Transcripts For CSPAN3 Federal Government Historians 20170305

Would say Historical Perspectives are important and policymaking. But there is much less understanding about how to actually link perspectives to policymaking a when, where, and what context it is appropriate. A series of panels about history and policy with federal historians who are often those closest to policymaking and might have some valuable thoughts to offer. We all appreciate that inside. My name is claire altman, i am the directory of the federal Judicial Center in washington, d c. It is the research and Education Agency and the History Office is responsible to promote programs and work to preserve the history of the judiciary. I am honored to be joined by four other historians. I will introduce them now and will assume since there biographies are relevant that they will fill in if i have missed any key points. Each will speak 57 minutes and then you will have a moderated discussion. I will start to my immediate right. A historian at the state Department Responsible for the Foreign Relations of the United States, the official documentary record of american Foreign Relations and i will add, it is undoubtedly a source that is indispensable for historians who work in that area. He graduated from the air force academy in 1974 in served for 24 years, retiring as a kernel in 2001. He moved to the state department in 2011 in our day masters degree in science from Johns Hopkins in 1975 and a dark or in in history in 2005. He is the author of powerful and brutal weapons, published by Harvard University press. Next to him is lincoln around while who specializes in public history. Following his positions at university of nevada las vegas where he served as a research director, in 2009 he became chief historian of the Usda Forest Service based in washington, d. C. His duties are whiteraging and include directing all aspects of the History Program his duties are whiteranging and include her acting all aspects of the history, and expert testimony in federal court in developing a Strategic Vision for history within the Land Management agencies mission. Most recently he served as a legislative Affairs Specialist acting as a direct liaison between congress and the agency policy, providing critical political advice to leadership and developing an agencywide position. He has a lot to add to this cover system. Conversation. Jeffrey resnick maintains the history of Medicine Division at the library of medicine and has a highly collaborative portfolio for the nih and National Library of medicine. As a social and cultural historian he is the editor of two books published by the Manchester University press. Prior to joining the National Library of medicine, dr. Resnick held other positions including director of institute or study of occupation and health of the American Occupation foundation and senior curator for the Armed Forces Institute of pathology. He earned his degrees from every emory university. Next, all the way on the end, eric boyle. From 2012 to 2016, he was chief historian for the department of energy where he is also the primary archivist and federal preservation officer. His first book was published in 2013 and his current work includes a book project tentatively titled in the belly of the beast history of alternative medicine at the nih. So, you see why i am honored and delighted to be among such as deemed panelists. For our conversation today, the five of us talked about a few broad themes. I will introduce those to frame the conversation. We would like to talk about the relationship between government historians and policymaking in practice. The potential contributions to policymaking, and the relationship between history as practiced within Government Agencies and the daytoday work of governance. As i mentioned, im going to as each of the panelists to talk for 57 minutes about what they do. I will go last, and watch time closely but timepermitting will , tie what we do at the Judicial Center and moderate a discussion. Join me in welcoming our panelists and we will kick it off with professor randolph. Dr. Randolph let me start by thanking you for putting together this panel. It is unique. Every time i find myself at a session like this, i am surrounded by other historians from cia, department of defense, and find it very diverse and different from my normal setting. Really a huge opportunity and much appreciated. The remarks i made today are my own opinion, not cleared by the state department. Within the ecosystem of public history, i think youll find very different examples here today. Mine is at the state department, we have a Statutory Program which is based in law which gives us a great deal of mass. We have about 50 historians on staff and are organized to execute primary missions which first of all is considered the publication and formulation of the United States series. The official documentary record. Which occupies about 5565 of 75 80 of our total work capacity. Beyond that, we offer policy support and education and outreach. The Foreign Relations series, we consider a distinct program but in itself it is extremely powerful support for policymakers when they have the awareness to use it. I use this moment in time among the volumes we publish on every administration, every subseries, we offer a management volume that tells how all the different administrations have structured the national decisionmaking process. Second, foundations, philosophical foundations going back to johnson and foward, how they viewed the international environments, their objectives, and how they intended to achieve their objective. This is all good material for those executing the ongoing changes. We execute the second, primary mission of policy support which brings me here today. The types of support we offer are worth quickly encapsulating. First, chronology. Getting the facts and story right is the first responsibility of the historian but we cannot leave it behind as we look to the broader task. Second, and analysis. We find ourselves doing considerable support for Public Diplomacy for missions overseas and within the department. Another thing we find ourselves doing which is a special honor for the service of historian is to serve as a template for other nations looking to do what we do, which is to bring to the public the documentation of their history. We have documented people from around the world hosted people from around the world looking for means to create such a program in their country and looking to us for guidance. How do we approach the program . We align historians with the regional bureaus. Not in a formal sense, but we have historians to for example, are in the african bureau, the western hemisphere. In part to understand their issues and in part to understand things that are building before they become crisis so we can be a help. One of the perennial problems with surprising providing support is it happens quicker than the research and writing cycle so the earlier you have awareness the better our research. So if we have an assignment for me higher levels of priority, we will swing people out of one program to offers support to another. What we do then, kind of the summary of this, is that there is a constant ongoing injection of historical expertise into the process from the state department from the office all the way to the highest level of leadership in the department. Very flexible in format. Anything from one page papers to multiyear Research Projects for example on the negotiating record of the many Peace Process mid east Peace Process. We also, because the nsc does not have the around and store in, we are on a close working relationship with them. We work with them daily very closely and when they have a Historical Program they reach out to us. We have provided papers to the white house for the president going overseas and other items as requested. The less part of our program i will mention before we move on this we have a very active and leadingedge Digital Publishing program which extends our reach not just within the department but around the world. That is something, there is a series of articles from the philippines the last couple of days from a historian there who is reflecting on their own history as it is described in those pages. The other thing we do in the digital realm is we have a website that is open to the public with the love and data sets. You dont we have a sharepoint site within the department firewall you might say that makes readily available to our policymakers he basics of the history and background of policy to nations around the world. With that outlined, i will turn it over to lincoln. Dr. Bramwell thank you very much. And thank you for organizing this panel and for the invitation and for everyone attending here and for coming to learn a little bit and discuss how history can have a place and value within the federal government and with its management. Again, my name is Lincoln Bramwell and like my other colleagues, i will just put out that blanket disclaimer these are all my own opinions and descriptions of my program and what i do. I will probably make it sound a little better than what somebody else might say officially but i guess that comes with the disclaimer. My position at the Forest Service is different. It is not a statutory position. There is not a great mass of historians. I am the chief historian but that also means i am the historian. I worked out of the National Headquarters for about seven or eight years and a lot of what i do, because it is not a statutory position, is i do a lot of trying to prove my valueadded. Managementspeak, showing how history can be of value. The one sentence description that i use for the History Program at the Forest Services that our job is to make history more accessible to the public and more meaningful to the agency. I kind of split my time between two different audiences. External and internal. Externally, in dealing with the public, i do a lot of what historians are trained to do. I write books. I publish articles. I do the Standard Research a writing that we are typically accustomed to. Tracking down, like i am sure all of my colleagues do, we will be asked for the facts related to a certain question and go trackback down. It is kind of sort of the bread and butter of what historians are known for and what they can do. We also do a lot of outreach externally and often times we will get outreaches from the media, whether it is printed or radio or tv. They want context. Perspective. Often times, what they are not asking for but what historians provide as we can tell that story and place those facts within a story that make sense and are meaningful to people. So that is a little bit about the external or publicfacing side. Internally it has been a little more fun and a little more leftbrained thinking then academicallytrained historians that saw themselves teaching at a university the rest of their career. What i do, what i have worked a lot at, is changing their perception. This historian position and the History Program, going from the perception of being a historian that is a repository of lists, facts, dates, and being a historian of the agency and changing into of them think of me as a historian for the agency. To help them sort of realize that trained historians have a skill set that can be applied in a lot of different ways to help the agency mission. This is kind of, you know, i had written up an article in the haa magazine thinking about historian says swiss army historians as swiss army knives. We should be a multitoll you can break out and apply to a lot of different things. That has got me into a lot of really fun activities within the agency. I will do a lot of new employee orientations and help them put the work they do into context and also my agency is really big on training and training leaders and leading people into kind of more robust responsibilities the national level, it is fun to take people that are really focused on sort of narrow, small problems or regional problems and kind of open up more natural research. You probably have a degree in some sort of Natural Resource filled a hand want to make your decision strictly ecologically and scientifically but we also operate within a political hot young system. You know, we serve the American People and basically the laws that apply to the agency i work for are a reflection of the desires of the American People and their representatives in congress, so it is really on to really fun to kind of provide this kind of context both political, cultural, and help the decisionmakers put the decisions that they want to do within the context to help them make hopefully a better decision. And, what i spend a lot of my time doing internally is making myself available to leadership and providing those onepage briefing papers. The longer analyses. Also, jumping in and say like, a legislative affairs at staff and actually working directly with congress because i take it as a victory for public history and historians, they need somebody who can communicate, right, research, can do it on their own, do not have to train. A historian would be perfect. And i thought, yes, we won. With that, i will leave the rest of it to the panelists. Mr. Reznick good morning. I work at the National Library of medicine which is one of the 27 institutes that makes at the National Institutes of health, one of the worlds Premium Research facilities located in bethesda maryland. , it has its roots in the 19 century. Originally the office of the United States Army Surgeon General and later the army medical library. These early institutions were located in various places around washington, d. C. And the modern library, where i worked today, opened on the campus of the nih in 1962. Has grown over the past 100 80 years to be the largest biomedical library, home to nearly 30 million items and a variety of formats. Traditional analog formats and a variety of digital resources that deliver these collections and data every day to millions of people not only around the nation butter of the world. Historians, scientists, historians, the general public. Within the librarys history of medicine which i direct, it houses one of the Worlds Largest History Collections related to human health and disease. It spans centuries from the 11th to the 21st including a wide range of formats. Books, images, fine arts, fmr, and digital material. It is collecting, preserving, interpreting this collection for the general public and our mission relates to general policymaking and waste distinctive to our institution. Internally, anna edwards, the history of Medicine Division operates fundamentally as part of not apart from our home branch of the library as a whole. We are a special collection to which special collections around the world look for guidance but more importantly, we are a unit of several dozen professionals from a friday failed to Work Together with our colleagues to support the overarching mission of our institution to divide biomedical information to the public, old and new. So as part of our institution, my division participates directly in discussing, formulated, contribute to, and implementing a variety of policies and procedures related to multiple tasks that support our mission to the public. For example, our catalogs of unique and read materials are worked on collaboratively to meet and informed comment catalog standards to make our collections available to the public. More specifically, we have one cataloger that regularly offers historical insights of our controlled vocabulary thesaurus which is used by our institution for cataloging bibliographic descriptions and cataloging articles for pub med. It is supported by our new leadership to have a voice in the future of our institution as we embark on our new Strategic Planning process and engage in the challenges on promises in the area of big data and data science. Our new director, dr. Patricia brennan, invited me recently to write for her blog and talk about how my colleagues and i are participating and envisioning the librarys third century of Public Service. The piece i wrote was entitled embracing the future as stewards of the past. It was based on another talk i gave last fall at the university of san francisco. By embracing the future i mean several things. Embracing the government, and enabling access to all, not just a few. Engaging new audiences, and not just traditional ones. This engagement should be across the disciplines and across the spectrum of the public to enjoy ensure that scholars, educators, policymakers, and interested people of today and tomorrow have access to the world historical medical heritage for research, teaching, and learning, certainly policymaking. Embracing the future means appreciating and understanding that the digital medical collections exist in the format appealing not only to those who focus on deep reading and study of individual works, historians, but also scholars and entirely new audiences interested in mining the surrogates and their associated metadata for more focused research. The revolving Digital World is increasing its data. In the world of big data and data science, meeting the longstanding world of persistent physical objects that contain records of the human condition and as these worlds collide at young coexist, opportunities are bound to advance and expand cooperation between institutions and organizations that preserve history and support research in all his blend. All of this will contribute to establishing the historical record of tomorrow. Ive argued further that the existence and persistence of this fast and expanding Virtual World should prompt more historians to learn more about the amenities and partner more with specialist to know that pulls well and how they can and will capture and make sense of the increasing Digital World of the human condition. The digital record will coexist. Better to try to understand and invest in these tools today when the record will be far bigger. The historical reading of these texts will be more challenging. Only by doing this will we not look back and realize we have not missed an opportunity to do things better. History of not medical History History generally, not just medical history and knowing that , we strove to surpass our example for future generations. Maybe this is more advocacy than policymaking but these arguments and how and where i make them represent some of the distinctive ways i serve my agency as a historically minded leader. The other examples i described, the ones that are more internal but have an external impact, the cataloging work i described are no less historically informed. So when my colleagues and i do policymakingertake in traditional ways, some of these nontraditional approaches convey that history is alive and well on the history of the National Institutes of health. Thank you for putting this panel together. Dr. Boyle first, i would like to record the sentiment already expressed by some of my colleagues today in the appreciation for you all coming here today in giving us an opportunity to talk about what we do and think more critically than maybe what we do on a daytoday basis between our work and policymaking, specifically in governance more broadly. I would also like to issue the same disclaimer that these are my views and not the views of the department of energy and the additional disclaimer that i have only been a federal historian for less than one year but i have also been an active member for the society for history and the federal government and have engaged with a wide range of federal historians within your organization for a number of years. The chair of our panelists mentioned before generously provided us with three themes to help focus our discussion today so in my brief introductory remarks i would like to focus mainly on those three themes. First on the relationship of government historians to policymaking in practice. What is the particularly challenging things about engaging policymakers is that opportunities for doing so very schematically from agency to agency. So in one agency, policymaking may be your second priority and you do it on a regular basis to speak to policymakers are provide information directly to them as a way of informing decision making. In other cases, and this is i think predominately the case of the department of energy throughout its history, engaging with policymakers has not always been explicitly part of the duties of a doe historian. With that said, since the pioneering work in the 1950s by Richard Hewitt to many consider to be the dean of federal historians, historians have been compiling material at least in part designed for policymakers. In the 1950s and 1960s is included a series of books on the history of the Atomic Energy commission, one of which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in the 1970s. This included a series of booklets called Energy History studies which explained the history, goals, and achievements of and assess our and major programs within the department of energy beginning in the 1990s, there were a series of background papers made available to policymakers called history briefs, which were provided to incoming doe policymakers, in particular, especially during president ial transitions. More recently, the office of history and Heritage Resources has provided policymakers with direct access to reports, briefs, and other documents related to past policy making through our chronology of events which is available on our website and highlights major developments in doe history going back to the energy commission. The doe has also worked with another Agency Within the doe in developing a website that features previously classified documents which are then made available directly to the public and policymakers as well. In most cases, the office of history plays a direct where role when it is called upon to do so. It is not something i do on a daytoday basis necessarily, but the advantage of interacting with policymakers in that way is that in these cases, the perceived value of Historical Perspective has already been established. Somebody has decided, maybe we should know more about the history of this subject. We should have a little more context in the decisionmaking process. On the second theme, the potential contributions for decisionmaking i suspect there , is a wide range of contributions that varies dramatically from agencytwoagency. In the case of the doe, i will mention a few examples of different types of past contributions. First, doe historians have contributed to litigation work from inside and outside the agency by providing documents, doing research. This has influenced subsequent legal and policy precedents, particularly in the area things like radiation exposure or waste cleanup, things like that. Second, the opposite of history has also responded to thousands of foia requests over the years. Many of which have dealt with issues engaged by policy makers outside the agency. So someone once to know what happened in the development of a specific doe policy from the 1960s or 1970s, the Historians Offices the place they go. Lastly, it in carrying out the offices larger mission, which is to preserve and articulate the agencies institutional memory through a wide variety of mediums and programs as the to create a body of work that is designed to be embraced and used by policy makers seeking an analogous historical issues and challenges they might draw upon. On the third game of the panel, therelationship between history of practice within Government Agencies in the daytoday work of governance, there is substantial evidence that at the doe, the opposite of history has been blessed with mostly positive working relationships with agency colleagues throughout its history. I suspect this is in no small part because my colleagues before me may have conscientiously made efforts to engage their agency peers in a variety of ways not limited to policymaking, but also including the daytoday operations of doe headquarters, its laboratories, and sites around the countries. So the offices, for example, has frequently been called upon to inform a wide range of daytoday governor matters. For example, in rolling out new policies or funding opportunities or in announcing scientific discoveries. Our colleagues have regularly called upon the office to research precedents. In responding to foia requests, the office has developed a collaborative relationship with members of programs and offices across the department of energy in an effort to conscientiously respond to individuals seeking information related to the past work of the department. Through our work to preserve agency records, i would also argue that the office of history has played a central role in collaborating with colleagues to ensure that documents that have ongoing relevance or applications are made available to people who are involved in the daytoday governance. Now, but also in the future. I am confident the value of work done by the office of history and Heritage Resources is wellestablished. While i have no doubt that we have a duty to ensure that the value of that work is continuously communicated to policymakers and the folks involved in daytoday governance within the doe as well as outside our agency, i am also optimistic the importance of this work will be embraced in the future. Thank you all for those thoughtful introductions to the work you do. I would like to say a bit about what i do and how my offices how my office is positioned in relation to policy as a way of opening up a broader set of questions about relationship between government, historians, and policy making. I have not been a historian in the federal government for that long. About a year and a half. By training, i am an american legal historian. I have a law degree and phd in history, a couple years at Amherst College before coming to the federal judiciary center. My current job has me doing a lot of the same kinds of work i was doing before in substance and also in the nature of the kind i am doing, american legal history. On the other hand, the move from academia to being a government historian involves a lot of selfconscious reflection about the role of a historian and about what the job is. I think the Public Service dimension of being a government historian requires you to think much more on a daytoday basis about how you are helping the public with your work, and what your appropriate role is, than i had ever experienced before. So you are catching me at a moment of reflection on this particular issue. But what i want i think to talk about, opening up some questions here, is about the specific relationship or the orientation of different government historians to the realm of policymaking. So when many of us think about government historians, we think about some of the agencies represented here. We tend to think about historians in a lot of different places in the executive branch. I am not in the executive branch. I am in the judiciary, which means i have a very different relationship to policymaking. I am in a branch that is selfconsciously the nonpolitical branch. My agency is not engaged, unlike my colleagues, in implementing and carrying out policy. That is not what we do. And so, there are constitutional and statutory reasons that my job as a historian is quite a bit removed from policy making. There is separation of powers, the rule of law, and the specific Statutory Mission of my agency to be an independent research and Education Agency for the courts, not to be engaged in making policy or influencing policy, beyond providing independent and objective research. So, i think that independence has a lot of value. I think it allows us a lot. It provides us a lot of legitimacy and esteem among those who look to us for deep, serious, objective work on the history of the courts. It allows us to stay insulated from certain political pressures, which is a nice thing. It allows us to be insulated from pressure which could potentially unduly shape how we represent the historical record, which is something all government historians have to balance. I recognize there are very Important Reasons historians should be much more closely connected to policymaking, and my colleagues have pointed to many of those. Nevertheless, the difference between my position and theres brings up a broader question, which is a normative one i think underlies his entire session. The way i introduce an end the way we have been talking about policymaking presumes Historical Perspective and policymaking is a good thing. That is what we want to achieve. I want to staff want to start what is the appropriate role of a government historian in relation to policy . What are the advantages and potential downsides or disadvantages to linking historical work and Historical Research within the government to policymaking directly . I will open that up to start the conversation. To whoever wants to answer, or i will happily keep talking. I will go ahead and start. I have gone through a long career, and i have never had anyone question the value of historical expertise and decisionmaking. It can be misused famously. You have got i think a risk we are careful to Pay Attention to in the state department. To ensure that whatever we do provide to the policy maker is unaffected by the desires of the policymaker. That what we do is provide thorough, balanced, comprehensive, relevant history to the policymaker as part of their decisionmaking process. It is not determinative, but i think every act, as i mentioned act of diplomacy, every act of foreign policy, every relationship with any issue going on in the world of Foreign Relations rests on a basis of previous events and decisions, and it is our role to do what we can to make sure that is understood. I will tell you that the first rule of my office is to get the history right. Get the history right, you know . There are all kinds of opportunities to shape history or put a slant on it for Public Affairs or Public Diplomacy or something, and we just cant do that. The basis ofty is our effectiveness, and that is something we are always watchful of as we engage throughout the department. Any others want to weigh in . I think one of the challenging things, in my agency, there isnt a clear relationship defined between the Historians Office and the policymakers at the agency. I like to think i am providing information they draw upon in making Resources Available both internally and through our website, which is available to everybody. But there is no way for me to and to know for sure unless somebody reaches out to , me from within the agency to ask a question or to express their gratitude for having provided that. So, i think, you know, one of the other difficult things operating in that environment is with every president ial administration you have a new , crop of people coming in and so you do not really know necessarily how to anticipate what the new group of people will expect in terms of the contributions you might make. Relationship that i think is because it is poorly defined, sometimes it can be more challenging. More than it would be if there was a clear, something more clearly established. Let me pick up on the poorly defined and lack of clarity. That is something i was trying to convey in my prepared remarks because, to me, from my vantage point, the practice of history and historical thinking is part of what we do at the National Library of medicine. We curate and we have exhibits , but the process of historical thinking is diffused and articulated by many people in my division who are not historians. They are historicallyminded archivists and librarians and Technical Information specialists. And sometimes they do an even better job than i certainly do. Historian,rmally a but 90 of my time is spent as you would expect it to be, running the division. Running all of the aspects of it in cooperation with my great staff. So the historical thinking is diffused throughout the division and informs the policies and procedures within our institution, as well as the outside. But if you get to the lack of clarity, i appreciate what youre saying because it is hard to put ones finger on what the impact is. What are the outcomes . You know you have had an impact when, as you say, someone from the outside says, hey, would you help us with this or to a task help us with this, or do a task, or research, but that does not happen all the time. Increasingly now, with shrinking budgets and rising expectations and changing times overall, i think those who are involved with the historical enterprise need to be keenly aware of how to identify those outcomes and track that impact because the historical enterprise is hugely important for reasons represented by all of us in all of our different capacities. I think the issues of tracking outcomes and impact is more important than ever before because i will say this further many of us can presume, rightly, that historical thinking and the practice of history is essential to policymaking, or even in Public Affairs in some ways, but there are a variety of other disciplines ive worked with every day that also have an equal, if not greater, influence on those things, and i have to work collaboratively with them to affect a positive impact and secondly, we are living in a time where a lot of disciplines are changing rapidly including the discipline of history. Iproceed with my work perceive with my work, the best way we can frame it is the shift of the traditional analog world that weve known for a long, long time, to the digital one. The pivot is impacting us profoundly and in a variety of ways. So there are always a lot of certainties we have worked with as historians, but there are a lot of uncertainties, as well. Do you want to add anything . I was going to pick up on a point. I wanted to connect this points those two points to something lincoln mentioned in his remarks which was a historian within an , Agency Working player doing all sorts of other things, like jeffs point, there are a lot of translation work that goes on on a daily basis to get people to understand what a Historical Perspective really is and what the work of historians is really all about and to understand what youre doing. Sometimes the people who are perhaps conveying your message message, that are the link in the chain, you have to first get them to understand the Historical Perspective behind it and what the work of historians can bring. That is an important kind of work that we have to do on a daytoday basis, but it connects with this question i raised at the beginning, which is how do we move from the perspective that it adds policy to figuring out how to link history to policymaking . It is a much greater challenge, and i think everyone has expressed this work of translation that has to go on. Do you want to add anything to that . Listening to the other comments, what i find kind of fun and interesting about working in a federal agency is, a lot of times, it is like you are working at a university and there isnt a big history department. You are mixing it up with all the other disciplines. A lot of what you are doing is learning the language of these other disciplines and how to communicate what you need to communicate to them. You want to provide historic thinking and context and good data and the right answer, but you have to learn how to communicate that to people that have been trained to think in different ways. For me, that is actually really fun, to work on Something Like that and find there is a lot of desire for that historical thinking. When i shifted from academia, i had been in a big history department, and we have all had that experience where, who is going to come talk to . You are just another historian in this hallway, and if somebody is interested in that particular topic youre working on they might swing by or something. At least, that was my experience , and moving to a federal agency , i found it was very refreshing to have people kind of approach me that they were looking for help with historic thinking. They would not say that in those terms, they would not ask, i need your help to think historically about this stuff, but what they had a lot of times in my agency is, they have a lot of data. Theyve got masses of data. They are trying to find someone to help them make sense of that data. Historians do that really well. We can find the right data and we can package it in a way that resonates with people in different disciplines, different walks of life, and learning how to do that, learning how to fashion that and package that correct information in a way that people will hear it and it , is reallyn impact challenging, but also a really exciting challenge, to see something you put into something weve its way into an outcome in a speech or a position that is being put forward. You think, all right. That communication resonated. Theyve got something factual that is right. It is the correct information. It makes my little historian heart warmer. [laughter] i think a different way some of you have referenced, and eric maybe raised this most directly, historians are often seen and treated as somewhat apart from Everything Else going on, and i think that can bleed over into the influence that historians have on policy in the sense that people making policy may see a number of contemporary conversations and a number of other forms of research that come to them as the main work of policymaking. That is the main information we need. That is the data we need. The history is the background, right . So, how do you change that conversation so that the assumption is not history is background to illuminate the social Scientific Research and to illuminate the kind of political conversation, but it can do more than just the something apart in the background. Does that make sense . Thoughts . I am going to quote eric because he used the phrase conscientious engagement. I think that is a wonderful way to frame an answer to your question because the key is conscientious engagement with others in your agency, like you are saying. Meeting them where they are in their own discipline, and it involves an ingredient of Public Affairs, also. In other words, explaining to people, meeting them where they are, understanding where they are coming from, that the historical view or enterprise does have some value to offer , even as yours does as a technical specialist or archivist or librarian or chief policymaker. So it is part of that true conscientious engagement, that history can become not background, but foreground. It can be informative, so that is how i look at it. To go back to Public Affairs i i dont thinkirs, the policymaking i described and Public Affairs are mutually exclusive. I think they go handinhand when Public Affairs, talking about the history of your office, unit, agency in a meaningful way, not as a cabinet of curiosity or in a banal sort of way. But truly fleshing out the richness of an agencys history, the fact that it was not only leadership that led an agency but hundreds of people over generations to shape a particular branch. By framing history and a really history in a really rich and thoughtful way in a Public Affairs context, that also leads to history becoming more foreground as opposed to background. That is my experience, but i understand the potential pitfalls there. When i spoke earlier i did not mean to say the importance of history was easy. You make it look easy. [laughter] i will take that as a complement. In the state department, we have a giant bureaucracy. Diffused. Emely we have 196 posts out there. The amount of history and policy to be addressed is immense. The tempo is staggering. We have moved, i think, all of us into a world where i think, in my case, i work in the bureau of Public Affairs, everybody but me in the bureau is working on the cycle time of a tweet, right . It changes the nature of your audience, i think, and therefore how you need to go about, again, i call it targeted engagement , which reflects my air force background maybe. [laughter] targeted conscientious engagement, we will get this right before we are done here. When you move, away from the policymakers, we work hard to set up a relationship with the policy planners and speech writers and people who are one step away, because in this immense bureaucracy with so many complex flows of information, it is important for any advisor, whether historical or whatever, to understand the mental terrain of the policymaker. What are his other sources of information, perceptions, backgrounds . That is not always going to be possible. So for us, it is a matter of continuing to adapt to this environment, and one dq in the area the and one peculiarity at the state department is that everybody is really busy. Few have time to take home a book and read it, but everybody almost is instinctively sympathetic to the historical narrative. It is the nature of the Foreign Service and diplomats in general , so what we try to do is make sure they are even, to be honest, aware that we exist and that is a big part of what this targeted conscientious engagement at the office and bureau levels, so our message and expertise is invested early enough in the process to where it flows to this overall process of considerations up the chain of command, and one thing that , the public material we do is primarily Foreign Relations. It is 75 of the overall workflow of the office. Try to setbasically up a mechanism to capture the imagination of the department and take them back to their roots, and it happened in an incremental way that it might be helpful to talk about. 2014, it was the outbreak of war in europe, and we had one of our historians assist the embassy in paris with their Public Diplomacy surrounding the outbreak. We found this incredible story of our embassy of there being completely overrun as the Financial System collapsed, as the Transportation Systems were nationalized, american citizens were trying to get home and needed help, and she told that story. We decided, what a wonderful story to extend to the other major capitals because the , themes and incidents are different, but the vividness of these stories are incredible and take the members of the department back to their core mission of protecting american citizens and back to the first days of the birth of the Foreign Service. We have got people covering paris and vienna and petersburg, and we will get london, and create this composite picture and a monograph to the birth of the Foreign Service and getting ready to release it and kind of a dickens, like a chapter a week over time to sustain the interest of the department in shaping the history of the world. So we, like all of our colleagues here, pay close attention to our audience and try to adapt what we do to remain relevant to their needs. I just want to add, it made me think of another role that we probably all play in different ways, which is using this theme of translation to be a kind of conduit between the historical thinking happening outside the government, being done by academics and scholars another institutions, we can do the way we can do the work of consuming that and conveying that beyond our respective offices and beyond our respective institutions, so that those within the institutions engaged in policymaking or informing what happens and making decisions can have a better understanding of what scholars are saying on a particular issue. We are uniquely positioned by our training and institutional roles to be that kind of connection and that kind of conduit. I suspect it is something that maybe we all do it different due in different ways and do not selfconsciously think of as part of our role, but i think it is a unique one that we play. I think one of the things lincoln said earlier resonated with me is something that i think would be of value to a number of historians who are in similar positions in agencies where we are the only historian. There is an office of history , but it is an office of one person. In the archival world, we used to call people who were in arrangers. On loan i dont know what we call people in that position. If we can think more in terms of how we cannot only capitalize on opportunities to convey to policymakers specifically within our agencies the value of the work we do or the work that has been done by other historians before us, that is one part of it, but i think this other part, this approach that you are putting forth, looking outward beyond your agency, drawing upon the Academic Community to support you, but also as a way of communicating to policymakers outside your agency, this is how history is also relevant beyond just being what happened in the past. I think there are also in the case of some of the work that i do, there are people outside the agency who are deeply interested and invested in the history of department, part of private foundations or do their own Public Service work. I think we have to look at upon thosees to draw resources, as well. To be more collaborative, especially in cases where the departments of history within agencies are being whittled down. I want to share an experience i had, where i think in the same terms eric is describing. Some of my biggest problems are capacity. It takes a long time to write a book. It takes a lot of your time and i think all of us here are busy. We have a lot of demand put on us. Writing a book can be tough. In another way, thinking in terms of capacity, it has pushed me to think more broadly about that community that thinks about your agency and how you can use them and work with them. One experience i had that i like to share was wildland fire. It is a big story you see every summer on the news. It makes great television. You know, big flames. It is a big issue for the Forest Service, and it has become and the last 10 years a really huge issue because it is eating our budget. We dont fund it like other natural disasters where fema comes in. What we do to fight fires comes out of our budget and kind of takes over our budget to where it is now over 50 of our budget, dedicated to fighting fires. It inhibits Everything Else we tried to do. So it is a big deal for the agency. They have been trying to think about it for a long time, and trying to get congressional fixes to this to fix this budget situation. There is a director of fire and aviation. There is one person who spends a couple of billion each summer fighting fires. He approached me several years ago and said, we need help. I need help for when i go to capitol hill and explain why we need this money. Why we need this fixed. I need help in explaining how we got into this situation. He was looking at me as historian, as a single person, i need you to help me out. Was take out do that ego of, sure, i am totally interested, and i will write the book. I will put my cape on and go out there and throw myself on the precipice, and i thought it would be totally cool. But then i thought about it and thought, i am not the right person for a couple of reasons. They deal with the things we talk about with history theory classes of, you know, we are striving for objectivity, and how would it be perceived if i wrote the book explaining why we are in the situation that we need help with . How would i be critical of the would it beow perceived by congress if i threw the problem at their feet and said it was not our fault . We needed an outside expert. So using my expertise in my field, i went and found a macarthur fellow winner in history who was the worlds expert on the subject, and helped sponsor a study about wildland fire policy and gave them complete editorial control. The idea was that this would be an outside objective take from a person that could look as critically at our internal operations as they wanted or as critical a look at congresss role, and this became a book. It was completed and published. For me, the crowning moment was sitting in legislative affairs behind the chief of our agency testifying to a Senate Energy committee, sitting alongside that historian that had completed the study. The historian had been at the invitation of that committee because they realized, here is an expert. We need their perspective of how we got into this mess. And how can we get out of a . Out of it . It was neat to sit back as a at a federal agency in the background of that, where i had help facilitate that, but step back from taking a leading role because i knew that would be more beneficial. Sometimes i think, as federal historians, discretion is the better part of dollars sometimes better part of valor sometimes. We can contract an outside objective voice to help those working around us, and sometimes that was a real learning experience for me. I think it turned out a lot better than if i had tried to complete the same amount of work. It would not have been as good as the expert, and it was much better received by all parties, so sometimes as a federal historian, we are thinking about those radical issues that come up in the first public history class i took. What would you do if an employer that you wanted that wanted you to write about them . How would you manage that . I was actually thinking about that. It would play better if maybe Something Else was writing this this time. I just wanted to bring up it is one way we approach the work sometimes. I think we all share something unique as a historian , which is to have an institution you work for in a way that is very different than in the academy. At the back of your mind is always the question of institutional legitimacy and credibility of not only your agency, but your particular office within the agency. As lincoln suggested, the concern of whether you are perceived as objective or part of a political process is an essential consideration in any of these conversations. I have other questions, but i would like to hold them off to open up for questions from the audience on anything we have talked about already or anything else you would like to hear from us about. Yes . Remarks about how historians are situated in federal agencies, how the work they can do can be best used. The question i have is a question i have not really heard becausend it could be there are cameras in the room that could limit the forthrightness of the response. The question is more about evaluating how your work has been used by policymakers. Guess it is more of a doe and state question. If you could speak to that for a minute to the extent you can evaluate how the policymakers have used it, if you think it has been manipulated or put to proper use, and anywhere in between. Great question about to what extent we have been able to evaluate how Historical Perspectives offered historians offered by historians in agencies is put to good use or not by policymakers. That is not a question for me , for sure. I will take the first run at it. First of all, we in the office of the historian share the problem of feedback that others have spoken to here. The feedback loop is inconsistent, i would have to say. Say i would have to some form of feedback on the because we provide basically we stay with those people. A big part of providing the first assistance to somebody is a program that is sustained and then broadens. Example,le, among the people we really want to be informed by this expertise we can offer so particularly when you offer something and the questions come back and there are times , actually when you do not know for a couple years whether something that you sent out, you know, we provided material to the chain of command in 2013 for the new administration and over time things happened and we said, son of a gun. They read that stuff. So it is very gratifying. There is no normalized way for feedback. So hard to we worked create that close relationship at the bureau level, because then you can get an ongoing relationship. The most important thing you can historical endeavor is you get new crew coming into , town and you do not know what theyre looking for, what their orientation is. You provide them something but something, but there has to be a feedback loop for you to get traction on that relationship and a sustained effectiveness with them. I think, to summarize my answer which has wandered, we get feedback a High Percentage of the time with key parts of our audience, and we find our expertise within that cadre that is useful, and we get sustained relationships, which is what we want to create. Think the example that comes to mind for doe would be, one of the big challenges facing the department over the last 10 to 20 years has been what to do projecterahattan and world war iiera sites, some of which are no longer operational, some which have radiation contamination, what you do in terms of decommissioning facilities, cleaning up sites, etc. . For much of the early time that that problem was being addressed or grappled with, historians werent involved. We started, as an office, to get more engaged in that discussion, we had opportunities to provide our perspective on the value of some of these sites that might exist outside of their continued operation in so operation, and so the benefit of the historians having a voice in that discussion, in terms of concrete outcomes for us, has been the creation of the Manhattan Project National Historic park , which is being operated in connection with the National Parks service and has preserved a number of sites, doe facilities for future generations to learn from, museums will be opened in conjunction with each, sites will be open to the public which have never been open to the public before. I think providing a Historical Perspective on the value of those facilities and what they represent, the stories that they cases,as, in many resulted in their preservation in the face of potential destruction. I would also add, behind your question is a concern that Historical Information may be manipulated for political gain in the policymaking process. I think that is something that historians are always thinking about. To the value of maintaining federal government Historians Offices that have some distance, and because of that, have the certain kind of legitimacy and credibility to those whom we offer Historical Information, so that it is seen manipulatives and not open to a lot of manipulation. It does not prevent that from happening, but i have found that most of the people that i am surrounded by are deeply interested in being honest and true to the historical record and to the history, even if they are not historians. Really want tond be honest and true to the record. So, other questions . First of all, thank you. I think it is so important to have a panel like this that deals with the role of federal historians because there are a lot of you, and you are kind of an invisible element within the profession, so it is great to have this panel and get some insight into what you do and the particular challenges you face. My question is about communication. Most professional historians have an audience of students and an audience of peers. If we are really lucky, we have an audience consisting of general readership, right . But you have a very distinct and different kind of audience you have to address, and i think stephen nicely encapsulated this by talking about the special mental terrain of the people you need to address. In many ways, i think it is a association, as well. What kind of skills of our needed to communicate or target that audience . The wayt different from most professional historians communicate with their audience . Just, i know you had some thoughts on that if you want to follow up. , i know you had some thoughts on that when you want to follow up. That is one of the interesting challenges of things when i came on board, i was not necessarily prepared for. There was a dissertation someone wrote about the hiring and demographics within my agency and i thought, this is valuable. You have to read this. And they said, no, you have to communicate that in a briefing summary. One sheet of paper. They want bullet points. They dont want complete sentences. It was different. It was code. I think what helps me prepare for that a little bit was actually a lesson i learned in graduate school, and it was an advisor who wrote on you know, i was in a phd program and trying in my wildest dreams, trying to write for a very specific audience in a very specific history journal that was you know, there is a formula for how those look. You are talking to your peers. This advisor of mine was writing for these very popular sort of supermarket type magazines about the old west, and would always had and out, and i kind of a little attitude and thought, why are you giving me this . I kind of poopood it he taught it, and he kind of taught me a lesson. This is the only avenue for a lot of people, the only access they have two history is what they might see at a grocery store, so why shouldnt they be hearing that from me . He had to write it in a completely different way. I think, as students, faculty, professional historians, in the federal government when we , practice writing for different audiences, that prepares us to be flexible enough to communicate as an oped for your local paper. Not just the new york times. Speaking to people where they are at. Maybe it is a supermarket magazine or it might be a briefing paper. We deal with that a lot. For me, it is just being flexible and expecting you are going to be flexible. Instead of saying, this is the way it has got to be done, i have an essential truth i need to tell you or some essential information, so let me put it in a way that you consume information. So heres your onepager. Take it. That is a great question. I will answer it in two ways. First, there is the internal process that goes on in my mind and how i interact with my colleagues across the library and across nih. As i mentioned before, i am really fortunate to work with people from a variety of disciplines. I have historians on my staff, but i also have librarians, archivists, Technical Information specialist, curators. These are folks who are trained in a variety of ways, and it is my responsibility as a manager, as a leader with historical bent to lift them up to be the best , possible professionals to conserve our library and agency and the American People, plain and simple. So there is an internal part of it, the leadership that is my responsibility, my division as it nests within the larger institution. So there is a management side, a leadership side to that. So to answer your question, what could be done in the discipline of history, the training of history, the more that individuals take forces outside the discipline, the more we engage in interdisciplinary work, the more we engage our colleagues of other disciplines to understand their perspectives , communicate with them, right with them, present papers to them. That, i think, can change a worldview to enable better communication with other disciplines with whom we work in our agencies. So that is the internal part of it. Is, toernal part piggyback on many of lincolns thoughts, you know, i started out writing academic history and still do that in my spare time. But i think it is tremendously rewarding to write a blog post or an article that does reach a greater audience. That reaches someone that may not have regular engagement with but we have a very popular blog and we get , reactions periodically and some of them are, i never knew that or learned that affect of history and that is tremendously , rewarding for me or for others who make posts, because we are reaching a broader audience, and that is one way we measure our outcomes. And howeading our blog, to we track those comments and responses in . So to answer your question more specifically, when i came into the government, i did not understand the concept of plain language. Hisderstood the concept of toriography and jargon. But plain language to reach a broader audience in my writing , both in internal writing papers and when i write for the public. It took me several years to write my own oped. I have a very dear friend and dear friend in atlanta, a fantastic journalist, who sat me down over a great dinner in a fine restaurant in atlanta and said to me, you need to forget about historiography and the jargon. You are writing for a popular audience. Im going to teach you how to write an oped. It was a great lesson. To learn those skills, force yourself to write for a local newspaper or for a magazine. Talk to a journalist and asked them, how can i reframe the historical work that i have done for many, many years and graduate school for a broader audience . This one journalist taught me how to do that. I did not do it very well at the time, but ive tried to refine that over the years. So, just to respond to your question. I was going to say, i think, in terms of specific skill sets, the skills i developed over time that i draw upon in trying to do my job today are skills that i learned on the job. I think there could be more emphasis placed on developing those skills as a graduate student in the process of learning how to be a historian. I think there is increasing acknowledgment of the need to develop these skill sets with the decline in job opportunities, but the first one i think, the first group of skills in that general area fall under public history, which is something i heard about and was aware of and read examples of as a graduate student, but i never did public history as part of my graduate school curriculum. The only opportunity i had to do that was in an internship. It is a skill you have to develop. Jeff alluded to it. When you try to first time, you are not very good at it, and it takes repetition and learning how to do it over a period. I think that is something that can be taught more to graduate students. Specifically for federal historians, learning more about how to do institutional history, which is something i learned about doing. I read examples of it as a graduate student, but did not actually try to do it myself until i was beyond graduate school. I think, why not develop those skills earlier on and not leave it to learning on the job process . To add to that, i think that i just want to echo the point about flexible thinking. Demonstrating the ability to think flexibly and place historical thinking in the context of thought presses that are going on, i think that is the essential skill. It is easy to think that we dont, i mean, i agree wholeheartedly, but i also think we do actually develop the skills as historians. We just employ them a little bit differently. When you are a subject matter expert, you are being asked all the time to explain your book on this specific thing and where it fits within the broader historiography of American History or european history or whatever it is. You have to think about, well, i know as a legal historian, i am really interested in the development of the beginner doctrine. But if i want to speak to someone who is interested in social or cultural history in a broader way, i need to describe how this fits in that landscape. We sort of do the same thing when we talk about the value of historical thinking to various issues going on in government. We prove that we are not narrow in our thinking and in our scope i am a historian, here is what i can tell you about the problem, but i also understand all the other dimensions of this problem for the agency and that it is not just about the history. I think demonstrating the kind of flexible thinking and translating skills we already use in other contexts into this context goes a long way. Have theeally want to last word, so i dont know if anyone has anything else to add before we wrap things up. No . I guess i have to have the last word. I just want to say, first of all, thank you so much to this panel of really esteemed government historians who i am just honored and delighted to stand next to. This has been incredibly illuminating and helpful for me and i hope that it has been for , all of you, as well. I hope we have been just a i hope we have done just a little bit to start to deepen the conversation about how to link policymaking to history and to what the kind of practical on the ground realities are for historians. Thanks to all. Thank you to our panelists. Enjoy the rest of the conference. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2016] watching American History tv all weekend and every weekend. Like us on facebook on cspan history. 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