Introduction
It might seem obvious that the study of history ought to improve the crafting of public policy. Surely if we understand the past, we should be able to make better decisions in the present—especially in the high-stakes worlds of statecraft and strategy.
But that assumption raises deeper questions. How should history be used? What history should be used? How do we gain the kind of historical knowledge that truly shapes decisions? And why is it that historians and policymakers so rarely speak the same language?
In his new book Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy (Yale University Press, 2025), Francis J. Gavin argues that a genuinely historical sensibility can illuminate the complex, often confusing realities of the present. Good historical work, he writes, does not offer easy analogies or tidy morals. Instead, it captures the challenges and uncertainties faced by decision-makers, complicates our assumptions, forces us to see the familiar in new ways, and invites us to understand others on their own terms without abandoning moral judgment.
Thinking historically, Gavin shows, is a discipline of discernment, curiosity, and humility—qualities as necessary in statecraft as they are in life.
About the Guest
Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS. He is the author of Gold, Dollars, and Power; Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy; and The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty.
For Further Investigation
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)
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