We Now Know; Rethinking Cold War History

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Good. x, [2], 425, [7] pages. Notes. bibliography. Index. Some underlining and highlighting noted. Sticker residue on rear cover. Store stamp on fep. John Lewis Gaddis (born 1941) is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. He is best known for his work on the Cold War and grand strategy and he has been hailed as the "Dean of Cold War Historians" by The New York Times. Gaddis is also the official biographer of the seminal 20th-century American statesman George F. Kennan. George F. Kennan: An American Life (2011), his biography of Kennan, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. He jointed The Ohio University in 1969. At Ohio, he founded and directed the Contemporary History Institute, and was named a distinguished professor in 1983. In 1997, he moved to Yale University to become the Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History. Gaddis is probably the best known historian writing in English about the Cold War. Perhaps his most famous work is the highly influential Strategies of Containment (rev. 2005), which analyzes in detail the theory and practice of containment that was employed against the Soviet Union by Cold War American presidents. We Now Know (1997) presented an analysis of the Cold War through to the Cuban Missile Crisis that incorporated new archival evidence from the Soviet bloc. Melvyn Leffler named it as "likely to set the parameters for a whole new generation of scholarship". It was praised as "the first coherent and sustained attempt to write the Cold War's history since it ended." "A masterly review of the early phases of the conflict between the United States, Russia, China and their respective allies from 1946 to the Cuban missile crisis in the autumn of 1962. It is clear, thorough and judicious; in short, magnificent."--The Economist "...Gaddis has done a thorough job of collating material from these diverse sources...and constructing a trenchant analysis that puts these fascinating tidbits into context."--San Francisco Chronicle & Examiner Based on the latest findings of Cold War historians and extensive research in American archives as well as the recently opened archives in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and China, We Now Know provides a vividly written, eye-opening account of the Cold War during the years from the end of World War II to the Cuban missile crisis. The book brims with new information drawn from previously unavailable sources, with fresh insight into the impact of ideology, economics, and nuclear weapons, and with striking reinterpretations of the roles of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Khrushchev, Mao, and Stalin. Indeed, Gaddis concludes that if there was one factor that made the Cold War unavoidable it was Stalin.