Undergraduate Admission

Dr. David Silbey, Faculty Profile

One of the most iconic images of the second half of the 20th century is that of the man standing in front of the tanks in China’s Tiananmen Square during the tumultuous anti-government protests of 1989. The image says it all—with a simple, defiant act, one anonymous, slender man holding a briefcase halts the advance of a row of Chinese tanks, and becomes a symbol for the power of individual action in the face of overwhelming odds.

History professor David Silbey displays this photo on his webpage because for him it also symbolizes one of the most important features of history. “History is ordinary people making ordinary decisions about good or evil,” Dr. Silbey says. “We should not forget that.”

That’s a common theme in his classes and in his research. Dr. Silbey is the national security fellow of the Jamestown Project, a Massachusetts-based think tank that focuses on issues that are central to effective democracy. Right now he’s working on a project that he hopes will inform U.S. military strategy at the highest levels.

It’s Dr. Silbey’s view that U.S. strategy hasn’t really changed since the Cold War, and in an era of insurgencies, counter-insurgencies, and unconventional, hard-to-define “battlefields,” that’s a problem.

“We need to figure out how to fight wars in a whole range of different ways against enemies who don’t fight in ways that go to our strengths,” he says. “We haven’t figured out how to do that.”

In the classroom, Dr. Silbey is fond of putting his students in the shoes of those whose choices in wartime proved to be momentous. They may explore, for example, the decision by the Japanese in World War II to bomb Pearl Harbor. By drawing America into the war, this act, says Dr. Silbey, was “the one choice that would guarantee disaster for them.” Or they may play the roles of Lee, Longstreet, Meade, and Chamberlain at the Battle of Gettysburg, where they’re called upon to justify the actions those Civil War leaders took during three days in July 1863 that shaped America’s future.

It’s a deeply engaging process, and it teaches students one of the most valuable lessons Dr. Silbey has to teach: “History is not about weapons and technology,” he says. “History is about ordinary people.”