ABSTRACT
John Lewis Gaddis, the author of We Now Know, is one of the most important experts on the subject of the Cold War. He was born in the city of Cotulla, Texas in 1941, and received a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. Gaddis’s books include The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War, and The Cold War. Gaddis explains in the book’s preface that We Now Know came from a series of eight lectures he gave at Oxford University in 1992 while spending a year there as a visiting professor. Gaddis argues in the text that such new documentary evidence obliged historians to revisit many of the traditional arguments about the Cold War and to compare materials from everywhere to get a new, international, view of the period’s history.
