Historians often trace the roots of their profession back to Thucydides. Thucydides is often recognized as the first person to write history, which in Ancient Greece meant writing an account of the past based on testimony of the people who were there. He also with the hope that other Athenians would draw lessons from his accounts, and in that way Applied Historians can also trace their lineage back to the Ancient Grecian. “A Vast Social Laboratory” Much like Thucydides, Applied historians attempt to use historical research methods to inform decision making, often in the realms of foreign and domestic policy. This impulse has always been a part of the professional historical research in the United States. The discipline of history professionalized during the Progressive-era and took on that period’s concerns with using expert knowledge to guide wide ranging reform. Shambaugh’s Applied history research center and book series, made use of “scientific knowledge of history and experience in efforts to solve present problems of human betterment” and produced research on the development of policies and their outcomes. Often taking the shape of state-level studies, this work focused on the micro-level concerns like the regulation of freight cars and tax laws, all the way up to macro-level concerns such as how to democratize the United States. Thinking in Time or Losing Time? Applied history matured in the 1980s as part of the development of public history. As manifold scholars and public intellectuals debated how best history could be used in service of the present, two dominant methods emerged. The first was Neustadt & May’s Thinking in Time which laid out a set of “mini-methods” for comparing present crisis to past solutions. Abbreviated as “K-U-P/L-D” decisionmakers need to first define the problem that faces them, with special attention to the roadblocks standing in the way of their desired outcome. Then, for all similar situations which are similar, create a list of what is was known, unclear, and presumed by past decisionmakers as they decided on a course of action. Only after this step, can the likeness or difference of an analogy be ascertained and made useful to the present. This method is intended not only draw insight from the successes or failures of past courses of action, and just as important, to prevent false analogies from guiding policy in an unrelated direction. On the other hand, Otis Graham’s Losing Time seemed to follow in the path set by Shambaugh. Graham railed against the analogy approach, which he felt was a misuse of history to justify “positions derived from other perspectives” (a claim that Neustadt & May would no doubt contest). Rather, Graham attempted to uncover a how a myth about the American past was driving policy debates. Across the 1970s and 1980s, legislators debated to what extent the government should intervene in economy. Believing that United States economic history was a story of glorious free enterprise, legislators and the public debated Industrial Policy as if it were something new. Graham’s research however, revealed that the United States had always had “de facto” industrial policies, and his scholarship made a bid for a new kind of applied history. Rather than comparing the past to the present, historians can help policy maker diagnose the problems at hand and ensure that they are asking the right questions in the first place. Further reading History and Law
