Applied History Project

The Belfer Center was honored to host former Secretary of Defense James Mattis this fall for an afternoon of conversations related to applied history and statesmanship.

This paper argues that historical analysis, necessarily written with hindsight, often underestimates the uncertainties of the past. The authors call this tendency explanation bias. This bias leads individuals—including professional historians—to imply greater certainty in causal analyses than the evidence justifies. Their analyses will treat what is plausible to be probable. The authors offer a few intuitions about why explanation bias exists, its relation to other well-established psychological biases, what it leads to, and how it might be combatted. 

SWJ interview with Nathaniel L. Moir, Ph.D., an Ernest May Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School. Dr. Moir is completing a book manuscript on Bernard Fall for publication.

SWJ interview with Nathaniel L. Moir, Ph.D., an Ernest May Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School. Dr. Moir is completing a book manuscript on Bernard Fall for publication.

Nathaniel L. Moir reviews In The Warlords' Shadow: Special Operations Forces, the Afghans, and Their Fight Against the Taliban by Daniel R. Green  (Naval Institute Press, 2017).

Nathaniel Moir writes that Revolutionary Warfare is not insurgency or guerrilla warfare: It is driven by ideology and commitment, not technology. Revolutionary Warfare's foundation is the perceived legitimacy of its political rationale among the population in which it is propagated. No matter how expertly or technologically advanced contemporary conflict is fought, it will not compensate for lack of political rationale.

Nathaniel Moir reviews Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual by Daniel Bessner.  He concludes that the book shows how and why it is important to think carefully about democracy and the role scholars and intellectuals contribute to its survival.

Nathaniel Moir reviews  Jungle Mission by René Riesen. He writes that Jungle Mission exemplifies applied history.  For armed forces engaging with diverse cultures, this book provides an individual precedent and useful analogies that illuminate contemporary problems where cultural intelligence is critical.

The 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China was not a birthday I felt like celebrating.

As Dutch historian Frank Dikotter has shown in his searing three-volume history of the Mao Zedong era, the Communist regime claimed the lives of tens of millions of people: 2 million in the revolution between 1949 and 1951, another 3 million by the end of the 1950s, up to 45 million in the man-made famine known as the "Great Leap Forward," and yet more in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, Mao's campaign against the intelligentsia, which escalated into a civil war.

Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has named former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Dr. A. Wess Mitchell a non-resident Fellow with the Applied History Project.