
Applied History Project
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Faculty Director
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Co-Chair
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Faculty
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Visiting Scholar
About the Applied History Project
The mission of Harvard’s Applied History Project is to revitalize applied history by promoting the production and use of historical reasoning to clarify public and private challenges and choices. Founded by Professors Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson in 2016, the Applied History Project builds upon the foundation laid by Professors Ernest May and Richard Neustadt in the 1980s, reflected in their book Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers.
Advancing its mission, the Project sponsors the Applied History Working Group of faculty members across Harvard University to organize discussions with scholars and practitioners; supports historians and policymakers in producing Applied History; develops courses in Applied History; funds the Ernest May Fellowships in History and Policy for pre- and post-doctoral students; and holds Applied History Events open to the Harvard Community and the public. Harvard’s project is one of the leaders among a rapidly expanding network of universities and think tanks that are furthering the discipline of Applied History by clarifying predicaments and choices to inform better decisions.
The Project gratefully acknowledges the Stanton Foundation's generous support for its Applied History endeavors.

Applied History Course
"Reasoning from the Past: Applied History and Decision Making," taught by Fredrik Logevall, provides a basis for using history as a tool for analyzing foreign, security, and scientific policy, calling attention to some common fallacies in reasoning from history and discussing ways to avoid them.
Our Work
The Applied History project sponsors events, publishes a newsletter, and supports a course at the Kennedy School to fulfill its mission of promoting the production and use of historical reasoning in policymaking.
Applied History This Week: February 10, 2025
Quote of the Week
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” – Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852)
Articles of the Week
“Gramm and Summers: A Letter on Tariffs From Economists to Trump” – Phil Gramm and Larry Summers, The Wall Street Journal, January 30, 2025.
“Like our predecessors in 1930, we oppose the use of tariffs as a general tool for economic policy.” In this op-ed, Summers and Gramm call on professional economists to co-sign their letter urging Congress and the president against proposed tariffs. “In the long history of the country,” they argue, “there is little evidence to substantiate the claim that America prospers more when trade deficits fall than it does when they rise.” In fact, trade deficits often arise when foreign investment into the US increases, and the critique that foreign investment makes the country poorer “flies in the face of recorded history.” Ultimately, Summers and Gramm conclude that “A review of the economic history of our nation yields no credible evidence that broad-based tariffs have benefited the nation as a whole.”