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In a new article in The Atlantic, Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson, both scholars at Harvard University, urge the president to establish a “Council of Historians,” arguing that “the U.S. could avoid future disaster if policy makers started looking more to the past.”
A key passage:
We suggest that the charter for the future Council of Historical Advisers begin with Thucydides’s observation that “the events of future history … will be of the same nature—or nearly so—as the history of the past, so long as men are men.” Although applied historians will never be clairvoyants with unclouded crystal balls, we agree with Winston Churchill: “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”
Read the full article here, and find out more about Applied History here.