Battle of Foo versus Foo, Battle of. Other terminology

[RJensen]

I think the first criteria for CZ is reliability, and reliance on non-reliable public opinion is the wrong direction to head. Users should look to CZ for leadership and fresh ideas, I suggest.  Wikipedia is already available as an alternative to reliability.

[Paul Wormer]

It's quite common practice to refer to Hastings, Lepanto, Waterloo  and Pearl Harbor rather than Battle of Hastings, Battle of Lepanto, etc.  ("Lee lost at Gettysburg" sounds better to my ear than "Lee lost the Battle of Gettysburg.")  Few people use the term "battle of Pearl Harbor" or "battle of Ft. Sumter" or "Battle of Normandy."

If I hear "Waterloo" I think in the following order of:
  1. Waterloo  (Ontario)  and its university
  2. An Abba song
  3. A touristic place in Belgium
  4. A soccer club I belonged to as a boy
  5. A battle that was the end of the Napoleontic era.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

I think the first criteria for CZ is reliability, and reliance on non-reliable public opinion is the wrong direction to head. Users should look to CZ for leadership and fresh ideas, I suggest.  Wikipedia is already available as an alternative to reliability.

The singular of criteria is criterion, at least in the version of English with which I am familiar.

Public opinion is relevant in that we have to take account of what people will search for. I have no objection to fresh ideas and scholarly directions, but I hardly think that lazy abbreviations constitute such.

Thank you, Paul, for pointing out how much confusion is created by unnecessary abbreviations of events (or actualities) to their associated places -- and also, how low-ranking historical events are in people's minds.

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

Since battles are the stuff of military affairs (i.e., not merely history, but such things as doctrine and current status), it would seem that military, as well as historical practice, is relevant. Let us take, for example, the ambiguity about Pearl Harbor.

When I wrote an article on the U.S. Pacific Command, the regional operational command for a very large part of the world, it seemed appropriate to identify the location of its headquarters. Without going to the level of the specific base, it is clear and reasonable to refer to USPACCOM's headquarters as Pearl Harbor.

While there have been variations in name over the decades, the U.S. had a Pacific Command, under Admiral Husband Kimmel, on December 7, 1941. Kimmel was replaced by Admiral Chester Nimitz. Admiral Timothy Keating is the current Commander, U.S. Pacific Command, traditionally called CINCPAC.

In writing the history of Pacific Command, it is quite necessary to be able to refer to Pearl Harbor, the geographic location, without any ambiguity about the events of December 1941. While I agree this is usually clear within the context of a narrative, it certainly is not with respect to editing. It might be a bit strange, otherwise, to speak of a social visit by Kongo-class destoyers of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, and wonder why the base was not more devastated in December 1941 if the Mobile Striking Fleet had Kongos available. There were U.S. embargoes on metal and oil, after all, why would the U.S. have given Japan the plans for the Burke class destroyers (of which Kongos are a clone) and the AEGIS battle management system?

I have worked on a wide range of U.S. command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I) systems, and led military seminars on the topic. Invariably, one refers to current connectivity to Pearl Harbor from a communications standpoint, but the Battle of Pearl Harbor is the classic example of intelligence failure and is invariably discussed as a point of comparison for today's Indications & Warning techniques and CINCPAC Watch Center. 

This is only one example. When referring to Gettysburg during the Eisenhower Administration, there was an occasional need to disambiguate the historical battle(field) from the President's personal residence. 

Whether or not historians have a convention on the topic, I suspect that military practice is equally as important. I agree that there is no rigid standardization there, but it is quite common, in a monograph on C3I or on intelligence dissemination, to see references to the Battle of Pearl Harbor. Military history, preferably with a good beer, is a favorite discussion among professional soldiers. Anecdote not being the singular of data, I remember someone playing "what-if" when first briefed on the M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS), a tactical launcher of heavy artillery rockets and missiles. With a wondering tone, she said "Hmmm. One MLRS, with a crew of three, could have settled the Battle of Gettysburg, for either side, in about 15 minutes." We later scheduled a trip to the battlefield, but were unconcerned about fratricide from the 20th Maine or 15th Alabama, as we struggled up the slope of Little Round Top and wondered how either side could have maneuvered on that terrain.

[Larry Sanger]

I did answer Larry's argument on Talk:Gettysburg Campaign

No, I'm afraid you didn't.  You didn't respond to the point about searches within .edu websites, which thoroughly demolishes your claim that historians do not use the phrase "Battle of Gettysburg"; you didn't respond to my argument on analogy with philosophers using "Descartes" in place of "Rene Descartes"; and you did not provide any evidence that other historians really do think that "Battle of Gettysburg" is somehow old-fashioned as a name (again, how articles and books are titled plainly doesn't make your case).

You know, I'm not even saying you're wrong.  There's a way of interpreting what you've been banging on about that makes sense to me.  I'm just saying that you haven't made your case.  Moreover, I hope you'll notice that there are many people here who are waiting and willing to examine an actual, solid case.

I think the first criteria for CZ is reliability, and reliance on non-reliable public opinion is the wrong direction to head. Users should look to CZ for leadership and fresh ideas, I suggest.  Wikipedia is already available as an alternative to reliability.

Well, who could disagree with that?  But your purport, obviously, is that by using the phrase "Battle of Gettysburg," or perhaps the problem is that we have an article titled "Battle of Gettysburg" (I'm not sure which is more objectionable to you, Richard), we are somehow being less reliable.  That, however, is exactly what you have yet to prove, to any degree at all.

[RJensen]

In reply To Larry, I politely declined to attack his poor use of edu websites. He challenges me to respond so I will do so. He did a google search but he does not seem to have examined his results, merely claiming they refute me. I coauthored a whole book on the "Civil War on the Web," and actually am considered one of the half dozen leading experts on that topic. Yesterday I checked out all the websites on the first page of the edu listing Larry provided. They were poor quality in terms of reliability standards for CZ. None was by a historian. Most were undergraduate websites--over 10 million undergrads have edu websites after all!  Several were reprints of old books, and several were anonymous, and seem to be made by reenactors. In all, they failed the CZ reliability test.  That stuff is fine for Wikipedia but not for CZ. 

Larry’s analogy with Descartes is entirely hypothetical --it is not based on any research into titles whatever--and had nothing to do with the naming issue of battles.  I like my pets, but how our animal authors handle the names of articles about dogs is the business of people who know about the breeds, not those who write military history as I do.

Every historian knows the term "battle of Gettysburg," Those who publish on the topic rarely use that as a title. Proof? I looked at every article and book published since 2000 listed in ABC-CLIO's master listing. (I happen to be on the advisory board, because they think I'm an expert there too.)  (and anyone can use books.google for similar results.) Why? As I explained on the Gettysburg talk page, that is probably because of a shift in interpretive models that followed Coddington's 1968 book, a shift away from the "battle" toward larger issues.

Military historians have HUGE debates of the role of battles in their historiography; --the great majority emphasize a shift away from battles. see the cites in my article on Military History. (And yes I attend the military history conventions and listen to these debates.)  Larry has announced that he will not take my word for such matters, so I'll produce some quotations shortly for this group.

As for a CZ article on the Battle of Gettysburg, whatever the title, the article I wrote was an integrated history of the Gettysburg Campaign, and was so titled. It has a medium-sized bibliography but only one author used “Battle of Gettysburg” as a title (and that was because it was in a 1980s series of books about battles that all used similar titles.) Larry decided to split the CZ article apart on the basis of very little study of the topic. He followed no one's advice, but instead did the cutting and pasting and then issued a plea for people to help untangle the result.  In my opinion an editor in chief would be much more effective waiting to be a final arbitrator rather than being a warrior in these debates, AND then claiming to have the last word.

What the general public thinks about Gettysburg, and why, is a problem of interest that I did discuss in the article. I recommend people read some of the published scholarship before making statements about what the "public" supposedly thinks about the Civil War

I think that if CZ systematically uses old fashioned terminology it reduces its credibility among experts, who will immediately spot the problem.

[Hayford Peirce]

It may not be fully adequate for expert eyes, but at least I rewrote the second paragraph of the Battle of Gettysburg article to read, in its entirety:

The battle was the culmination of what historians now call the Gettysburg Campaign.

With a link to  Gettysburg Campaign, this ought to be a start to reaching a compromise promise that will satisfy all parties.

[RJensen]

As promised here are some quotes from historians re history of battles and the broader picture

1. “It was somewhat ironic that just as the battlefield narrative was achieving new standards of comprehensiveness and depth in the immediate postwar period (1950s), the whole discipline of military history was reshaped by new developments…. there was the inception of a "new military history" focused  on institutions, society, and thought rather than action.” ''Military History and the Military Profession'' (1992) ed. David A. Charters et al. p 47:

2. on sources of popular memory: “These Civil War battles have been preserved, remembered, or reconstructed in reenactments, memorials, paintings, prints, photographs, motion pictures, television programs, videos, and even computer games”  [ Kenneth W. Noe, George C. Rable and Carol Reardon. “Battle Histories: Reflections on Civil War Military Studies”  Civil War History. Volume: 53. Issue: 3. 2007. pp 229+.]


3 Edward Tabor Linenthal on the battlefield at Gettysburg: "Fixation on the battlefield itself played out in the extreme in battle reenactments, celebrated American martial courage and ignored the more profound legacy of the battle and the war."  [Noe 2007]

4. "Traditional battle histories are still of unending interest to a legion of popular writers and Civil War enthusiasts, those much maligned "buffs" who, by their fascination with reenactment and antiquarianism, have given Civil War military history a bad name among academics, who are contemptuous of the "Which regiment took the Peach Orchard?" approach to history." [Noe 2007]

5 "But most scholars, Gary Gallagher notes, were not thinking about battles; rather, they "have focused on nonmilitary topics such as diplomacy, politics, social trends, and economics.” [Noe 2007]

6. "What happened on the battlefields of the Civil War is very important to know and understand," David Blight states in Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (2002). But to know what happened on the battlefield is not nearly enough: "The legions of readers for Civil War military history should continue to hear the bugle call to knowledge of how the war was fought, which leaders were most pivotal in outcomes and why, which factors led to Union victory and Confederate defeat, and the values and motivations of soldiers and civilians in waging such a fundamental struggle for America's national existence." Thus, Blight looks "beyond the battlefield" and puts traditional battle history in context--and, it seems, in its place." [Noe 2007]

7 "The most pressing challenge facing Civil War scholarship today," Daniel Sutherland writes regarding the purpose of "The Great Campaigns of the Civil War," a series published by the University of Nebraska Press, "is the integration of various perspectives and emphases into a new narrative that explains not only what happened, why, and how, but why it mattered." This series "points to new ways of viewing military campaigns by looking beyond the battlefield and the headquarters tent to the wider political and social context with which these campaigns unfolded; it also shows how campaigns and battles left their imprint on many Americans, from presidents and generals down to privates and civilians." [Noe 2007]

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

Is there not an assumption here that social and political history are the only issues that are important, or at least to a category of scholars who have those as primary interests?  What about the scholars who specialize in the evolution of military doctrine?

If the Allied command in 1914 had utterly, completely absorbed the broad context of the origin of the American Civil War, but failed to understand that the tactical defense was exponentially stronger than that which Pickett attacked, would they have sent infantry -- and we must not forget the French conceit that red pantaloons were essential to morale -- into barbed wire entanglements covered by machine guns and indirect fire artillery?

I suggest, Sir, that both aspects are relevant, and you are making an argument for one particular area of study, but not addressing that there are other, legitimate, interests.

[RJensen]

In reply to Ed-- the intellectual history of military doctrine is a hot field, and definitely part of the "new military history."  For example specialized full-length books like, ''Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America, 1815-1945'' by Christopher Bassford (1994).

Azar Gat, an Israeli, does some of the best work, such as his sweeping survey  ''A History of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Cold War'' (2002), and he also did ''British Armour Theory and the Rise of the Panzer Arm: Revising the Revisionists'' (2000)

[Larry Sanger]

In reply To Larry, I politely declined to attack his poor use of edu websites. He challenges me to respond so I will do so. He did a google search but he does not seem to have examined his results, merely claiming they refute me. I coauthored a whole book on the "Civil War on the Web," and actually am considered one of the half dozen leading experts on that topic. Yesterday I checked out all the websites on the first page of the edu listing Larry provided. They were poor quality in terms of reliability standards for CZ. None was by a historian. Most were undergraduate websites--over 10 million undergrads have edu websites after all!  Several were reprints of old books, and several were anonymous, and seem to be made by reenactors. In all, they failed the CZ reliability test.  That stuff is fine for Wikipedia but not for CZ. 

Larry’s analogy with Descartes is entirely hypothetical --it is not based on any research into titles whatever--and had nothing to do with the naming issue of battles.  I like my pets, but how our animal authors handle the names of articles about dogs is the business of people who know about the breeds, not those who write military history as I do.

Every historian knows the term "battle of Gettysburg," Those who publish on the topic rarely use that as a title. Proof? I looked at every article and book published since 2000 listed in ABC-CLIO's master listing. (I happen to be on the advisory board, because they think I'm an expert there too.)  (and anyone can use books.google for similar results.) Why? As I explained on the Gettysburg talk page, that is probably because of a shift in interpretive models that followed Coddington's 1968 book, a shift away from the "battle" toward larger issues.

Military historians have HUGE debates of the role of battles in their historiography; --the great majority emphasize a shift away from battles. see the cites in my article on Military History. (And yes I attend the military history conventions and listen to these debates.)  Larry has announced that he will not take my word for such matters, so I'll produce some quotations shortly for this group.

As for a CZ article on the Battle of Gettysburg, whatever the title, the article I wrote was an integrated history of the Gettysburg Campaign, and was so titled. It has a medium-sized bibliography but only one author used “Battle of Gettysburg” as a title (and that was because it was in a 1980s series of books about battles that all used similar titles.) Larry decided to split the CZ article apart on the basis of very little study of the topic. He followed no one's advice, but instead did the cutting and pasting and then issued a plea for people to help untangle the result.  In my opinion an editor in chief would be much more effective waiting to be a final arbitrator rather than being a warrior in these debates, AND then claiming to have the last word.

What the general public thinks about Gettysburg, and why, is a problem of interest that I did discuss in the article. I recommend people read some of the published scholarship before making statements about what the "public" supposedly thinks about the Civil War

I think that if CZ systematically uses old fashioned terminology it reduces its credibility among experts, who will immediately spot the problem.

I'm afraid that it's gotten to the point with me that I'm quitting this debate in disgust.  I have better things to do than to continue to take pot-shots at transparently bad arguments.  I have done so, so far, in order to establish that I've done due diligence in making my decision.  Mission accomplished.  (I've also added a few new replies on the talk page of the Gettysburg Campaign article.)

[Tom Morris]

If I hear "Waterloo" I think in the following order of:
  1. Waterloo  (Ontario)  and its university
  2. An Abba song
  3. A touristic place in Belgium
  4. A soccer club I belonged to as a boy
  5. A battle that was the end of the Napoleontic era.

Mine is more like:
1. London train station, the Eastern wing of which I whizz through quite often
2. Place in Ontario.
3. Napoleonic battle

When I leave London, I go through Waterloo and - if I fall asleep on the train - end up in Hastings, passing through Battle, where the Battle of Hastings actually took place.

And I have to say, I think Larry Sanger is absolutely right about this. All these commas in article names are just plain ridiculous.

I just did Google searches for "battle of hastings" site:.ac.uk and "hastings, battle of" site:.ac.uk. 1,990 compared to eight.