John Lewis Gaddis
John Lewis Gaddis | |
---|---|
Born | 1941 Cotulla, Texas |
Residence | United States |
Citizenship | United States |
Nationality | United States |
Fields | Foreign relations of the United States |
Institutions | Ohio University Yale University Naval War College University of Oxford Princeton University |
Alma mater | University of Texas, Austin |
Doctoral advisor | Robert A. Divine |
John Lewis Gaddis (born 1941) is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University.[1] He is best known for his work on the Cold War and grand strategy,[1] and has been hailed as the "Dean of Cold War Historians" by The New York Times.[2] Gaddis is also the official biographer of the seminal 20th-century American statesman George F. Kennan.[3] George F. Kennan: An American Life (2011), his biography of Kennan, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.[4]
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Biography
Gaddis was born in Cotulla, Texas, in 1941.[5] He attended the University of Texas at Austin, receiving his BA in 1963, MA in 1965, and PhD in 1968,[6][7] the latter under the direction of Robert Divine. Gaddis then taught briefly at Indiana University Southeast, before joining Ohio University in 1969.[6] At Ohio, he founded and directed the Contemporary History Institute,[8] and was named a distinguished professor in 1983.[6]
In the 1975–77 academic years, Gaddis was a Visiting Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College. In the 1992–93 academic year, he was the Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Oxford.[9] He has also held visiting positions at Princeton University and the University of Helsinki. He served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 1992.[10]
In 1997, he moved to Yale University to become the Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History. In the 2000–01 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.[11] In 2005, he received the National Humanities Medal.[12] He sits on the advisory committee of the Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project,[13] which he helped establish in 1991.[12]
Gaddis is also known for his close relationship with the late George Kennan and his wife, whom Gaddis described as "my companions".[14] He was also fairly close to President George W. Bush, making suggestions to his speech writers,[15] and has been described as an "overt admirer" of the 43rd President.[16] After leaving office, Bush took up painting as a hobby at Gaddis's recommendation.[17]
Scholarship
Gaddis is probably the best known historian writing in English about the Cold War.[18] His most famous work is perhaps the highly influential Strategies of Containment (1982; rev. 2005),[19] which analyzes in detail the theory and practice of containment that was employed against the Soviet Union by Cold War American presidents, and his 1983 distillation of post-revisionist scholarship similarly became a major channel for guiding subsequent Cold War research.[20]
We Now Know (1997), an analysis of the Cold War through to the Cuban Missile Crisis that incorporated new archival evidence from the Soviet bloc, was likewise predicted as "likely to set the parameters for a whole new generation of scholarship",[21] while also praised as "the first coherent and sustained attempt to write the Cold War's history since it ended."[22]
The Cold War (2005), praised by John Ikenberry as a "beautifully written panoramic view of the Cold War, full of illuminations and shrewd judgments,"[23] was described as an examination of the history and effects of the Cold War in a more removed context than had been previously possible,[24] and won Gaddis the 2006 Harry S. Truman Book Prize.[25] Critics were rather less impressed, with Tony Judt summarising the book as "a history of America's cold war: as seen from America, as experienced in America, and told in a way most agreeable to many American readers."[26]
His 2011 biography of George Kennan garnered multiple prizes, including a Pulitzer.[4]
Gaddis is known for arguing that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's personality and role in history constituted 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.[citation needed]
Awards and distinctions
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- 2012 – Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography [4]
- 2012 – American History Book Prize [27]
- 2011 – National Book Critics Circle Award, Biography [28]
- 2006 – Harry S. Truman Book Award [25]
- 2005 – National Humanities Medal [12]
- 2003 – Yale Phi Beta Kappa DeVane Medalist for undergraduate teaching [29]
- 2000 – Eastman Professor at the University of Oxford [30]
- 1996 – Fulbright Scholar to Poland [31]
- 1995 – Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences [32][33]
- 1995 – Wilson Center Fellowship [34][35]
- 1993 – Whitney H. Shepardson Fellowship [36]
- 1992 – Harmsworth Professor of American History at the University of Oxford [9]
- 1992 – Presidency of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations [10]
- 1986 – Guggenheim Fellowship [37]
- 1983 – Distinguished Professor of Ohio University [38]
- 1980 – Fulbright Scholar to Finland [31]
- 1973 – Bancroft Prize [39]
- 1973 – National Historical Society Prize [40]
- 1973 – Stuart L. Bernath Prize [41]
Selected publications
Books
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Articles and chapters
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See also
References
Notes
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Profile of Kennan on his 100th birthday, includes several paragraphs detailing his relationship with Gaddis. - ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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- ↑ Costigliola 2011.
- ↑ Gaddis 2008.
Hartung 2003 criticizes Gaddis for holding a "relatively positive assessment" of post-9/11 Bush foreign policy. - ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Painter 2006, p. 527.
- ↑ Leffler 1999, p. 503, which describes Strategies of Containment as "one of the most influential books ever written on post-World War II international relations."
- ↑ Hogan 1987, p. 494.
- ↑ Leffler 1999, p. 502.
- ↑ Ascherson 1997.
- ↑ Ikenberry 2006.
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- ↑ 25.0 25.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Judt 2006.
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- ↑ Gaddis 1974, p. 14, for "Best First Work of History".
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Bibliography
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External links
- Articles with unsourced statements from April 2013
- American historians
- Cold War historians
- American military historians
- American male writers
- American academics
- University of Texas at Austin alumni
- Living people
- Naval War College faculty
- Yale University faculty
- 1941 births
- Guggenheim Fellows
- National Humanities Medal recipients
- Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography winners
- People from La Salle County, Texas
- Writers from Texas
- Historians of American foreign relations
- Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professors of American History