The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft

Leading scholars and policymakers explore how history influences foreign policy and offer insights on how the study of the past can more usefully serve the present.

History, with its insights, analogies, and narratives, is central to the ways that the United States interacts with the world. Historians and policymakers, however, rarely engage one another as effectively or fruitfully as they might. This book bridges that divide, bringing together leading scholars and policymakers to address the essential questions surrounding the history-policy relationship including Mark Lawrence on the numerous, and often contradictory, historical lessons that American observers have drawn from the Vietnam War; H. W. Brands on the role of analogies in U.S. policy during the Persian Gulf crisis and war of 1990–91; and Jeremi Suri on Henry Kissinger's powerful use of history.

• Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers
• Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (Modern Library Chronicles)
• Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)
• History Wars
• Partisan Histories
• Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama
• Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum
• The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
• Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum
• Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama