| John Lewis Gaddis | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1941 Cotulla, Texas |
| Residence | United States |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | U.S. foreign relations |
| Institutions | Ohio University, Yale University |
| Alma mater | University of Texas, Austin |
| Doctoral advisor | Robert A. Divine |
| Doctoral students | Shu Guang Zhang, Jeremi Suri, Lorenz Luthi, Jonathan Reed Winkler, Marc Selverstone |
John Lewis Gaddis (born 1941 in Cotulla, Texas, U.S.)[1] is a noted historian of the Cold War and grand strategy,[2] who has been hailed as the "Dean of Cold War Historians" by The New York Times. He is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University.[2][3] He is also the official biographer of the seminal 20th century statesman George F. Kennan.[4]
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Raised in Cotulla, Texas, Gaddis attended the University of Texas at Austin,[5]. He received his B.A. in 1963, his M.A. in 1965, and his Ph.D. in 1968, under the direction of Robert Divine.[6] He taught briefly at Indiana University Southeast before joining Ohio University in 1969.[5] At Ohio, he founded and directed the Contemporary History Institute[7] and was named a distinguished professor in 1983.[5] In the 1975-1977 academic years, Gaddis was a Visiting Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College. In the 1992-1993 academic year, he was the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University. He has held visiting positions at the Naval War College, Princeton University, and the University of Helsinki. He served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 1992.[8] In 1997, he moved to Yale University to become the Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History. In the 2000-2001 academic year, Gaddis was the George Eastman Professor at Oxford, the second scholar (after Robin Winks) to have the honor of being both Eastman and Harmsworth professor.[9]
In 2005, he received the National Humanities Medal.[10]
Gaddis is best known for his critical analysis of the strategies of containment employed by United States presidents from Harry S. Truman to Ronald 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. Within the field of U.S. diplomatic history, he is most associated with the concept of 'post-revisionism,' the idea of moving past the revisionist and orthodox interpretations of the origins of the Cold War to embrace what were (in the 1970s) interpretations based upon the then-growing availability of government documents from the United States, Great Britain and other western government archives.
His most recent work The Cold War: A New History (2005) examines the history and effects of the Cold War in a more removed context than previously possible.[7]
Other important works include 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 analyzes in detail the theory and methods used to contain the Soviet Union from the Truman to Reagan administrations.