Luskin Center for History and Policy

The UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy was founded in 2017 through a generous gift from Meyer and Renee Luskin. It is the first academic center on the West Coast focused on bringing historical knowledge and perspective to bear on policy deliberations. In the words of Meyer Luskin, “The best way to choose the path to the future is to know the roads that brought us to the present.”

The mission of the Center is to generate and promote historically informed discussions of key public policy issues. We foster teaching, research and collaborations across campus and beyond the university that use historical insight to shape policy and provide solutions to current problems. To that end, the Center supports individual and collaborative research projects that address an urgent need or problem in our society, make tangible contributions to policy formation, and lead to a deeper understanding of significant contemporary issues. Through grants, the Center also contributes to the development of new courses that train students to analyze historical events and apply that knowledge to current issues.

Public History Initiative

The Public History Initiative trains students in all aspects of public history.  Our undergraduate courses engage students with cutting-edge research on the relevance of the past. We teach students how to communicate with broad audiences, and we foster core competencies and professional development for desirable career outcomes.

Our HistoryCorps program places undergraduate history students in credit-earning internships in museums, schools, cultural institutions and community organizations in the Los Angeles region.

The National Center for History in the Schools (NCHS), a division of the PHI, seeks to enliven the teaching of history at the university and K-12 level through publication and professional development resources and collaboration with educators.

We carry out pubic history research. We work at the forefront of public history research and communication. Our research is both local and international. We have current projects on imagining archives, the long history of essential work in California, and neighborhood histories/history as community activism.

We collaborate with community partners. We have partnerships with cultural institutions, community organizations, and advocacy groups throughout the Los Angeles region. These partnerships are integral to our work in training students and in producing high quality, inclusive public histories.