We are guided by a positive vision for the relationship between history and policy, and the VIPR Applied History Lab provides and space for intellectual experiments undertaken individually and collectively by undergraduate, graduate, and faculty members, exploring how historical research can lead policy makers to a better future. The study of the past lends its tremendous insight to the challenges of the present. To this end, we have three guiding aims: First, to identify and communicate issues in contemporary American politics, both in domestic and foreign policy, and bring an historian’s insight to public policy debates. Policy and decision makers are obviously future-oriented, but they must draw on examples from the past when proposing or determining a course of action. Historians can and should lend their strengths to this endeavour. Second, historians often refer to their own study as the process of “change over time.” But we also study continuity and contingency. What changed is often as important as what stayed the same, as well as identifying key inflection points when things could have gone differently. And of course, the ‘why and how’ of all these questions. Third, we bring an acknowledgment that any given problem facing the American people did not spring into being in a vacuum. Historians are uniquely able to diagnose the past decisions, strategies, and mistakes which have culminated in the present. Historians can contribute to present day decision making by placing contemporary problems into a larger temporal stream and in so doing help to reveal underlying problems and considerations which may not be immediately obvious. In these ways, historians can add to the collective understanding of policy issues and serve as guardians against simple answers to complex problems. A great philosopher once wrote that “The Owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering,” suggesting that societies are doomed to misunderstand their present, unable to find answers to the problems that face them until after it is too late. Collectively we resist this idea and insist that historians have a unique role to play in public policy. To this end the VIPR Lab offers an array of UGA community members the opportunity to develop their research and communication skills, with an eye toward bringing dynamic contemporary problems and potential solutions to a wider audience. In this way, we hope to fulfill the promise of the university as a public good, providing historically informed analysis of contemporary problems to all Georgians.
