Overview

Significant demand exists for history: students, private-sector businesspeople, and government officials all value the lessons from diplomatic and military history, financial and economic history, international and global history, and technological and leadership history. But supply falls short: many traditional academic history departments are not meeting the demand for consequential history and meaningful historical analysis.

The Hoover History Lab addresses this mismatch between demand and supply. Modeled after successful science laboratories, the lab will take a flexible umbrella structure, organized around high-powered research projects. With Hoover’s formidable constellation of historians known both for their scholarly achievements and their deep policy connections, the lab will advance historical knowledge and apply it to contemporary global challenges as well as those looming on the horizon. Read more.

Featured Programs
Global Futures

Global Futures: History, Statecraft, Systems

Led by Senior Fellow Stephen Kotkin, this project explores geopolitics and geoeconomics, institutions and technologies, citizenship and leadership, to understand the key drivers of historical continuity or change, especially the roles of contingency, chance, and choice versus long-term underlying structures. Examining how people have identified and utilized levers of power to try to shift the larger system, and what a system is and how complex systems behave.

History Working Group

History Working Group

Under the leadership of Senior Fellow Niall Ferguson, the Hoover History Working Group aims to conduct and disseminate historical research on issues of national and international concern; provide concrete recommendations on the basis of research and discussion; and use Hoover's unique situation to convene academic experts, policy makers, and interested private sector actors both at Stanford and in Washington, DC.

Military History Working Group

Military History Working Group

The careful study of military history offers a way of analyzing modern war and peace that is often underappreciated in this age of technological determinism. Yet the result leads to a more in-depth and dispassionate understanding of contemporary wars, one that explains how particular military successes and failures of the past can be often germane, sometimes misunderstood, or occasionally irrelevant in the context of the present. Chaired by Victor Davis Hanson, the Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict examines how knowledge of past military operations can influence contemporary public policy decisions concerning current conflicts. 

Fellowship Opportunity

Hoover History Lab Research & Teaching Fellowship

The Hoover Institution is seeking outstanding post-doctoral scholars for appointments at the rank of Research Fellow for the Hoover History Lab. The term of the appointment is one year and may be renewed. Scholars will be associated with the Hoover History Lab’s project “Global Futures – History, Statecraft, System,” encompassing a history of the world from the 18th century to the present.

History Lab Fellowship

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