Luvaas' ''The Civil War: A Soldier's View'' (1958) collected the writings of
Colonel George Francis Robert Henderson, a British observer of the
American Civil War. Henderson's international reputation had been built on a biography of
Stonewall Jackson; Luvaas' study combined Henderson's work as a military historian/biographer and a teacher of the art of war, recognizing that Henderson's fame rested on his career as a teacher and writer, not as a field officer. In the final chapter, as
J. Orin Oliphant points out, Luvaas analyzed Henderson's contribution to military thinking and education. In 1959, the
University of Chicago Press published Luvaas' dissertation on the lessons learned by British, French and Prussian military observers of the Civil War,
The Military Legacy of the Civil War: The European Inheritance; this was republished in 1988 by
University of Kansas. From 1956 to 1982, Luvaas taught at his own
alma mater, Allegheny College, where he was a professor of history. In 1972, he was the first civilian to serve as a visiting professor at the
United States Military Academy. In 1982, he left Allegheny to teach at the
Army War College, where he held the prestigious
Harold Keith Johnson Chair of Military History at the
U.S. Army Military History Institute (USAMHI). Accepting a permanent position there, he taught
lieutenant colonels and
colonels on the fast track for general staff posts, and wrote papers and taught courses specific to their interests and needs. Luvaas remained at the Army War College until his retirement in 1995. After his retirement, he became Distinguished Fellow there in 1997. He was a two-time recipient of the
Outstanding Civilian Service Medal from the
Department of the Army. He visited the battlefields of the American Civil War annually, either on War College Staff Rides or with regular tours. Luvaas' and Nelson's volume the U.S. Army War College Guide to the Battle of Gettysburg (1986) is a feature in Civil War battlefield tours. With his friend
Brigadier General Harold W. Nelson, Luvaas authored several volumes of the US Army War College Staff Ride Series on the Civil War:
Gettysburg,
Antietam,
Fredericksburg and
Chancellorsville, and co-authored another on the
Battle of Shiloh and the
Atlanta campaign. Luvaas also the translated military writings of
Napoleon and
Frederick the Great, and edited volumes of the writings by George Henderson, and a book on the history of military theory in Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries. In his 1985 essay on officer education, Luvaas maintained that the best people to teach officers were civilian historians, although others promoted a modified view, that a faculty of civilian military historians should be tempered with professional soldiers. The combined spirit if the professional soldier and the civilian historian,
Benjamin Franklin Cooling suggests, is a
new school of military history that unifies old and new historical styles: it modifies the patriotic gore described by
Edmund Wilson with contextual and integrative studies of leadership and theory. There is room for both the "informed and broader contextual study of military history as suggested by Professor Jay Luvaas, ... and [for] his more popular resurrected "historical rides" to Civil War battlefields."
Assessment Luvaas was one of a generation of historians to examine the Anglo-American tradition in military history. Trumbull Higgins described Luvaas' work in
Education of An Army: British Military Thought 1815-1940 (1964), as a careful and detailed study of the development in military thought from
Wellington to World War I, and a much needed analysis that flowed logically from Luvaas' earlier work on the Civil War. In his 1999 review of
Military Legacy of the Civil War (1959),
Owen Connelly maintained that Luvaas had never written or edited a bad book and that he "demolished the widely accepted idea that U.S. Civil War had demonstrated the nature of modern war to Europeans, especially the Prussians," lessons that they employed successfully against Denmark and France immediately. Instead, Connelly maintained, Luvaas argued that the Prussians had all but ignored their Civil War observations until after 1914, as did the other powers. According to Connelly, Luvaas' work in
Napoleon on the Art of War argued that Napoleon "created" the operational level of war, a category between strategy and tactics. Furthermore, Napoleon made the
corps his standard unit, and it was adopted by all the major armies in turn, making operational art possible. ==Selected writing==