Scholarship
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 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.
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.
Read more about this topic: John Lewis Gaddis
Famous quotes containing the word scholarship:
“The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions.... I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art.... It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo- scholarship which actually destroys its object.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)