John Lewis Gaddis

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U.S. President George W. Bush and Laura Bush stand with 2005 National Humanities Medal recipient John Lewis Gaddis on November 10, 2005 in the Oval Office at the White House.

John Lewis Gaddis(b.1941) is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. He was born in Cotulla Texas in 1941. He is a noted historian of the Cold War and grand strategy. He has been hailed as the 'Dean of Cold War Historians' by the The New York Times. He is also the official biographer of the seminal 20th century statesman George F. Kennan.

He is best known for his critical analysis of the strategies of containment employed by the United States presidents from Truman to Reagan, and for arguing that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's personality and role in history was one of the most important causes of the Cold War. His most recent work (2005) is a study of the entire Cold War. Prior to this, his important works included We Now Know (1997), an analysis of the Cold War from its origins to the Cuban Missile Crisis incorporating new archival evidence from the Soviet bloc, and his revised edition of Strategies of Containment (2005), which analyzed in detail the theory and methods used to contain the Soviet Union from the Truman to Reagan administrations.

He received his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked under Robert Divine. He has taught at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhodes Island and at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, where he founded and directed the Contemporary History Institute. At Yale, he co-teaches the elite leadership course, Studies in Grand Strategy, and his ever-popular course on the History of the Cold War. He served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 1992.

His PhD students teach at, among other places, the University of Virginia, Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wright State University, the University of Maryland-College Park, McGill University, the University of Arkansas, Auburn University-Montgomery, Pennsylvania State-Shenango and the University of Kentucky.

In 2005, he received the National Humanities Medal.

Gaddis' most recently published book, The Cold War: A New History, examines the history and effects of the Cold War in a more removed context than previously possible.

Publications

• On Moral Equivalency and Cold War History Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 10 (1996)
• The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (1972; 2nd. ed., 2000).
• Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive History - (1978, 2d ed., 1990)
• Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy - (1982, 2d ed., 2005)
• The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War - (1987)
• The United States and the End of the Cold War: Reconsideration, Implications, Provocations - (1992)
• We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History - (1997) ISBN 0-19-878071-0
• The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past - (2002)
• Surprise, Security, and the American Experience - (2004)
• The Cold War: A New History, Penguin Press, 2005. ISBN 1-59420-062-9 (US edition). The Cold War, Allen Lane, 2005. ISBN 0-7139-9912-8 (UK edition). Summary of reviews
• Ending Tyranny: The past and future of an idea The American Interest, September-October 2008

References