ABSTRACT
John Gaddis Lewis was one of several historians who were aiming to provide a new international history of the Cold War. Gaddis’s approach was novel, however, in that his ambition was to write a full history of the first third of the Cold War and not just the story of one event within it, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Although the Cold War’s end and the availability of a great quantity of documents prompted a surge in historical writing and study, Gaddis successfully incorporated much of this newly available material and analysis into his book in a readable and coherent fashion. As the Cold War had just ended, Gaddis knew the outcome; and he had access to new documents from the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. In the preface to We Now Know, Gaddis explains that he set out to follow the example of Louis Halle’s classic book The Cold War As History.
