The December issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era questions the state and direction of military history as a field.  In their foreword to this special issue of the journal, historians Gary Gallagher and Kathryn Shively Meier offer their comments on military history and its important role in understanding and studying the Civil War.  Many of their points deserve close attention, for they offer good suggestions for the direction of the field; other comments pointedly object to a rising set of scholarship which I argue follows the cycle of historical interpretation.