ABSTRACT
During the late 1960s and the 1970s historians and political scientists bitterly debated the origins of the Cold War. An eclectic group of scholars, known as revisionists, challenged traditional views of how the Cold War got started. Revisionists insisted that the United States was not an innocent bystander. Focusing on the expansionist tradition and the entrepreneurial capitalism that had characterized US history from its inception and influenced by their hostility to the war in Vietnam, some of them argued that deeply embedded economic and ideological imperatives inspired American officials to assume global responsibilities. Other revisionists focused more directly on the legacy of the great depression which, they said, reinforced an elite consensus in favor of overseas market expansion in order to avert domestic business stagnation and unacceptable levels of unemployment. Still others turned a harsh lens on the diplomacy of Harry S. Truman who, they believed, reversed his predecessor’s desire to maintain the wartime coalition with the Soviet Union.
