Few historians have as monumental of an impact on the field as Edward M. Coffman. Throughout his career, he has broken new ground in military history, advised many of the next generation’s top scholars, and pioneered oral history techniques interviewing some of the twentieth century’s most influential figures. His contribution to the field is so significant that the Society for Military History named its prize for the best annual dissertation after him. Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1929, Edward McKenzie Coffman was one of the most prolific historians of the United States Army until his death on September 16, 2020. After graduating from the ROTC program at the University of Kentucky Phi Beta Kappa with a journalism degree, Coffman served in the United States Army as an infantry officer in Japan and Korea between 1951 and 1953. After his stint in the Army, Coffman entered the graduate program at his alma mater, completing a master’s degree in 1955 and a Ph.D. in history in 1959.
After studying at the University of Kentucky under Gerhard Weinberg and his primary advisor Thomas C. Clark, Coffman published his dissertation as his first book titled, The Hilt of the Sword: The Career of Peyton C. March. While researching in the archives for his dissertation, he met and agreed to serve as a research assistant for Forrest Pogue on his multi-volume biography of George C. Marshall. Researching these books also provided ample material for his second book, A War to End all Wars. Coffman is noted as an early practitioner of oral history techniques and counts Douglas MacArthur, Emilio Aguinaldo, Benjamin Foulois, a cavalryman from Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and a black enlistee in the nineteenth century US Army as his interview subjects. Coffman taught at Memphis State University from 1957 until 1961, before moving to the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1961 until his retirement in 1992. During his career, he spent a year each at Kansas State, the United States Military Academy, the United States Air Force Academy, the Army War College, and the Command and General Staff College. According to his obituary, he is still the only civilian to serve as the distinguished military historian at West Point.
Coffman is a pioneer of the “new” military history that encouraged robust social approaches in the field. In a 1984 article in Military Affairs, Coffman advocated that this new approach include a shift in focus from “battlefields to military institutions, society, and thought, and how they fit in the currents of their times.” Though initially espoused in the 1960s, and expanded in the 1970s, the term “new” military history and its war and society approach to military history gained considerable ground during the 1980s in a series of articles. Armies are reflections of the societies and cultures from whence they came; they have distinct cultures and peoples and should be studied as such.
Responding to broader trends in the field, military historians next sought to incorporate cultural methodologies to provide further context to the conduct of war. These approaches focused on the human side of war — individual soldier social histories, studies of combat motivation, the influence of training, the civil-military relationship, the home front, and the influence of war on economics, technology, culture, and international relations. Thanks, in part, to Coffman’s influence, military history followed the rest of the discipline in shifting from events and individuals toward an interdisciplinary study of systems, structures, and processes. The study of warfare and its relationship with society evolved into different strands of cultural analyses while maintaining a focus on “drums and trumpets” traditional military history.
In his interpretation, Coffman saw that the new focus produced balanced perspectives on the military and its role in society. Coffman demonstrates the shift in military history in the 1970s and early 1980s through his writing. He sees the influence of contemporary society — the Vietnam War — as particularly evident in American Revolution scholarship published for the bicentennial in 1976. Demonstrating a more inclusive version of the discipline, Coffman also demonstrates how new perspectives on civilian institutions have led to a better understanding of the nation’s military past. He proposes studying the military’s professionalization during the late 19th century through the lens of Progressivism. He argues this approach will allow readers to see a complete picture of military thought during that time. Nowhere is this reflected more than in his books, in which Coffman elucidates the lives of soldiers and their families, how they reflected their society, and how they lived their daily lives. Coffman’s inclusive peacetime focus is in stark contrast to “traditional” earlier works that John Keegan referred to as “battle pieces.”
In his second monograph, The War to End All Wars, Coffman takes a comprehensive look at American involvement in the First World War. The War to End All Wars is still regarded as one of the best single-volume accounts of the American effort in the First World War. Coffman highlights multiple personalities and conflicts between the Commander in Chief of the Allied Expeditionary Force, John J. Pershing, and (eventual) Army Chief of Staff Peyton C. March. Throughout the book, Coffman combines in-depth archival research with oral history interviews of living veterans — including AEF staff officers. Perhaps one of his most significant sources, the papers of Hugh Drum, First Army Chief of Staff responsible for planning both the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives, he found in one of Drum’s grandsons’ attic. Coffman also made battle site visits to get a feel for the areas he wrote about, which helped make this book stand out. This book is the standard-bearer for anyone writing on the American military experience in the First World War due to its ability to combine operations with the social reality of the AEF.
Coffman’s next work advanced the conception of social military history by looking at soldiers’ day-to-day life in the United States Army. The first in a two-volume study of the United States Army in peacetime, The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784–1898, is a comprehensive look at soldiering from the republic’s founding to the Spanish-American War; this work demonstrates the efficacy and academic rigor of “new” military history. Coffman addresses the Army officer corps, regular enlisted ranks, and the women and children that made up camp followers and Army families. Coffman argues that while some problems, customs, and attitudes remained the same in the nineteenth-century army, the advance of the frontier, the rapid evolution of technology, and the pattern of maintaining a slightly larger army after each war emphasized change to those who experienced it.
His second volume of US Army social history, The Regulars: The American Army, 1898 to 1940, represents a continuation of Coffman’s themes in The Old Army. Coffman emphasizes the life and exploits of soldiers and their families through his skill with oral interviews. This time during the first half of the twentieth century before the mass mobilization of manpower during World War II. This framing is significant because it is the last period in which the army maintains a small professional standing force that grows for war and shrinks after. Coffman can dive deeper into the army’s workings and life during this pre-World War II and the global superpower era because of its narrower and more recent focus. This book earned the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History.
His final book, The Embattled Past: Reflections on Military History, represents a culmination of his life’s work. This book is a collection of both previously published and unpublished essays Coffman wrote throughout his career, reflecting on his contributions and the state of the field. Few historians manage to capture their life’s work in a contemplative and gracious tone that serves as a lesson for future scholars. Throughout the book, Coffman discusses how he became a military historian, his professional development, and his experiences working in the field. The highlight of the book is a transcript of his interview with Douglas MacArthur. The book serves as one part treatise on the state of the field, one part memoir, and one part instruction manual. Regardless, an essential capstone to a legendary career.
Throughout his distinguished career, Coffman advised and influenced a plethora of graduate students. Many of these students went on to have stellar careers in the academy, influencing the field in ways that reflect their training with Coffman. One of his earliest students, Marvin E. Fletcher, finished his Ph.D. training in 1968. Following in his advisor’s tradition, Fletcher published a social history of African Americans in the army between 1891 and 1917 in addition to a biography on Gen. Benjamin O. Davis. Richard H. Kohn also studied at Wisconsin, and while not a direct advisee of Coffman, has nonetheless carried on the mantle of American social military history. His book, The Eagle and the Sword, represents a definitive account of the late eighteenth century American army — from its exploits to its social composition. Kohn’s subsequent article, “The Social History of the American Soldier,” served as a prospectus for research that influenced Coffman and an entire generation of scholars towards new historical inquiry. Another early graduate student of Coffman’s is Timothy D. Nenninger. Nenninger’s dissertation, “The Fort Leavenworth Schools: Post Graduate Military Education and Professionalization in the US Army, 1880–1920,” traced the US Army’s evolution from frontier constabulary to a modern professional force. Nenninger’s most significant contribution to the field is as the premier archivist at the National Archives in College Park, where he oversees the modern military records branch, helping guide multiple generations of scholars’ research. Renowned Civil War historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Joseph T. Glatthaar, represents another of Coffman’s accomplished graduate students. In The March to the Sea and Beyond, Glatthaar shows a deft hand for just the sort of social military history Coffman writes in his two volumes on the American Army. Glatthaar’s subsequent works continue to advance social methodologies in military history, including exploring the dynamics of command relationships, the social dynamics between Black soldiers and white officers in the Union Army, and his twin books on General Lee’s Army.
Edward “Mac” Coffman had a monumental impact on military history during his career. A longtime member and contributor to the Society for Military History, he served as its president from 1983 to 1985 and was awarded the Samiel Eliot Morison Prize in 1990 — the society’s highest award. Coffman earned multiple awards from his time teaching for the United States Army, The Old Army earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he was later awarded the Spencer Tucker Award from ABC-Clio for “outstanding achievements in military history.” Reflecting on the state of the field in 1997, Coffman lamented the rest of the historical field’s receptiveness to military scholarship and its problematic relationship since the Vietnam Era, noting that neither he nor John Shy or Gerald Linderman had been replaced since their retirements. Nevertheless, his tone remained hopeful that with continued emphasis on the study of war and everything related to it, military history will continue to have a place in the broader historiography. His legacy and reach as a scholar is more apparent each day — from his advancement of the field into social horizons replete with rich oral histories, to his graduate students and their graduate students — his impact is still being felt across the discipline. Coffman is responsible for injected renewed vigor into the field of military history while redefining its focus and role in the academy.
