John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University (though he teaches neither military nor naval history). He is a noted historian of the Cold War and grand strategy. 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 of America during the Cold War, 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. He has taught at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode 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.

His Ph.D 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.

Publications

• The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 - (1972, 2d 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: Reconsiderations, Implications, Provocations - (1992)
• We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History - (1997) ISBN 0198780710
• 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 1594200629 (US edition). The Cold War, Allen Lane, 2005. ISBN 0713999128 (UK edition).

American historians | Yale University | American academics | University of Texas at Austin alumni

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