What we stand for...
The AMG is dedicated to a new military history that is oriented to cultural and social historical approaches. In reaction to the common historiographical developments in the study of history and the triumph of gender studies, microhistory, historical anthropology, and cultural history, which have marginalized questions of the military, the working group believes military history should also be explored in these thematic areas as well. The emphases of the AMG work inlcude social and "alltagsgeschichtliche" approaches to the actual living conditions of this large social group, the "military" and its relationship to society, economics, culture, and politics (the state).
The AMG aims to contribute to understanding the early modern period as an epoche and to participate in examining the overarching research paradigms of state building, social discipline, and confessionalization and thereby to provide a more sophisticated description of the developmental processes such as modernization, rationalization, bureaucratization, and professionalization. The complete disregard for the factor "military" involves a danger of not properly recognizing these processes or paradigms.
A further goal of the AMG consists in the development of new source materials. For instance, (members of the working group) will evaluate serial sources through data processing, including quartering lists, company rosters, tax rolls, account books of the company officers, and military budgets. In addition, others will investigate the social import and military functionality of the clothing while others will examine literary sources including poems, songs, plays, and prose, especially those illuminated by contemporary characterizations of the merceny or viewed through journals, letters and memoirs in order to perceive patterns of perception and to decode the "inner life" of the men and women. Furthermore, the richly extant image material will be the subject of investigation in order to draw conclusions about the reality of life, and above all to make visible the societal concepts of military and war.
