Back in July Richard set off a lively discussion about the place, desirable and actual, of military history in education with his post "When did military history go out of fashion?" In the course of this discussion I mentioned that we had invited a distinguished military historian to write a short article making the case for military history as an important piece of the high school curriculum. This has recently been published in RHI , the second issue of an annual magazine for educators published by our North American distributors, Random House. Scroll down the contents list, which begins impressively with "Thoughts on the Duty and Power of Citizenship" by Barack Obama and look out for Professor Dennis Showalter's powerful contribution, "Teaching War - Providing a Different Perspective to Engage and Challenge Your Students", downloadable like the rest of the magazine.
Random House do not publish textbooks but they have an enormous amount of valuable material to offer teachers and students for classroom and library use and personal study, and RHI is proving very effective as a showcase for all of this, including our own Essential Histories. Working with the Random House Academic Marketing team on book exhibits at teacher conventions and meeting teachers and professors, I have been able to establish for myself that the cause is not hopeless, but there is a lot of persuading to be done! RHI gets a great welcome and reaches a wide audience in the educational community. We are delighted and honoured to feature in it and to have the flag carried for military history, and Osprey, by our good friend Dennis Showalter.