"It was very much a book that stands on the shoulders of my students who were doing this work," he says. As their assessments piled up, he sensed the need for a synthesis, leading him to write We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History.
Gaddis encouraged his students, first at Ohio University, and then at Yale, which has been his home since 1997, to write "second drafts and third drafts" of history. It really requires going back and rethinking many of the things that we thought we knew before the Cold War ended." In 1991, he helped launch the Cold War International History Project, which translates and publishes documents, encourages governments to allow archival access, and supports scholarship using previously untapped archives. "I never expected to be in a position to draw on Soviet, Chinese, and East European documents, but it is now possible to do that. Next came Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, which urged historians to look beyond political, economic, and military factors to understand America's role in the Cold War.įor Gaddis, part of the attraction of working on the Cold War has been the ongoing reassessment of the conflict as a result of the opening of the archives in the former Communist bloc. He followed it up with Russia, the Soviet Union, the United States: An Interpretive History, which traced the relationship between the two powers from Catherine the Great through Mikhail Gorbachev. Gaddis used the first release of documents from the early years of the conflict to write what he calls "the first draft of history." The resulting book, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, won the Bancroft Prize.
"I started working on the Cold War when the Cold War was still very much current events," he says. Interested in the intersection between current events and history-and the process by which current events becomes history-Gaddis gravitated toward diplomatic history early on. Over the past for decades, John Lewis Gaddis has made a name for himself in academic and policy circles for his incisive examination of the Cold War.
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