Professor David Armitage FAHA, the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University, gave the keynote lecture of 2017 Allan Martin Week, honouring Allan Martin (1926-2002). He spoke with the ANU School of History’s Dr Alexander Cook about his body of work, the role of historians, his writing process, and the themes in David's most recent major publication, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017).