Historical Thinking as a Skill in Public Affairs Graduate Education

This article suggests how historical thinking, as a skill, might be integrated into MPA, MPP, and similar programs. I compare three modes of historical thinking-as a warehouse of analogues, a set of historical institutionalist models of stability and change, and as a "stream"-in terms of the likelihood that they provide useful skills for MPA/MPP graduates. I conclude that historical institutionalist models possess the greatest potential for skill building. Historical analogizing, though obviously a useful skill, is likely to be less portable than historical institutionalist models, and less useful as a tool for navigating the fragmented organizational terrain of the new governance. I argue as well that the potential of "thinking in time streams" is not as a skill, but rather as an ideal point against which skill at applying historical institutionalist models, and historical analogizing, might be judged.