In this week’s conversation, Francis J. Gavin joined me to talk about his new book, Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy. The book is less about giving policymakers neat lessons from the past than about cultivating what Gavin calls a “historical sensibility”: the discipline of discernment, curiosity, and humility.
We traced Gavin’s own journey from graduate training as a diplomatic historian into teaching at a policy school, where he introduced students to historical case studies—not as analogies, but as lived dilemmas. He recalled how exercises on the Vietnam War suddenly felt newly relevant after 9/11, and how they convinced him that history can prepare decision-makers to ask different questions, even if it cannot predict outcomes.
Our conversation then turned to the tension between “thinking historically” and possessing a “historical sensibility.” Gavin argued that the sensibility is a temperament: receptivity to surprise, appreciation of complexity, and awareness of contingency. Thinking historically is the application of that temperament to actual choices. Both are needed, but they do different work.
We discussed why historians frustrate other disciplines: their promiscuous borrowing from law, literature, economics, or art; their unwillingness to settle on a single methodology; their insistence on revisiting the same problems from new angles. Gavin sees this as a strength, even if it makes historians less tidy and less “useful” in the eyes of policymakers. Yet he also worries about history’s institutional decline and about what happens when leaders lose the humility that historical sensibility encourages.
By the end, Gavin called for new institutional experiments—just as scientists created biochemistry or nuclear engineering to solve emerging problems, so too should humanists rethink how to organize knowledge. Without a revival of historical sensibility, he warned, our public life risks becoming more brittle, more certain, and less wise.
“Thinking historically is not about prediction. It’s about preparing yourself to ask better questions when the world surprises you.” —Francis J. Gavin
Listen & Discuss
1. What does it mean to cultivate a “historical sensibility”?
2. How does Gavin argue that this differs from “thinking historically”? What do you think?
3. Why are policymakers drawn to analogies like Munich or Vietnam? Have you used such analogies in discussions of current events? Why?
4. How can historical case studies shape strategic decision-making?
5. What dangers arise when history is misused in politics? Is this why are historians and policymakers often skeptical of each other?
6. How does Gavin argue that historical revisionism parallels policymaking revision? What do both of these revisions need to do?
7. What role does humility play in both history and statecraft?
8. How can universities foster historical thinking beyond history departments? How can those who want to think historically foster this kind of thought outside of academia?
9. What can citizens—not just leaders—gain from thinking historically?
Bibliography
Related Historically Thinking Episodes
The Historical Thinking Series
Intellectual Humility and Historical Thinking
Francis J. Gavin, Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy (Yale University Press, 2025)
Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (Free Press, 1986).
John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford University Press, 2002).
Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method (Princeton University Press, 2006).
David Staley, History and Future: Using Historical Thinking to Imagine the Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
Michael Howard, Lessons of History (Yale University Press, 1991).
E.H. Carr, What Is History? (Vintage, 1961).
Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Temple University Press, 2001)
This topic/subject/focus/presentation framed your podcast title,"Historically Speaking," with such clarity. And while the content is so substantive, I'd label it a real,"keeper," and file it away for future reference. But I think to do so would be to do just the opposite of what is needed. This historical perspective deserves center stage in all aspects of our personal, professional, and civic lives!