2024-2025 Course Flipbook v2 - Flipbook - Page 43
HISTORY PRACTICUM: EMERGING GLOBAL CHALLENGES
HISTORY
What are the issues and dilemmas that we will be tasked with in the immediate future?
How should we strategically move forward in our contemporary world with the knowledge
we have of the past? The goal of this course is to provide students with a 昀椀rmer
foundation for understanding diverse challenges, identifying their common roots,
and outlining policy responses that are relevant and strategic. Achieving this goal
requires a mix of history, theory, and policy analysis and also calls for broad reading
and intensive discussion. The 昀椀rst unit of the course focuses on the central text
The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft by Hal Brands and Jeremi Suri which
provides the basis for how historians and policy makers balance their knowledge
of the past with their current context when responding to modern dilemmas. For
the remainder of the course students engage with case studies of intersecting
domestic and international challenges such as responding to a global pandemic,
the emergence of arti昀椀cial intelligence, and democracy and nation-building. This
course pushes students to synthesize the analytical skills built over their Field history
experience, broaden their contemporary issue expertise, and develop a coherent
individual worldview that offers useful prescriptions for future policy. The course
will not encourage agreement among students, but it will demand a consideration
of multiple points of view before students settle on their own original explanatory
frameworks for contemporary global challenges through a 昀椀nal national security
paper on the issue of their choice.
