies and generals, we look to understand its military culture. This is where theories on the history of emotions, social militarisation, strategic culture, lieu de memoir, groupism, and ways of war (though these are somewhat infantile in their approach), as well as economic, cultural and social histories, enable us to explore the rationalisation and organisation of state killing.

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"Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities."