John Lewis Gaddis

John Lewis Gaddis (born 1941) is an American historian of the Cold War and of grand strategy who holds the Robert A. Lovett Professorship of Military and Naval History at Yale University. He studied at the University of Texas at Austin, taught at Ohio University, where he founded the Contemporary History Institute, and moved to Yale in 1997. His Strategies of Containment analyzed the theory and practice of containment under successive American presidents, and We Now Know used newly opened Soviet bloc archives to rethink the history of the conflict. He is associated with post-revisionism in the study of Cold War origins, a label some critics now consider too generous because of his emphasis on Stalin and his more traditional reading of American policy. His biography of the diplomat George F. Kennan won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, and he later wrote On Grand Strategy. The New York Times has called him the dean of Cold War historians.