Summary Of The Cold War A New History

John Lewis Gaddis is a history professor at Yale University, lecturing an undergraduate class every Monday and Wednesday on the Cold War. He wrote The Cold War: A New History based on questions some of his prior students had on the Cold War, as well as making a shorter, more understanding book for students to read. Gaddis provides a fantastic overview of the Cold War but could have organized the information a lot better. For instance, if he put it in chronological order rather than jumping back and forth between decades, it would have made it a lot easier to understand what caused certain events.
Gaddis was born April 2, 1941 in Cotulla, Texas. He is an American Historian of the Cold War and grand strategy. He graduated from the University of Texas with a PhD in history and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for his famous biography George F. Kennan: An American Life. That’s one of many famous writings he has published. He was also known as the “dean of Cold War historians”(New York Times). The Cold War: A New History was written to help students better understand the many details and struggles that the world was facing from 1945 to 1991. Gaddis states, “The cold War: A New History is meant chiefly, therefore, for a new generation of readers for whom
He feels that the United States and the Soviet Union were two major powers with two different ideas. He believes there were “actors” that played major roles in the beginning and in the end of the Cold War like Pope John Paul and Ronald Reagan. Gaddis says, “All at once a single individual, through a series of dramatic performances, was changing the course of history. That was in a way appropriate, because the Cold War itself was a kind of theatre in which distinctions between illusions and reality were not always obvious. It presented great opportunities for great actors to play great