In this edition of The Hoover Institution Briefing on Revitalizing History, the Hoover History Lab launches a new program to teach high school students about producing high-quality historical research. Contributors to Strategika ask if Israel can win its new multifront war against Iran and its proxies. And historians discuss why the highly accurate predictions of the Sigma War Games of the 1960s did little to influence the course of the Vietnam War.
FEATURED ANALYSIS
Hoover History Lab Launches History Skills Academy for High School Students
The Hoover Institution’s History Lab is launching the History Skills Academy, a summer program for high school students meant to introduce new methods, sources, and skills for budding historians looking to craft excellent, potentially publishable historical research papers.
During summer 2025, Hoover will host the first two-week program, in which up to twenty-four students will have the opportunity to learn best practices of historical research and use of evidence, along with strong writing methods. They will have access to the world-renowned collections of the Hoover Institution’s Library & Archives as well as Stanford’s Cecil B. Green Library.
To implement this initiative, the Hoover History Lab is partnering with The Concord Review (TCR), publishers of America’s only journal for exceptional historical research papers written by high school students. TCR, an experienced operator of in-person history camps for high school students, will provide some of its trained teachers and well-developed curriculum to combine with Hoover for this program.
Read more here.
Strategika #94: Israel and its Enemies
In the latest issue of Strategika, contributors address Israel and its war against Hamas in Gaza as well as Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. In a background essay, Jerry Hendrix asks if Israel can achieve some form of permanent peace via its current campaign. In contributing essays, Michael Doran asks if Israel can win its war against the “Axis of Resistance” while David P. Goldman argues that an objective of complete victory over Hamas is not feasible.
Read more here.
Why America’s Leaders Ignored Shockingly Prescient Sigma War Games on Vietnam
In the early 1960s, America was slowly marching into an all-out war in Vietnam. Historians have questioned the reasons for US involvement in the region ever since. The Sigma War Games, a series of politico-military war games run by the Pentagon’s Joint Staff during the 1960s, sought to understand the unfolding conflict in Southeast Asia.
These games, which involved top figures from the Johnson administration—including National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Air Force General Curtis LeMay, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Earle Wheeler—offered a chillingly accurate forecast of the war's potential trajectory.
These games accurately predicted the dates that America would launch a bombing campaign and land Marines at Da Nang Air Base. The games also indicated the United States would need to devote as many as 500,000 troops to the Vietnam War, something that came to pass by the end of 1967.
On Tuesday, October 8, 2024, Hargrove Fellow Jacquelyn Schneider, director of Hoover’s Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative, brought together Hoover senior fellow H.R. McMaster; Mai Elliott, award-winning author of The Sacred Willow and a RAND Corporation study on the Vietnam War; and Mark Moyar, director of Hillsdale College’s Center for Military History and Strategy, to discuss why the conclusions of the Sigma War Games went unheeded.
The event came weeks after the official launch of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative Collection, which contains some of the original Sigma War Game documents from the 1960s. The mission of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative is to advance war games, simulations, and their data as analytic tools and learning resources for academia, policy, and industry.
You can read about the discussion here.
Learn more about Hoover’s Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative here.
John Bew Applies History to Foreign Policymaking
On the latest episode of Secrets of Statecraft with Andrew Roberts, incoming distinguished visiting fellow John Bew speaks about his role as chief foreign policy for four successive UK prime ministers as well as his biographies of Lord Castlereagh and Clement Attlee.
Listen to the episode here.
Lessons for American Immigration Policy from the Past
Cody Nager, research fellow in the Hoover History Lab, released a policy brief about what US policymakers dealing with immigration can learn from the historical approaches to immigration throughout the past 250 years. “Across the political landscape, the debate over immigration policy lacks abiding and empirically rich historical context. Present circumstances with immigration, often cast as unique, resemble America’s past experiences to an uncanny degree,” he writes.
Considering how major US cities requested federal assistance to shelter asylum seekers in the summer of 2024, Nager finds similarities between the immigration situation of this year and the year of 1794, when Congress was asked to support Baltimore, Maryland, which saw an influx of refugees fleeing Haiti.
Read more here.
LIBRARY & ARCHIVES NEWS
Hoover Acquires the Records of the Conflict Records Research Center
The Hoover Institution Library & Archives has acquired and will make available to the public the archive of the Conflict Record Research Center (CRRC), which was established to fulfill former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s intent to enable research on captured records with “complete openness and rigid adherence to academic freedom and integrity.” The CRRC’s mission was to facilitate the use of captured records to support research both within and outside the US government.
The CRRC collection was originally opened to scholars at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, in 2010 but was shut down in 2015 due to operational cuts in the US government budget.
The CRRC collection contains over 1,100 records and more than 150 hours of audio and visual recordings. The records that will be made available to the public will include original Arabic, Dari, and Pashtu documents as well as English translations. The records will be searchable through the Hoover Institution Digital Collection that can be accessed through Hoover’s reading rooms on the Stanford campus and at the Hoover Institution’s Washington, DC, office.
Read more here.
Reflections Series Reveals Hoover Artifacts Tied to Key Moments in History
To better highlight and elevate the valuable collections of Hoover’s Library & Archives, the Reflections series features prominent Hoover scholars speaking about significant pieces housed at Hoover. In the latest video, Senior Fellow Stephen Kotkin speaks about the rare photos housed at Hoover’s Library & Archives that show Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Josef Stalin at the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of Non-Aggression in August 1939.
In another video, Condoleezza Rice recounts the visit of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev to Stanford University on June 4, 1990. More than 7,000 teachers, staff, and faculty gathered in Memorial Auditorium to hear him speak. And after he was finished, with applause still ringing in the venue, staff from the Hoover Institution’s Library & Archives presented him with a framed poster from the early Soviet period, quoting Pushkin’s 1825 poem “A Bacchic Night”: “Long live the sun! And down with the night!” The gift brought tears to Gorbachev’s eyes.
You can watch the videos here.
For more insight on Revitalizing History visit:
https://www.hoover.org/focus-areas/revitalizing-history
